Parnell School 2002: An anti-sexist, anti-racist GAA will be central to the new Ireland, Tim O'Brien heard.

A woman president of the Gaelic Athletic Association? Certainly, and "sooner rather than later".

And if she is "urban, intellectual, Irish Times-reading, anti-racist and and living in Rathgar" all the better. For the GAA is about to rediscover its cultural, radical past - if the organisation's Strategic Review Committee has its way.

Speaking at the Parnell Summer School in Co Wicklow yesterday Mr Peter Quinn, a member of the review committee, urged the association to embrace radical reforms to limit the danger of becoming "just another games organisation".

Stressing the cultural role of the GAA at "the centre of Irish life" , Mr Quinn, who is also a member of the North's Parades Commission and a former GAA president, said the organisation must embrace change, as Irish society has changed.

He would, he said, remind the organisation that Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the organisation's early patrons, "logically, politically and socially had little in comon with the GAA". Yet the GAA had gone against the Roman Catholic Church and the establishment to form the guard of honour at Parnell's funeral because he reflected "radical nationalism".

Addressing the theme of yesterday morning's session, The Irish Revival - Cultural Inheritance or Cultural Baggage, Mr Quinn said the GAA could be proud of its radical heritage, which included support for such revivalist movements, between 1880 and 1920, as Conradh na Gaeilge, the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association and Sinn Féin. The context of the time would show that Irish people were beginning to seek out their own identity and independence, and the GAA offered a forum for this. To be anti-establishment was almost a core value of the GAA, he added.

He said the strength of the GAA was its identity at parish level. The organisation gave men and women the opportunity to "cry with pride" at county or national championships.

"The link between culture and the games has been there since the outset and is set to continue," he promised.

But Mr Quinn also warned that in a changing culture the organisation would have to rediscover some of its radicalism to retain the spirit of Ireland. It would need to be more than non-sexist and non-racist, it would need to be anti-sexist and anti-racist.

The organisation would need to encompass family, non-participants, many people in the wider community, even "the people from urban Dublin who never identified with the GAA in the past - and that's probably most of them". They would have to include the "Irish Times-reading, urban, anti-racist intellectual, living in Rathgar".

"We have to change because our cultural and political world has changed. The greatest threat to the organisation", he said, was the "increasing urbanisation and drift to the east coast".

"Many believe the GAA has abandoned its radicalism in favour of hesitancy and risk aversion". But he felt the investment in facilities at Croke Park decided in 1992 "before the Celtic tiger" was evidence of a commitment to investing in Irish cultural life.

In one area, however, he felt the GAA had never realised its potential. This was in relation to the Irish language and he paid tribute to organisations such as TG4 which he felt had "done much in a few short years".

Iva Pocock adds:

At the school's opening session, Prof Declan Kiberd said the real question should not be why the Celtic Tiger happened, but rather why its coming took so long. The development was tardy considering the early 20th-century attainments in culture and politics.

In a keynote address on Sunday night entitled "Irish Revivals: Then and Now", he offered a number of explanations including the Civil War, which he suggested "induced a profound caution, making many distrustful of innovation". Dr Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin and a former director of the Yeats International Summer School.

Today the allergy to technology and business which existed in the 1970s had changed and yet "so far our writers have not managed to create novels, plays or poems which capture this activity".

Irish intellectuals' relative silence on a whole range of issues from Charles Haughey to the Belfast Agreement may be the result of "an underlying bafflement" in the face of such rapid social change.

"Our country needs a philosophy, over and above the short-term triumphs of the Minister for Finance . . . A country as rich as ours now is would not leave so many sick people without hospital treament - if it had a philosophy".

The Parnell Summer School continues until Friday. The director can be e-mailed at: ... pj.mathews@spd.dcu.ie