The only good thing to have come out of Saturday's deliberations in the Burlington Hotel was the preserved unity of the GAA. The price, however, has been almost intolerably high. There are few places in which the decision to make no decision on Rule 21 will be welcome.

This should have been a simple, easy process. The time for the GAA to take some sort of lead on the national issue has long passed, but on Saturday, by abolishing its ugliest rule, the GAA could have made some sort of belated contribution to a prevailing mood which will benefit all its members.

We are more than aware of the symbolic importance of the GAA to large swathes of Northern nationalist opinion. We have written here many times on the difficulties facing Northern clubs and their members. Through the years the association has been the vehicle for an expression of Irishness which is fundamentally joyful and positive.

Definitions change, however. Irishness is a less narrow concept today then it was 10, 20 years ago. It is inclusive, not defiant; big, not small. Saturday's decision was narrow, small and unlikely to improve the lot of a single GAA member anywhere. The sort of inexplicable own goal which the GAA specialises in.

Why this capacity for inflicting gunshot wounds to the foot?

The GAA is a sort of administrative paradox, crippled in many ways by a surfeit of internal democracy but blithe about the fact that this democracy often serves the ordinary members badly.

Blessed with probably the finest chief executive of any sports organisation in these islands, the GAA chooses not to give Liam Mulvihill the freedom to run the association in the streamlined manner which the nation's largest sporting body requires. Instead, it wraps Mulvihill up in the red tape spun out endlessly by councils, committees and congresses.

On the other hand, the playing membership (the only membership that matters) is often poorly served by those layers of democracy and bureaucracy. Last week the Sunday Times surveyed GAA members in the six counties. It found 57 per cent were in favour of the abolition of Rule 21. On Saturday, exactly 0 per cent of the Ulster delegates were mandated to vote for that abolition.

The public debate on Rule 21 had a curiously lop-sided feel. The multiplicity of voices in favour of abolition were opposed by a smaller but far more implacable chorus. In the main, proponents of abolition queued to argue with Eilish McCabe, who brought a peculiarly disproportionate moral weight to her arguments.

In no way did Eilish McCabe seek to exploit the memory of her murdered brother, Aidan McAnespie, but she didn't have to. The issue of what happened at Aughnacloy was there as the most vividly emotive argument for retention of the rule. That extreme couldn't be balanced out by the various, well-intentioned chimes who felt generally that abolition would be a small, good thing. The pro-abolition side lacked any of the singularly focused weight which the Loughinisland club brought to the debate in Down three years ago.

Poor Joe McDonagh, who acted with a courage rare in sports politics in this country, must be feeling the pinch of disillusion this morning. All those sly pragmatists who have kept their head down on this issue over the years had their day on Saturday.

McDonagh gave a lead which we have reason to believe was in tune with the wishes of the majority of the GAA membership across the 32 counties. The layer of democracy which gathered in the Burlington deferred to the GAA's internal brand of partition. Ulster said No. The GAA came up with a face-saving delaying device. It seems everyone has abandoned slap-in-the-face politics except the GAA. So the final chance for the GAA to be what it thinks it is passed by. Now, in the stool in the opposite corner of the ring to Ian Paisley, towelling down in the battle for the moral lowground title, the GAA sits, just saying NO to the world until such time as the world meets the GAA's idea of what it should be.

The membership deserves better. The country deserved better. Saturday's proceedings were disproportionately reflective of the wishes of one small strand of the GAA. The entire association takes the hit, however.

There would have been unanimity in the Burlington on the issue of whether the RUC needs reforming.

The RUC doesn't serve well the community from which the GAA draws its members. Clubs in the North are all too familiar with the blind eyes and official indifference with which their problems are dealt with by the police force. Murdered members, burnt out clubhouses and ritual harassment have been a strand of the Ulster GAA story for decades. For once, however, 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. The sacred shibboleths of the past have been left in the past.

If mainstream republicanism has stopped holding up its dead and its wounded as justification for eternal war, why should the GAA be persisting? From Hume to Adams, the nationalist strain in the North has been in the business of taking the first step. Not the GAA.

In a community slowly forcing itself to accept the early release of prisoners as part of the price of progress, in a place where people are swallowing their own history in order to survive, the refusal of a mere sporting body to budge an inch is uniquely distressing.

Does anybody who contributed to Saturday's debate seriously believe that the outcome contributed anything to the reform of the RUC, that the utterance of one more hissed NO enabled them to heal any of the scars of the past? Would the fact of admitting those banned under Rule 21 have made any difference to the daily lives of those in the Northern GAA?

Will the RUC be a chastened body this morning? In the long term, with what element of Northern society has the GAA just allied itself? How does the GAA stand now? An organisation which takes British government handouts but picks and chooses when it comes to membership. A sporting body sponsored by some of the topline commercial enterprises in this country with the political and PR nous of the Flintstones.

Saturday afternoon in the Burlington Hotel was an opportunity lost. The GAA gained nothing and lost plenty. For a great and unique sports body with so much to offer, it was a sad day.