Dark days for Dublin and by extension the GAA. This is not just based on the infirmities demonstrated by the county's footballers last weekend but more an uncomfortable intimation for the association at large. No team can expect to progress very far with a fully-permeable defence and an attack prone to narcolepsy and the GAA can hardly be held to account for the decline in the capital's fortunes on the field.

Yet there should be concern at headquarters at what is happening. There is resentment in other counties at what is often perceived as the special pleading on Dublin's behalf. In the wake of the All-Ireland finals of 1994 and '95, both Down and Tyrone took issue with this.

In his county's yearbook, then Down chairman Danny Murphy complained about the tone of the previews of that September's All-Ireland final and the argument that Dublin `deserved' an All-Ireland even before a ball was kicked.

Twelve months later, Tyrone's joint-manager Art McRory with some asperity commented on his team's late disallowed point (ruled out, ironically, for the very pick-up offence which Ian Robertson committed with impunity when equalising for Dublin last Sunday). He said something to the effect that he knew the GAA wanted Dublin to win an All-Ireland but he hadn't realised they wanted it that badly.

But like it or not, the capital is essential to the well-being of the GAA, a fact recognised by director general Liam Mulvihill in successive reports to annual congress and his address to the 1997 Dublin convention.

Again the thrust of the argument can irritate people but Dublin's arrival in the mid-1970s did give the GAA a nationwide profile. Without a presence in the city, the association could hardly consider itself national.

The impatience with Dublin often centres on the huge numbers available to the county's clubs and the notion that the expanding population is one big unexploited market. Yet this potential comes hand-in-hand with the most intractable social problems and requires vast work as well as substantial funding and other resources.

Dublin's success is always a useful focus for the rest of the country and the contribution made by the county to the evolution of the modern GAA is considerable.

It's now 25 years since Kevin Heffernan's team began its rise to prominence and as well as providing a foil for Mick O'Dwyer's Kerry, it started a process whereby many counties measured themselves against Dublin in championship football. It's not true that Dublin brought the crowds back as by the 1970s ground capacities were already shrinking but their presence in big matches has always generated big attendances.

Offaly's gradual climb to an All-Ireland title in 1982 was based on gradually out-performing Dublin in Leinster before doing the same to Kerry. Later in the 80s Meath trained their sights on Dublin as an interim target and having wrested Leinster from their grasp, maintained a big appetite for beating their neighbours.

The Ulster counties which won All-Irelands in the 1990s could all number wins over Dublin among their successful campaigns. Up to 1992, Dublin had never lost to an Ulster county in championship play.

The point to be made here is that Dublin's extraordinary resilience at the top has often been accepted as just part of the backdrop which sustains the GAA in its annual routine. Now that it appears as if the county is not going to be a major force for a good while, what are the implications for the GAA in general?

To give a flavour of the county's impact over the years, a few striking statistics can be advanced. In the 23 years between Dublin's re-emergence and losing their All-Ireland crown three years ago, the county featured in every Leinster final bar two, 1981 and '91. Of those 23 finals, 14 were won, giving Dublin an All-Ireland presence for nearly two thirds of those 25 years.

It may appear too narrow a focus to labour the question of attendances and crowds but there can be no denying the strength the GAA has derived from the mass appeal of the games.

Whereas it has already been accepted that Dublin's arrival didn't lead to the first manifestation of big crowds, it should also be borne in mind that attendances were beginning to cause concern within the GAA at the start of the 1970s.

The Report of the Commission of the GAA was submitted in 1971 and presented survey evidence of the decline of attendances between 1958 and '69. It identified a trend of decline in big-match attendances of 25 per cent, in All-Ireland finals 1952-70 of 7.5 per cent and in All-Ireland semi-finals 1958-70 of 46 per cent.

Whereas the second figure is consistent with ground changes at Croke Park which cut the capacity, the others represent real decline. Dublin's arrival helped set capacity records for headquarters as it was in the 1970s (before further capacity reductions in the 1980s triggered the now familiar all-ticket requirement for All-Ireland finals) and maintained high turnouts at the semi-final stages even though Kerry's penultimate fixtures in this era were often disappointing (apart from 1977 when they played Dublin).

This year has seen a worrying trend develop in relation to attendances. For their National League quarter-final with Kildare, Dublin attracted just over 20,000 - a 50 per cent drop on when the counties previously met at that stage of the competition. Barely 25,000 turned out for the two semi-final matches with Armagh - compared to an average of 36,000 which watched the county's previous three league semi-finals.

These figures are not wholly reliable indicators of Dublin's drawing power as the semi-finals double bill features different counties with varying drawing-power. Nonetheless, the trend is down.

Decline in numbers is bad for the GAA in general but big matches are pulling numbers in both hurling and football nowadays so it's not the prospect of empty terraces which will trouble Croke Park. Rather it's the fact that the decline reflects a withering of the interest in Dublin.

Winning the All-Ireland four years ago was for the county's GAA a matter of running to stay still. It made little promotional impact on an urban population addicted to the commercially-pumped phenomenon of English soccer.

Add that well-worn difficulty to all the others which beset the games in Dublin and have been catalogued by county secretary John Costello: the fact that the county is one of 32 in the higher councils of the GAA and yet administers about one third of the country's population; that it struggles with the cost of land in the city and the implications for development; that urban deprivation, drugs and the proliferation of one-parent families have all wrought terrible damage on the ability of clubs to provide some sort of sporting infrastructure.

The last thing Costello and his administration need is for the senior team to disappear from sight.