The Irish-Chinese Arts, Cultural & Shaolin Academy was set up recently to build bridges between the 60,000 Chinese living here and the plain people of Ireland. One of its first priorities has been to seek out links with the Italian community. This becomes less surprising when we discover the involvement of the FAI, arguably Ireland's closest counterpart to the Surrealist Movement.

The football association's money-making schemes are legion and legend. One, famously, involved saving a few bob by flying the players to key games economy class while officials stretched their legs up front. This was an improvement on the bad old days when, on at least one occasion, the players were forced to rough it in the baggage compartment of a train.

An Age of Enlightenment appeared to be dawning when, in the run-up to the last World Cup Finals, the FAI unveiled a masterplan entitled 'One Game, One Association'. The principal aim of this strategy was to maximise the number of people involved in Irish football. It made clear that "participation should be understood to have a broad definition, which includes supporters".

With inclusivity as its watchword, the association pledged in writing to make the game "accessible in terms of location, price and time of availability". Then came the World Cup where the country's living-rooms heaved as we followed the team's exploits on national TV. So what did the FAI do next? They took Ireland's home games off the terrestrial airwaves and sold them to the pay-channel Sky. The fans howled treachery but the FAI insisted the financial boost to Irish football justified this vanishing act. Number-crunchers who begged to differ calculated that the overall financial gain to the FAI was a pittance of around 4%.

The FAI then landed a prestige visit from Brazil. Ever alert to an opportunity, they told the fans that tickets for the Brazil game must be purchased as part of a three-game bundle incorporating less glamorous ties against Croatia and Romania. Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the sudden overtures the Chinese and Italian communities have been making to each other.

Brian Kerr's team have friendlies coming up against China and Italy. The FAI have bundled the tickets for the games so that if you want to see one, you've got to fork out for two. While supporters of the Republic mightn't like this, at least they're paying to see their own team twice. If you're Chinese or Italian it's a bit like ordering a curry or a pasta and being told your order comes with a compulsory second main course of bacon and cabbage. So the Irish-Chinese Academy is doing what it can to bring about a cross-cultural exchange of match tickets, with the Chinese offloading the unwanted half of their supersized portions to the Italians and vice versa.

The Italians are regarded among the traditional aristocrats of the game, but a recent paper by a top academic has established that in ancient China football was the sport of emperors. According to Helmut Brinker, Oriental Arts professor at the University of Zurich, the Emperor Taizu, ruler from 960-976 and founder of the Song Dynasty, was a gifted player. In one of the many illustrations of him with a ball, he's depicted as a stocky right-winger drawing applause (quite possibly under pain of death) from an admiring crowd.

Brinker's research shows that football was well-established in China by the time of Christ. By the end of the Tang Dynasty (618-906) they'd developed footballs containing an air-filled bladder whose bounce and swerve brought new technical and tactical dimensions to the game.

Matches were contested between two teams of six players, with the 12 players representing the elemental forces of the months of the year. According to a surviving inscription carved on a 'ball-wall' or goal from around 100AD, the two teams "lay siege to one another". It continues: "A referee is named and an assistant appointed. Their interpretations of the rules must be constant. (They must be) unprejudiced near or far. There shall be no currying favour nor high-handedness." Arsene or Alex could have yelled it yesterday.

Happily, there's a rich and unexpected cultural dividend to come out of all of this, both for the bundlers of the FAI and for the GAA. The Irish-Chinese Academy believes that with 60,000 Chinese people now living in Ireland, the Ireland vs China game on March 29 will prove a huge attraction. On these grounds, the Academy is calling for the match to be transferred to the 80,000-seater Croke Park.

The great news for the GAA is that there's no longer any reason the money-spinning match shouldn't go ahead at the generally idle Drumcondra Coliseum, since football can never again be tarred with the smear that it's an English game.

On Tuesday, 120 people turned up at Dublin's Botanic Gardens to audition for even a bit part in Diarmuid Gavin's next production from Kew Gardens. The reinvention of gardening as mass-entertainment is beyond me but the growth in interest was spotted 10 years ago. In 1995, Jim Synott, Director of the Botanical Gardens, revealed: "We tried to develop a fern collection. We put in 40 or 50 new ferns. In the first week we lost nine plants. They just disappeared. The next week we lost another nine. They were the choicest ones. I thought that was good, because up until then we thought no-one was interested in ferns."

damianc@tnet.ie