LockerRoom: Away in the City of Culture for the weekend (that's virtually a sabbatical for a hard-working member of the hackery, so less of the sarcasm), so this space, which is normally rivetingly topical and no small piece controversial, opts briefly for a more sedentary pace and a tone befitting a tenderfoot making his way through the City of Culture.

In other words, this is being written last Wednesday night.

Western civilization might have been threatened by another uprising of the Dublin hurlers at any time in the last four days or so, but not a jot of condemnation or (as would be more fitting) syrupy approval will you find in the following lines. Nope. We're oblivious. Happy. We know nothing about recent events on the sports treadmill.

What's new, you ask.

Anyway. On with the culture.

One of the nice things about this job (which is otherwise filled with hell, believe me. This weekend in Cork will be paid for in spades back at the coalface on Monday) is that books occasionally end up in your pigeon hole.

That's not as painful as it sounds. The books are free, which makes them 50 per cent more readable for a start, and sometimes they are the sort of books you wouldn't normally pick up on the bestseller shelf in Easons, which makes them 50 per cent more interesting.

A little while ago I received a copy of a book the title alone of which kept me amused until such time as I could pass it on to somebody else. Skirts Hurlin', the Story of Camogie in Killanena won't have secured a retirement fund for its authors, Pat and Kathleen McNamara, but the book is a miniature triumph, a splendidly incidental history of life in an Irish town, a chronicling of the things that matter and the events which real people actually talk about.

There's such an extraordinary amount of research and delving and social archaeology that goes into a book like Skirts Hurlin' (and of course the title; never heard the phrase before but am passing it off as my own) that a mere journalist can only feel humble leafing through the typo-free pages.

Our own skirts hurlers in St Vincent's have fine relations with the skirts hurlers of Clarecastle and Newmarket-on-Fergus (how are ye all?), and reading through these pages made me make a mental note to extend the annual trip westwards by a day or two to take in a bit of skirts hurlin' in Killanena and to dine in Loughnane's, where all the top local skirts hurlers seem to go to celebrate.

The photos alone tell a story of life near the banks of Lough Graney, and from all the tales and cuttings and sepia memories I especially enjoyed one verse of the poem written to commemorate a famous victory back in 1959:

All praise to the Convent who put up such a fight,

And in the last minute gave us such a fright,

We must not forget as we go on the booze,

That for one team to win sure the other must lose.

There's a few layers of Irish society squeezed into those lines alone.

Lots of stuff like that falls through the cracks of time and gets buried under the bric-a-brac of distractions with which we amuse ourselves.

Another book which came into my greedy hands a few weeks ago illustrates the point most conveniently and allows us to skip on to Tony O'Donoghue's (not the suave Corkonian RTÉ sports all-round reporter and sex god, but the equally suave RTÉ sports athletics commentator) painstaking compilation of the results of the Irish Athletics Championships from 1873 to 1914. That doesn't initially suggest it might have the impact of an airport blockbuster, but amid the incredible detail are any number of stories and a cast of characters who flit in an out like actors in an unfolding soap.

You forget sometimes (not me or Tony O'Donoghue, but you) how inextricably bound up athletics was with the GAA back in those mad years either side of the Hayes Hotel shindig.

Chief among the figures who hopped peripatetically between one activity and another and who was instrumental in shaping the GAA and our landscape on the northside of Dublin was an almost forgotten hero of the GAA, Frank Brazil Dineen.

Frank has fascinated me for a long time. He seems to have been a Zelig of the era. He wanders in and out of O'Donoghue's piece of scholarship like Banquo's ghost. Here he is in 1887 in Kerry acting as manager and starter of the annual championships. There he is in 1888 in Market's Field in his native Limerick acting as meet manager and timekeeper for the National Athletics Championships (Dan Fraher went in the high jump that day, but big Dan Shanahan came third in the hop, step and jump, weights allowed).

So it goes. One of the pleasures is dipping in and out of the statistics and little anecdotes, catching up with various figures as they move through history and through their lives. You think of them all living purely for the day, never imagining that posterity will have quietly preserved their names and deeds until such time as Tony O'Donoghue felt inspired enough and curious enough to go and blow the dust off.

Well, maybe Frank Dineen suspected he might have been served better by history. He's not mentioned as being at the historic national championships of 1892 which were held on a September Sunday in Jones's Road, but you just know he was there eyeing the potential of what would become Croke Park.

That meet was run by the proprietor of the grounds as they were at that time, one Maurice Butterly, and Sport magazine reported, "unfortunately the arrangements were of such a primitive character that the meeting has left a decidedly unfavourable impression behind it . . . no police were present . . . the patrons of the sixpenny enclosure invaded the reserve one and fist-fights between welshers and dupes were frequent . . . few who were present and saw the way the card-sharpers, thimble-riggers and other gamblers of the lowest type were allowed to make their own of the reserved enclosure will care to visit the City and Suburban RaceCourse again in a hurry".

The Croke Park Residents may say what they like about their current neighbours, but the patrons of the sixpenny enclosure are far more well behaved than of yore. We can't speak for the welshers or dupes or thimble-riggers.

Dineen would be president of the GAA and also would briefly be secretary of the GAA after his legendary row with the then secretary Dick Blake. He was involved in every bun fight and unification campaign and big idea that the GAA had in those days.

The City and Suburban RaceCourse, used mainly for pony trotting and sometimes for Ladies' Football, was used by the GAA for All-Ireland finals in 1896, and the association became regular tenants for a while after that. Dineen kept his eye on the patch even after Maurice Butterly died and it fell into disuse.

Then, three years after Butterly's death in 1905, Dineen purchased the 14 acres for £3,250, a pretty pile of money at the time. It all came out of Dineen's pocket. He had a vision. He hoped others would follow.

Now, the thing about Frank was that he wasn't of money. In fact, he was one of that humble trade that did so much for the GAA back in those days: he was a journalist. The payments on the land overtook him before he could persuade the GAA of the benefits of the Jones's Road site. He sold four acres to Belvedere College to tide himself over, and it took many decades for the GAA to get those acres (upon which a muddy rugby field stood for many years behind the Cusack) back.

Five years of keeping Jones's Road in some kind of order took its toll on Frank Dineen. He relaid the pitch and made numerous improvement out of his own funds, but finally, after a furious row between the GAA and the clergy of Tipperary on how best to celebrate the memory of Archbishop Croke, the association's preference for a ground rather than a sculpture won out.

Dineen offered the grounds back to the GAA for £4,000 in 1913. In thanks, the GAA rather sniffily said it was very interested in a site in Elm Park and delayed for weeks before deciding (by a single vote) to offer Dineen £3,500 for having purchased and maintained what would be Croke Park.

Dineen was a tough nut though and survived. You get a small sense of his presence in Tony O'Donoghue's pages, and now that his memory has been exhumed properly perhaps it's time to name some section of Croke Park after him.

Somewhere well away from the sixpenny enclosure.