The controversy sparked by GAA president Joe MacDonagh's proposal to rescind Rule 21 gave us a glimpse of an aspect of the Belfast Agreement which hadn't hitherto been highlighted. (Rule 21 bars members of the RUC or the British Army from joining the association.)
Most of the people in the North who voted Yes did so for thoroughly decent reasons. They wanted peace, and an end to sectarian hate. The most staggering statistic came from the exit poll which suggested that 99% of Northern Nationalists had backed the deal.
In the South, 94.5% voted Yes.
But in the minds of the most powerful elements behind the Agreement there's more to it than peace and an end to sectarianism.
Both before and after the special GAA congress of May 30th, political and sports correspondents presented the proposal as a parallel with the Peace Process, an essential ingredient of reconciliation between "the two communities". So to say No to the proposal was to say No to peace and reconciliation.
A feature by the Irish Times Gaelic Games Corespondent Sean Moran on the Wednesday before the special congress was typical.
If delegates voted against McDonagh's proposal, he warned, "The GAA will end up more politically extreme than the Provisional republican movement . . . It will need all delegates to stand up rather than abdicate their responsibilities and refuse to allow their cultural and sporting association to be used to pursue a political agenda abandoned by 95 percent of nationalist Ireland".
Despite a flotilla of features along these lines, delegates didn't give the proposal the two thirds majority it required. A compromise formula was put and passed instead. The fact that Northern delegates were unanimously opposed to the Rule-change had proved decisive.
In the aftermath, the Times, and the rest of the media, fulminated even more furiously. Tom Humphries' regular Monday column (June 1st) was an example.
Tom, in untypically awkward style, laid into the delegates for their uncouth refusal to "(make) some sort of belated contribution to a prevailing mood which will benefit all its members."
He went on: "The GAA appears to be at least a step behind the nationalist constituency in the North. Apart from the intractably heavy metal elements of the republican movement, the thrust of nationalist philosophy in recent times has been compromise and forward movement."
Even the most talented of journalists find it hard to write well when they know at some level that what they're writing is wrong. With that in mind, read that last sentence of Tom's again.
Perhaps the half-formed thought unsettling him was this: That since the Northern delegates, ranged 100% against the Rule-change, had come from a community which had voted 99% in favour of the Agreement, maybe there was more to this matter than the media had cared, or dared, to acknowledge.
Overwhelmingly, Southern delegates had been ready to ditch the Rule. But support in the South for the Agreement, while huge, hadn't touched the dizzy heights recorded by the Nationalists in the North.
So were delegates from the South faithfully representative of grass-roots opinion in their areas - but delegates from North unrepresentative to the extent that they spoke for as few as one percent of their community?
This mindless malarkey was the "explanation" provided in almost every Dublin newspaper and on RTE radio and television. (The exception was the Sunday Tribune, which carried two comment pieces by myself challenging the consensus.)
The alternative explanation - that the fault lay not in the composition of the congress but in an analysis which characterised the Rule 21 debate as a re-enactment of the Referendum poll - wasn't given an airing: not surprising in an intellectual climate in which it was assumed that critical thought was rendered redundant on the instant of the Referendum result.
We shall return to these matters. In the meantime, let's be clear about what, in broad terms, was going on in the row over Rule 21. Operating on an unacknowledged assumption that the GAA is or ought to be representative of Catholic Nationalism (by no means a self-evident proposition), the media, the Government (David Andrews), the Opposition (John Bruton, Ruairi Quinn, Prionsias de Rossa), the Catholic Church (Archbishop Clifford), Uncle Tom (I use the phrase advisedly) Cobbleigh and all, demanded that delegates vote for a peace based on reconciliation with - not their Protestant neighbours - but the RUC and British Army. Which is not the same thing.
The grievances Northern nationalists have against the State security forces are not, either objectively or in the way they are felt, grievances against Protestants.
Tom Humphries, implicitly but clearly, argued that Eilish McCabe, by protesting outside the congress against the murder by the British Army of her brother, Aidan McAnespie, on his way to play in a club football match, and against the refusal of the RUC to take the killing seriously, was setting her face against reconcilation between Catholics and Protestants and opposing peace.
There was a time when Tom would have given short shrift to that class of ignorant mendacity.
What was being asked of Northern Nationalists is that they become reconciled to the State. Unable, or unwilling, to put this argument plain, propagandists for the powers-that-be tried to bludgeon their opponents into submission with moral cudgels labelled "peace".
To make the case against State forces for the murder of Aidan McAnespie is not to give expression to Catholic Nationalism. To show unconcern about the matter is not to express the thinking or the interests of Protestants.
On the other hand, this is exactly the understanding of the Agreement which the most powerful elements behind it want to impose on the plain people. In their minds, as distinct from the minds of the mass of the people, the purpose of the exercise is to silence the aggrieved, and to leave the repressive institutions of the State undisturbed.
This is what the sports-page campaigners against Rule 21 have been engaged in. n