We grew up on terraces most of us, and never suspected that we were entitled to anything better. With Sunday dinners inside us our arms pinned against our shoulders and our feet terrifyingly leaving the concrete every now and then we listened to the same bloke make the same beery joke over and over and consoled ourselves with the thought that we were sipping the finest of terrace wit. Wouldn't swap it for the world. Oh what a lovely war.

The toilets at the back of the Hill overflowed well before the minor game and on days when Dublin were playing, when the senior game would start, if the occasion was big enough, the gates at the back of the Hill would be burst open by those waiting outside and they would tear up the back of the great embankment and pile down the front pushing us all towards the front. Putting one over on the GAA. We thought it was great crack.

I remember the first five minutes of the second half of the famous All-Ireland semi-final between Dublin and Kerry. At least I remember being there because I was stuck in one of the sunken channels which ran across the width of the old Hill 16 and couldn't force my way into the viewing areas again. Finally somebody scored and the crowd seethed forward and then receded like a wave. Ready and waiting I waded into the breach, letting myself be carried forward again down the terraces.

Another day, later in life, myself and some friends went to Lansdowne Road for a game and tried to effect entry to the Havelock Square end. I believe my feet never touched the ground and that I have never been more terrified in my life. We were carried in, carried out and left the ground pale faced and shaken without seeing a minutes action.

There were days when we were soaked to the skin, days when we inadvertently paddled in the sea of urine behind the Hill, days when scatters broke out around us and fists flew, days when the sun broiled us all and the smell of body odour hung over us like the stench of death. And that was before we came to associate terraces with death at all.

We used to tell ourselves as we peered through the fencing and the bobbing heads in front of us that this was the best view in the ground. Best bloody view and we'd crane our necks and look towards the Canal End and take our cue from whatever the crowd on that far distant terrace were doing. Couldn't see a damn thing of course.

The Mikey Sheehy goal in 1978 was a mystery to us. Another in a long line of mysteries. But we told ourselves we were the heart and soul of the place.

And later, living in London, I remember panicky feet moving quickly as a Riverdancer as the crowds on terraces in Highbury and White Hart Lane and other grounds shifted elementally after some stir of excitement. The fear was always there. Fear of being sucked under the flailing legs and never getting back up, fear when the breath was punched from you in a sudden lurch forwards or the terraces caught your heels as the crowd jagged back up the concrete. All that plus pickpockets, racists, lunatics and that fragrant body odour.

Then came Hillsborough. That sunny afternoon, wandering home to flick on the game on the television and the gruesome business of watching deaths occurring live on television. I started journalism about a year later and left the terraces behind and have never missed them for a second.

HILLSBOROUGH more than the crass vulgarity of Robbie Fowler or the staggering scale of modern players' wages or the systematic dumbing down of sport, encouraged by elements of the Murdoch empire, symbolised the essential lie that is modern sport.

The sham inquiries, the unseemly hurry of the FA to get Liverpool playing again, the obscene outpourings of The Sun newspaper and the mere fact that it took 96 deaths on a sunny Saturday to get anything done about ground facilities told us all we needed to know about what soccer thinks of the philosophy of crowning the customer.

Since Hillsborough soccer has rapidly been taken away from the working classes. That is the ultimate legacy. If these people whose spend inside the ground is so negligible now have to be seated and pampered well we will replace them with a new type of customer.

If you can't shoehorn them into a terrace and they can't afford the vol-au-vents and vino treatment well they have virtually no place in a modern stadium. There is something perverse about the economic cycle that soccer has been sucked into when you see a club like Manchester United (the Riverdance phenomonen of soccer) who tap into their great middle-class soccer audience so relentlessly announcing another increase in season ticket prices to help pay players' wages. Was there ever an economic gesture more indicative of the great wedge currently being driven between soccer and its roots.

For all the empty rattling about from some quarters about the corporate sector in Croke Park, the GAA hasn't committed itself to a similar cycle (although there is another column in the manner in which it has allowed itself to be wiped out in huge working-class areas of Dublin, Belfast, Limerick and Cork)

If this column harbours reservations among the mainly positive feelings about the new Croke Park, they concern the impediments which some customers endure. The roof doesn't seem to extend far enough over the new stands, there aren't enough escalators to move people at peak times and the retention of the terraced area is a sentimental and probably well intentioned idea but could not cut-rate seats not be placed there. Some good old fashioned bleachers which by definition will have no shelter from the summer sun or winter rain.

Making people stand like cattle for the duration of an entertainment is an unwanted part of the class system. I have no real objection to corporate boxes subsidising the GAA or any other sporting organisation; but there is something eerily prehistoric about a situation whereby a section of society sits in deep pile carpetland behind the glass of the corporate tier munching canapes and slurping chianti, while amateur players disport themselves passionately below and one section of the ground heaves and totters, exposed to the elements, suffering the worst view in the place and enduring the oul blather which passes as terrace wit.

Liam Mulvihill, the best sports administrator in this islands, has spoken in advance of this week's congress of the need to avoid complacency in the GAA, to keep updating facilities at the start of the new millennium.

Hopefully this will involve a phasing out of terracing at major grounds. Since Hillsborough, we have known that all customers deserve better.