"If the boys and girls in the guard of honour can hear me," boomed the Voice of Croke Park, "when the President is walking between the lines you are to keep clapping until she gets to the end."
Truly this is a Christian Brothers' school, an institution which does not leave such things to chance or human frailty.
The speaker was Mr Pat Guthrie, who does the announcements at Croke Park for semi-finals and finals. Mr Guthrie was lending his voice to St Michael's Christian Brothers' School in Inchicore, Dublin, which was preparing for a visit by the President, Mrs McAleese, to its summer camp yesterday.
The school is perched on the edge of St Michael's Estate, an area with plenty of unemployment and plenty of social problems - but with hope, too, that the grey blocks of flats will soon be demolished and replaced by housing on a more human scale.
What, one wonders, would some of the more fierce Christian Brothers of the past - men to whom the GAA was nothing less than a religion - have made of the fine demonstration of soccer skills which some of the boys put on for her? What would they have made of the dancing demonstration before the President arrived, not to the strains of the Gallowglass Ceili Band but to the B*witched single, C'est La Vie?
The President told the children of spending her childhood summers on a farm, of turf and lanes and summer fields. As clouds gathered she issued a presidential decree that the word "summer" should no longer to be used, because "in Ireland, winter ends in May and starts again in June". And she praised the camp director, Mr Seamus O'Neill, and the other teachers who organise the month-long camp every year.