Connect: 'The Gaelic Athletic Association is the one body which has never failed to draw the line between the Gael and the Gall," said Michael Collins in Croke Park on the first anniversary of its Bloody Sunday. Eighty-two years later, Collins's language - that "Gael and Gall" - sounds time-warped.
It's antiquated to most, embarrassing to many and, no doubt, galling to some. It bespeaks an old-fashioned Irish nationalism in words that even canny Provos would avoid. It foreshadows the baggage of deeply unfashionable Catholic Tiger Ireland: insularity, intolerance, industrial schools and all the rest.
Nonetheless, obsolete as Collins's language may sound, his plaudit's sentiment remains defining for many people within the GAA. The association continues "to draw the line between the Gael and the Gall". That, after all, was its original purpose. It was founded in 1884 to curtail the Anglicisation through popular culture - papers, magazines, cheap books - that was making Ireland an English province in late-Victorian times. It has been wonderfully successful but is now at a crossroads.
It's ironic, of course, that the GAA arose as an indigenous response to the athletic ethic of "muscular Christianity" promoted in posh British schools during the Victorian era. British muscular Christians were produced to consolidate and expand their country's empire. In reaction, the GAA determined to produce muscular Irish Catholics and it did.
Padraic de Burca wrote, in 1924, that under the control of the early GAA "our young men were being turned into admirable material for soldiers". He continued: "Their sinews were developed, their courage was tested. They were taught to submit to order and discipline and (most importantly) they were untainted by anti-Irish influences." Clearly, De Burca wrote muscular prose for a muscular project. His language - soldiers, sinews, courage, order, discipline - is militaristic and reflects the spirit of his time. Though often demonised and scoffed at now, the early generations of this state committed themselves to nation-building and the GAA deserves enormous credit for its input.
The early generations were front-line citizens. Like front-line soldiers, their methods were often extreme and nowadays seem questionable. But the country of today, with all its merits and all its faults, was built on their virtues and their vices. Sure, the early state was illiberal, Catholic Church-dominated and often cruel. It was too, however, sufficiently muscular to survive.
Today, the GAA has the most magnificent stadium in Ireland. Indeed, if Croke Park had the ground's railway end properly finished, it would be a true world stadium. Soccer and rugby - still "Gall" games to some people - have nothing remotely comparable. It's a clarion irony that the GAA could, if it wished, be the landlord for all codes of Irish football.
It's an emotional subject, of course. The GAA remembers its Bloody Sunday at an older Croke Park. It remembers supplying people to fight the Black and Tans. It remembers the more recent bloody conflict in the North. Yet "Gaels" as landlords of perceived "Galls" is now a realistic option for the association. What will it do? Certainly, outsiders ought not attempt to dictate to the GAA. As De Burca, 79 years ago, wrote in the triumphalistic tone of the victorious front-liner: "Their playing pitch was forbidden ground alike to the foreigner and the native renegade." Michael Jackson, Prince, Lou Reed and other "foreigners" have, of course, since performed on the "forbidden ground".
But Damien Duff and Brian O'Driscoll remain barred, despite, as even De Burca admitted: "I know many rugby and association teams which supplied men for the fighting line." Irish nationalism has never been an exclusively Gaelic-games affair, even though adherents of those games formed the overwhelming majority of sportspeople committed to its ideology.
Still, the GAA must decide what's best for itself. Nowadays it's muscular economics that determine much about life in contemporary Ireland. Sure, muscular imperialists and muscular resistors haven't quite gone away despite the whitewashed history of recent decades. But muscular economics is, if you'll pardon the metaphor, the dominant game in town (and country).
Anyway, the GAA must balance its options. The North's conflict remains sufficiently raw for old attitudes to flourish. A poll of spectators at this year's All-Ireland football final between Tyrone and Armagh might well have rejected allowing soccer or rugby into Croke Park. But a poll of spectators at a game between traditional powers, say Kerry and Dublin, would not.
So, it's crossroads time for the GAA without the certainty of a De Valeran crossroads and its athletic youths. There could be a magnanimity enclosing a muscular economic motive in opening up Croke Park. Alternatively, the association could act like the "keep-out" landlords it struggled against in its early years. It's up to its members.
A final point: whether or not the GAA decides to allow soccer and/or rugby, even temporarily, into its great new stadium, it must encourage its match commentators to quit acting like cheerleaders. Hurling and Gaelic football are demeaned by the incessant PR-speak. Gaels, Galls or even ghouls, we all - as do the games themselves - deserve better.