The only time you hear someone talking up the importance of the national leagues in hurling or football is when, having won the blessed thing in May or whenever, that feat is completely ignored by All Star selectors in December.

Then it is stated solemnly that the achievement, such as it was, of winning the league has been diminished - and this, after all, is the second competition on the GAA calendar and the All Star selectors have been more hurtful than a body every imagined they could be. And the carol singers can be expected at the door within the week.

Is there anything that can be done about the national leagues other than to let Jack Kevorkian usher them into a dignified afterlife, and we may then rhapsodise sentimentally about their hey day? When Croke Park is afflicted by the eyesore of so many empty seats on a day when Dublin, Kildare, Cork and Derry all get together on the one patch of grass, well, it's too bad.

You can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you'll never persuade enough of the people that the national leagues are the real thing. Back in 1991, when Micko was a novelty down in Kildare and big days out were as rare as dentistry parlours for hens, they flocked unashamedly to the league final.

Kildare lost in the championship first round to Louth not long afterwards and the novelty of Micko and the big day out began to wear thin.

As for Dublin, they went on to the sapping, four-match epic with Meath and, when they lost it, great and ironic was the hollering in the Meath dressing-room.

"The league champions is beat," whooped the old salts as they towelled down. The implications were clear. Only fools and saps puff themselves up on the nourishment of a league title. The league is like that kind old guy with the beard who leaves presents at the end of your bed at Christmas. Fine for young teams, but players over a certain age would be embarrassed to profess belief in it.

Last week, faced with Kildare playing Dublin in the league, the spectating public decided it was yesterday's cold meet served up with hot gravy and pushed the plate away. Nah.

The leagues are for teams with identity crises, financial worries or nothing better to do with themselves. Who among next Sunday's semi-finalists would set off on a open-top bus tour with just a league trophy to brandish at the bewildered passers-by?

Take the football semi-finals. Dublin, on the so-called easy side of the championship draw in Leinster, might as well stay in the league because it beats playing challenge matches. For that reason alone they will be fancied to beat Armagh.

Meath, who face more serious fare earlier in the summer, should decide to get off the merry-go-round now. Which leaves the tea leaf readers and previewers predicting a Cork-Dublin league final for reasons which have very little to do with football.

Ask any inter-county manager how much the league is really worth when championship disappointment is still tasting bitter in the county board's mouth. Uttering pieties about a good league run won't save anyone his job. Ask Tom Ryan of Limerick, who holds the record for the shortest interlude between league win and dismissal.

The league is phoney war time. Take the prospect of the Clare v Tipperary league semi-final which we now face. Clare and Tipperary should meet in the only game that matters to either of them on June 6th.

How are we to assess Clare and Tipp's approach to the business in hand? Clare are scarcely bothered with winning a league now. Back in the Seventies they fell for that fools gold, and nobody talks much about it anymore except to place in perspective the Stygian depths of the summer disappointments they brought upon themselves later.

In 1995, Clare appeared in a memorable league final against Kilkenny which had everyone leaving the Gaelic Grounds shaking their heads. Clare couldn't take many more slappings like this one. Poor saps were going nowhere. Anytime they came up against a class act like Kilkenny, well, it was the sort of thing you averted your eyes from.

So Clare, having released several senior players from the burden of training and having denied themselves the pleasure of Ger Loughnane's alto tenor musings until April, find themselves through no real fault of their own in a league semi-final against the team whom they will play in the championship on the first Sunday in June.

Last year against Cork, when faced with a similar prospect, Clare opted to turn off their interest at the mains only to switch it on again later in the summer. Cork, eager beaver as young teams should be, fell for the whole caper.

Tipp this time around will likely be more cagey. One approach would be to rob any graves around the county which have not been emptied already in an attempt to put out sufficient stiffs to make it clear that it will be a very different story on June 6th.

Then again, Nicky English may bite the bullet and decide that a win now would be good for his young team's confidence on a day when the pitch is parched. And if they get whacked in those circumstances? Well who needs it.

Solutions don't fall like manna from heaven. In an amateur game where the emphasis on the primary competition so grotesquely dwarfs the secondary competition it is hard to see a way out. Playing both competitions in the same calendar year would help marginally.

Perhaps some sort of linkage of the league to the championship is worth considering. Any team which makes the semi-finals of the league gets the chance to enter a losers group if they are beaten in their provincial championship, something like that.

Ultimately, though, the GAA will have to ask if it really needs a league. Television has made it clear that the business of championship is about all that interests it. GAA fans, apart from the die-hards, have expressed much the same view. Even the GAA itself tends to demean the leagues by using them as a laboratory for testing new rules and formats.

If the GAA is to be radical in the long term, perhaps it should become like most other major sports in the world and have one competition per season, building in a league component to the early stages of a championship summer which might start in April and end in late September and be filled with good and meaningful games.