Would that a Croke or a Cusack were living at this hour! To state and stand for the cause of truth and honour and genuine sporting values.

The GAA was founded to be, and remains, a benevolent society in the truest sense of that term: it exists to promote communal well-being. The GAA is as surely and demonstrably a benevolent society as, say, the Simon Community: idealism and the concept of service voluntary service are equally intrinsic to each body. And not a syllable of the foregoing is changed by the fact that for many, or most, the GAA is also a highly enjoyable hobby.

From that it follows, as night follows day, that the totality of the resources of the GAA must constitute a commonwealth. This was so self-evident to the founders, and other visionaries, of the association that it probably was not asserted strongly or frequently enough down the years. We do not use the word ``commonwealth'' in the way in which it was abused by the rump of the Empire upon which the sun has long since set but upon which the blood has yet to dry. By that egalitarian word ``commonwealth'' we mean the entire stock of resources, material and mental, of the GAA, to be applied for the common weal, i.e. the maintenance and advancement of the GAA and its aims and ideals, thereby serving the good of the whole community.

All of that is too easily and too often forgotten.

``Never believe the rumour until you hear the official denial'' was a reliable and valuable axiom of old. We've heard more than enough assertions that the GPA is not interested in pay for play; logically sequential questions arise but, of course, have not been asked. 1 Does this mean that if pay for play became available you would turn it down? 2 When the matter of pay for play arises in your conventicles or in casual conversation do you cogently and consistently oppose it?

And another. If it can be proven that the GAA has money to spare and splash and nobody has come remotely near to so proving should not the very first priority be the reduction or abolition of admission charges for families and for the poor and disadvantaged?

Thus we arrive at the immediate cause of the current conflict: money becoming available from outside the association. (The GAA's getting enmeshed with these priests of profit, advertisers and marketeers and sponsors and all the rest, who wish only to exploit and manipulate the GAA for their own gain, was questionable when it began and is more so and blatantly so now. But that is a separate argument.) A quotation from Brian Corcoran is relevant here: ``The GAA aren't sharing their revenue with us; why should we have to share ours with them?''

The GAA provides its members with free hurleys, free coaching, free pitches to play on, free matches to play in, and free referees to run them. All of those boons and benefits these people enjoyed, and enjoy, came out of the GAA's resources, or ``revenue'' as Corcoran would have it; all out of the COMMONWEALTH of voluntary cooperation and contribution which is the GAA.

Grasp that and you grasp that such incidentals and windfalls as may happen along from whatever source belong to the commonwealth. No individual has a right to that which belongs truly to the commonwealth, to all.

Nearly fifty years since, Christy Ring was offered unimaginable riches just to allow his name to be put over the door of a pub in New York. The tangler trying his arm was given a choice between disappearing in twenty seconds or taking a ducking in the Berwick Fountain.

The economic arguments for preserving the GAA from the myrmidons of Mammon are irrefutable. But they are the least of the arguments. We need the GAA as an expression of all that transcends mere commerce: idealism, service, joy, plain goodness.

Corporate Park might never have been built if Liam Mulvihill and the other main movers had adverted even a little to the history and the literature of their country. The Proclamation enjoined them to ``cherish all of the children of the nation equally.''

Prophetic Seán O'Casey explained to them that their pals, the banks who occupy their sybaritic boxes, were no more than ``respectable thieves.'' Oliver Gogarty opined that the cure might lie in ``turning the banks into brothels and the brothels into banks''; but then bethought him that, when the bank manager sought to effect the exchange, Fresh Nellie might ``Tell him none of us would be seen dead in his kip.''

Perhaps the first great mistake was made even further back: the appointment of the GAA's first full-time professional administrator. The most urgent thing to be done now is to restore egalitarianism in the GAA. As a first step Corporate Park must be sold on to Ahern and his sidekicks. And the GAA must relocate to Thurles and there build a ticketless stadium of the people not the powerful.

When first made, many moons since, that suggestion was just the radical vision of this one writer. Now it is an imperative towards drawing the fangs of the GPA, and restoring decency and democracy.