The news that Charlie McCreevy's stocking-filler Budget would include £20 million towards Croke Park's rebuilding costs was always likely to cast the GAA in the role of temporary lightning conductor for the many bodies disappointed with their allocation.

The GAA is accustomed to serving in that position. It is a tribute to (and the curse of) the GAA that while it may have 750,000 members, every Irish person considers they have the rights of a shareholder within the association. The phone lines to talk radio forums will crackle with the complaints of the aggrieved for weeks to come. So, first things first. The GAA got £20 million because it is a unique and thriving sporting and cultural organisation, providing healthy recreation in every corner of the country. It got £20 million because it is the only sporting organisation with an advanced plan for a 21st century facility on the table.

It got £20 million because after a decade of governmental pillaging of lottery sports funding, £20 million is the least our premier sports body deserves. It got £20 million because it is an extraordinary community-based amateur organisation competing against some of the world's great professional sports.

Most of all, it got £20 million because at last as a nation, riding along on the back of the big fat eternally smug Celtic Tiger, we are beginning to appreciate that sport is a resource worthy of investment and care. Sport is not a luxury; it is a part of our lives which impinges on health, education and welfare.

All very fine but unlikely to abate the chorus of carping. What about soccer in Croke Park? What about all the other things £20 million can be used for?

The point about soccer in Croke Park is simple and virtually redundant. The GAA has never been asked to make soccer available. It would be disingenuous to assume that it would welcome such a request but soccer has never been refused admission to Croke Park.

If such a request were to be made, why is it deemed to be morally incumbent on the GAA to offer up its home to a rival sport? Not just any rival sport either but the richest, most professional, most widely played, most media-pervasive sport in the world.

If we are talking about symbols and sport on a national level, that is what we must consider.

Sure, there are easy headlines shaken out of the occasional local spat which arises when a GAA club resists the covetous or desperate demands of its soccer neighbours. On such occasions, Croke Park obligingly trots out its "vested in the GAA" rule in support of its local club and much cheap ridicule is heaped upon the heads of all concerned.

We have yet to see a page one story or a commending editorial for the hundreds of quotidian incidences of sporting ecumenism. GAA clubs offer their dressingrooms or pitches to local soccer clubs somewhere every day of the year. Rugby clubs, incidentally, have been just as generous to soccer and the GAA.

Those are the practicalities. In most communities, the overlap between members of sporting clubs is considerable. The notion that the GAA exists as some sort of green and muscle-bound Cosa Nostra is a ridiculous fabrication of the upper middle imagination that finds in the GAA some embarrassing remnants of a world best left behind.

The GAA survives in communities because the GAA is of those communities.

On a macro level, the GAA does not exist as a service outlet for the sporting whims of an emotional and easily stirred public. From an amateur basis it competes for members and survival with a range of other sports. None of these understands the starkly unromantic nature of the bottom line as clearly as the hardheaded professionals of the soccer world.

Why, after two World Cups, a European Championship, the advent of Sky and the cast of thousands who waved sponsorship deals at soccer, why after all this is the GAA still getting beaten over the head for having the confidence and organisational nous to keep its house in order? Where is the fund which European or world soccer has created to make sure its stadiums get built and maintained?

If the issue of soccer in Croke Park is an irritant to the GAA, it must surely be a full-blown, redcheeked embarrassment to the FAI which searches in vain from the crumbling ruins of the old eastern bloc to the shambles of the Third World for a nation comparably bereft of a flagship soccer facility.

There are many people within the GAA who would enjoy seeing an Irish soccer team playing in Croke Park. Many, indeed, who would see the sense in having Wimbledon/ Dublin as tenants of Croke Park. They understand, however, that it is the association's prerogative to use its premises as it sees fit.

Furthermore, the GAA has given more than a century of service to a country which lacks any municipal sporting or leisure policy. For that and for the special nature of its cultural input, £20 million is the least the GAA deserves. No quid pro quos should be necessary for the GAA to enjoy a slice of public funding.

There is the pleasingly pat complementary argument put forward by those who will hold up centres of urban decay such as Darndale or Neilstown and ask why the GAA get £20 million for concrete and glass when kids there aren't safe scuffing a ball around these streets. You'd be afraid to park your Primera in these places, yet the GAA is getting money for a stand. Tut tut.

This argument is seldom heard when the government loots the lottery funds to meet regular Exchequer requirements. Its proponents are mute when the issue is arts funding or the national film industry or the restoration of old buildings. There are no howls of despair when lottery funds are dished out to institutions as fundamentally exclusionary in character as golf clubs.

Go to Darndale, then. One of the best things the community has going for it in terms of sport is O'Toole's GAA club, which has moved its centre of business and its catchment area from Seville Place in the inner city to an apron of green space just off the roadway.

It is the GAA which is hauling the kids in, putting jerseys on their backs, hurleys in their hands and teaching them about skills and team spirits and responsibilities and their own possibilities. And it is Croke Park, great and gleaming, which those kids dream about. It might be a Cumann na mBunscoil match in the rain in October or an All-Ireland in the sunshine in September but the GAA is feeding their imaginations and building their muscles.

Go to practically every community throughout the country, from Finglas to Farranfore and the story is the same. It is the GAA which has bought the pitches, provided the club houses, built the dressingrooms. It is the GAA which has scrounged funds by every means possible, from raffles to golf classics, to get their clubs up and running, to provide a sporting outlet for local children.

There is an ideological motivation behind some of that frenetic activity but most of all there is a love of the sport and an evangelical passion for it which drives these people.

Back in September, I had the pleasure to stand with my friend, John Keogh, in the new premises and pitches built by the Killarney Crokes club in Killarney. What an astonishing testimony to the resilience and passion of GAA people to stand in that freshly painted building and gaze over the perfect pitches hewn out of a tangled ribbon of wasteland by John and a small army of FAS workers and volunteers.

They hauled rocks out of there and turned the earth and loaded topsoil and planted grass and put down little trees to break the breeze. They sold raffle tickets and ran dances and made collections and hustled sponsors. Nobody made a penny profit out of any of it.

On Saturdays and Sundays and summer evenings sometime soon, my friend John Keogh will gaze out of the big clubhouse window we stood at in September and see the pitches below teem with local people and local children, playing Irish sports for the sheer pride and enjoyment of it all. That will be his reward and the community's reward.

And when they come to Croke Park and see the sweeping elegance of the new stands, the splendour of the skyline, this confident statement of our cultural renaissance, they will know that they were appreciated.

For their love and passion, for their expressiveness and dedication, for their ability to exist as a crutch before a national sports policy or grants agency had ever been invented, Croke Park shall be part of their just reward too.