On Gaelic Games: Bad weekend? Good weekend? It was certainly eventful, with a new president taking office and a clutch of entertaining, tightly contested matches, albeit in the shadow of poor attendances and a major event in another sport.

The Gaelic games-rugby interface was interesting in that it threw up a number of issues. Munster is the area with the biggest overlap between rugby and the GAA and it was also the venue for the big matches on Sunday as well as the provenance of most of the participants.

It obviously made little sense to have the NHL semi-finals flat up against the European Cup rugby but there wasn't a huge range of options. The hurling league had already lost a weekend to one (yes, one) postponed match and had nowhere to go in terms of deferral.

Saturday was floated as an alternative and would probably have been used but for it being congress weekend. A weekday, Wednesday or Thursday, could have been used for Limerick-Clare - as it successfully had been five years previously almost to the day.

Tipperary-Kilkenny could have been played on Sunday evening after the rugby match, although TG4 were anxious to carry all of the weekend's league fixtures and the GAA were understandably mindful of the wishes of a very effective media partner.

But for all the frustration over the failure to schedule the matches away from the rugby and the slightly later staging of Congress, the fact remains that last weekend was always going to be dominated by the Munster-Leinster match.

Former GAA president Peter Quinn once said (in a phrase even he's probably weary of seeing me repeat) the association had to accept that big international events in other sports would have a high profile and there wasn't much that could be done about it.

By way of compensation these events don't happen very often and Gaelic games generally have the upper hand in terms of live attendances and even television audiences.

It may have been slightly unsettling that the rugby protagonists at the weekend were both Irish teams but the international context was a key influence in making the match the best attended of any domestic pairing in a field sport outside of Gaelic games.

Even the circumstances of the scheduling were international, the ERC organisers fixing Munster-Leinster for Sunday because French television wanted the Saturday date for the Biarritz semi-final.

On a whimsical note, it was fascinating to note the suggestion - not, it must be said, from anyone in authority - that after decades of exclusion from GAA grounds the IRFU might suddenly feel so indebted over the tentative agreement to lease Croke Park (on excellent commercial terms for the landlord) that they would be driven by a duty of neighbourliness to demand a different date in order to protect the NFL final.

The evidence of major international sports events with an Irish involvement is that Gaelic games fixtures suffer for a while before bouncing back unaffected. It's a pattern that can be traced through the Fifa World Cups in which Ireland competed by comparing attendances at championship matches throughout June of the years in question with normal turnouts.

For instance over the past 12 years, Cork and Kerry have met in all but two Munster championships and the two lowest attendances were in June of the World Cup years of 1994 and 2002 (and that's not even counting the 2002 replay, which was held on a Sunday evening in Cork to predictably little enthusiasm).

But it's not all bad news. Despite the waves of hype crashing down around the rugby match and the highest Irish television audience ever for a European Cup match, peaking at 648,000, the GAA can watch with the straightest faces they can muster as the whole event is whisked off to pay-per-view from next season.

Again, like the scheduling of Sunday's match, this shows that, as with the country at large, the enormous benefits of Europe are accompanied by a loss of individual control that at times can be detrimental.

Television audiences and the marketing opportunity they represent shrink drastically when events move off terrestrial television. It's ironic that at a time when the Six Nations tournament has decided its future lies away from satellite, the European Cup - in many ways an even greater evangelist for Irish rugby than the internationals - is set to disappear out of the lives of hundreds of thousands of followers.

That however is not the GAA's problem; the national leagues are. What happened at the weekend is all too symptomatic of the competition's standing, and sponsors Allianz could be forgiven for being less than impressed. For a start it wasn't a good idea to table the NFL final for the day after congress, particularly one being held in Killarney.

Secondly, once football finals are fixed for outside of Croke Park the attendance suffers. That has been the experience regardless of geographical convenience, such as Cork having a home tie in 1999 and the 2002 All-Ulster pairing of Cavan and Tyrone being held in Clones - albeit neither to the extent of just 7,598 turning up, as happened in Limerick.

Thirdly, the competition structure is such that whereas it starts in a blaze of interest after the close season and in anticipation of seeing new players and how teams are developing and concludes its regulation phase in a further welter of excitement as supporters calculate who's qualified and who's relegated, by the time the play-offs arrive everyone's nervously eyeing the championship and interest has receded.

The idea of dispensing with the play-offs and just awarding the title to the top team - or even playing just a final between the top two - as suggested by the GAA's head of games, Pat Daly, would make sense in that it would leave a bit of a gap between the end of the league and beginning of the championship.

This largely applies to the NHL as well and might avoid the speculation over whether teams "wanted" to reach the final for fear of having to play a team they're drawn against in the championship.

One way or another, were last Sunday's events the catalyst for sorting out optimum structure for the leagues rather than getting too agitated over the notional threat posed by once-in-a-lifetime rugby matches, we could look back on it as quite a good weekend.