Tom Humphries/LockerRoom:Funny sort of a week. Nothing seismic. Nothing hilarious. Just that sense you get every now and then that the ground beneath you isn't quite as stable as you thought it was.

Shane Ryan went to football. Six Limerick hurlers did the same. Setanta still not back from Australia. In Dublin the beleaguered hurling community awaits with dread some word of the deliberations going on in the heads of hurlers like Conal Keaney and Stephen Hiney.

You can't blame players of course. They are free to play whatever they choose to play and if they opted for tiddlywinks above GAA we'd just have to wish them the best.

We probably have to accept a couple of things from now on though.

The dual-player idea is dead and probably has been for quite a while. It's only sentiment and the nature of the GAA's structure which keep it alive.

Remember when Dessie Farrell was first breaking through on to the Dublin team? He was a fine hockey player but nobody considered it desirable that he continue with serious hockey if he was going to be a Dub. Ditto Jayo with basketball and later soccer.

Why should hurling be any different? Just because it comes under the umbrella of the GAA. If hurling is to survive it probably needs a hitherto unimaginable degree of separation, autonomy and marketing.

That's for later though. What's curious for now is the decision process that a dual player endures. Haven't we reached a point where there is a general acceptance that a player will opt for the code in which he has the best chance of being successful rather than the code in which he has the best chance of fulfilling his potential?

Is it better to be a medal-winning footballer or to hurl for a county whose best chance of silverware would be to buy metal detectors for players?

We can't complain. We can merely wonder how we got here and try to remember what we were thinking of. How did we get to the stage, firstly, where sport holds such a grip on the public imagination? And secondly, how did sport become more about success than about exercise or character or development?

One hundred years ago organised sport existed but was only in its infancy. It was a marginal factor in the imaginations and lives of most people. In a pre-technological age the athletic human form had yet to become an ideal.

Sport was novel and it was culturally peripheral. It wasn't bogged down in layers of human identity or national identity, it wasn't seen as a means of pushing human limits or yet as a clear forum for pharmacological experimentation. Sport didn't represent anything other than what it was. It didn't push the ethical envelope.

Now of course we're crazy. Sport is the currency of media. Sport is identified with success in a manner which is extraordinary.

The language of success borrows from sport all the time, the motivational speakers at business conferences are athletes and winners. The role models are people in jerseys and vests. And yet we expect more from sport than we permit it to deliver.

The pressures which make an amateur GAA player choose success over fulfilment are in no way different from the pressures which make an athlete choose drugs over second place.

The Late Late Show on Friday carried a short and interesting discussion on the business of drugs during which the commonplace frustration and disillusionment with the policing of modern high-performance sport raised its head.

In a sporting world where science is at the beck and call of physiology the detectives are always going to be behind the perpetrators if only for the reason that you can't detect a crime until it has been committed and you can't detect a drug until you know it has been invented.

What was missing in all the talk of inconsistencies and what is generally missing in all such talk was a sense of the integrity of sport.

Whether it's GAA or Olympic sprinting, the way we approach sport should be predicated on what we would wish for a five-year-old picking up a hurl for the first time or putting on a pair of running spikes. What would we want that kid to have gotten out of sport 30 years later? Put those things in order. Would fulfilment come ahead of money or recognition? Dignity? Sense of well-being? Social happiness? An enlarged liver?

If we view sport through the prism of a five-year-old's needs, do drug testing and amateurism still remain the only protectors of sport's integrity?

In John Hoberman's fascinating book Mortal Engines he reports on the West German troubles with the nature of sport in the mid-1980s. The then president of the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsacker, addressed the issue in an eloquent and thoughtful way at the time.

He spoke of the constant comparative process that sport involves, how that process is the very fascination and dynamic of sport, how we have come to view sport and its performance principle as an expression of the dynamic of society at large. He proposed a "clear and binding ethics of sport" which could only come from constant self-interrogation. Sport had to keep asking itself the big questions.

"Its worldwide success does not release sport from the obligation to examine its own deepest premises. On the contrary it is precisely this almost limitless success which forces sport to reflect both on its premises and its limits."

Not bad for a politician. In this country we have never desisted from the olé-olé-olé culture long enough to examine the nature of sport and where it is going.

On Friday Geraldine Hendricken suggested from the audience that the issue of drug taking isn't always black and white. Once you've been banned it never is.

The man from WADA struggled slightly to get across the point that the ever-changing list of banned products is a form of consistency rather than inconsistency. If caffeine is dropped from the list, so be it; the presence of caffeine on the list was part of the scientific process of catching up, of policing sport and imposing some ethics on it. It's always black and white once you stick to the principles you'd like a five-year-old to be subject to.

What we lack, and what it would have been nice to hear John Treacy talk about because he has commenced action on the issue, is a national discussion on the ethics of sport.

In Canada after the Ben Johnson affair they not only had the lengthy and expensive Dubin Inquiry but they created and funded the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport.

In Ireland after Michelle Smith and Geraldine Hendricken we hardly spoke about the issue at all and when we did it was by way of disputation. Did they? Didn't they? Fairly punished or unfairly punished? Isn't everyone doing it?

It's a big jump from a discussion of the notion of dual players to a consideration of drug cheats and the ethics of sport. After all guys like Shane Ryan, for instance, still rightfully represent a sort of sporting ideal in Irish culture.

It's a big jump, but the pressures involved in making the dual player extinct and in forming the choices dual players are making aren't a lot different to the pressures involved in forcing an athlete to take drugs. Success. Recognition. Winning is smart. Losing sucks.

The point is there's probably more for the GAA to learn right now than there is for anyone else. The GAA is still getting there. Still amateur. Still community based. Still offering choices and facing crossroads.

It's time perhaps to start the big-picture discussion with a little mental picture of a five-year-old.