ON GAELIC GAMES:NO AUTUMN is complete these times without a special congress. Some are more riveting than others, but even by the least demanding standards of the genre this weekend's agenda will struggle to alter the pulse rate of delegates, writes SEÁN MORAN

There’s important business to be done in the sense that the damage of an ill-considered motion at last April’s annual congress has to be repaired, but there is little dispute about the means of doing so – a special-case scenario for next year’s championship.

Coincidentally, an issue that arose on the same congress weekend also needs remedial attention – the ambiguity in the rules on extra-time in club matches discovered by the Disputes Resolution Authority is the subject of another motion on Saturday.

But behind all of this housekeeping lies an uneasy reality. The congress is concerning itself with what is a depressing snapshot of competitive hurling in this, the 125th anniversary of the GAA.

The “competitive” qualification is deliberate, as there is no doubt that, at the level of participation, the game is healthier and more widely thriving than in the past, with new teams springing up in previously unfertile soil above the Dublin-Galway line.

But competition is a different matter. In the past 15 years or so, the GAA has busied itself trying to rationalise hurling’s competitive infrastructure – moving in around and from All-Ireland B competitions to junior championships restricted to weaker counties and, finally this decade, to what started as three tiers of championship hurling and which has since developed a fourth stratum.

The problem remains, as administrators will acknowledge, that the range of quality within hurling counties is vast and could be broken into eight championships without finding ideal competitiveness at each level.

The squabbling around last summer’s championship, which has indirectly brought everyone to City West next Saturday, concerned, among other things, a philosophical divide in hurling at the top level.

That might sound too grand a description of attitudes that are generally informed strictly by self-interest, but it poses a question: should hurling be the same as football and allow entry to all, even teams with as much chance of survival as the expenditure levels of the Ceann Comhairle’s office?

There are obvious limitations to this. Even a generous door-policy would hardly admit more than about 16 counties to the MacCarthy Cup and senior provincial championships. What happens then? A few lop-sided matches, big defeats – hopefully falling short of demoralisation – and then what?

Then again, is it fair to dismiss the desire of counties to play at the highest level, both for their own sense of fulfilment and for the purpose of developing their game?

Colm Bonnar, who has extensive experience of the intercounty scene, argued in these pages last week for an open-door policy in the MacCarthy Cup, more or less allowing counties to decide for themselves whether they were up to the standard required and, more importantly, able to cope with the potential humiliation of coming up short.

Roughly put, he is saying that hurling has an extremely narrow competitive base, so how do you encourage that to expand without exposing emerging teams to the highest level of competition – particularly if they want to have that chance – even when that poses challenges they won’t be able to meet?

In principle that’s fine, but should there be no element of merit in an elite competition?

Furthermore, even on its own terms, there is no strong evidence that immersion in a higher level of hurling brings on teams. Offaly are always advanced as an argument in this – their embedding in Division One leading to senior championship success – but that’s 40 years ago and the impact was nearly immediate.

In more recent (last 20) years, Antrim, Kerry and Meath have all made notable breakthroughs in their own different contexts, but none have managed to maintain a presence in the higher reaches of the game.

There is an additional problem. Unlike football, there is no depth of quality. In the season just gone, Sligo, who played NFL Division Four in the spring, came within a missed penalty of eliminating eventual All-Ireland champions Kerry in the qualifiers.

How would their hurling counterparts, Monaghan, have got on with Kilkenny?

Saturday’s congress is only a sticking plaster for next year’s championship in allowing Carlow to compete without relegating any other county. The clár includes a motion undertaking to consult widely and bring back to next year’s congress a new format for championships, entailing promotion and relegation between the tiers. In all likelihood this will rest on some form of play-off to determine whether the weakest team in the MacCarthy Cup is better or worse than the winners of the Ring Cup.

It might be an idea to encourage a bit of discussion around this issue to determine does congress want to prioritise inclusivity or competitiveness.

Unfortunately there’s no real way of guaranteeing either. The best of the rest can’t be relied on to unhorse the very worst of the top-tier counties in any championship, and even with a compact 12 teams there are yawning gulfs between the MacCarthy Cup counties.

One solution might be to allow another four counties into tier one but allow them opt for the Ring Cup rather than the qualifiers when they get eliminated from the championship. But that is administratively messy and militates against clarity in the draws.

Above all the problem is the counties. Three of those facing relegation, Offaly, Clare and Wexford, won five successive All-Irelands between them in the last decade, but their exploitation of that success in terms of a developmental response was lamentably weak.

Inevitably, the one county that decided to review, dismantle and reconstruct its development regime was the one that had least apparent need to, but, having won 10 provincial minor titles on the spin, Kilkenny had become agitated at the lack of All-Ireland follow-through.

That sort of self-scrutiny and attention to detail is why they are where they are. With everyone else trailing in a long, straggling pack.