Locker Room: Those clever clogs on the BBC's Newsnight programme have been running an amusing little wheeze of an item for some time. To follow the fortunes of Gordon Brown, they have invented the Gordaq, a sort of stock exchange index which measures whether Gordon's shareholders should be happy or panicky during the long run-in to his coronation as Tony Blair's successor. The Gordaq takes into account gathered samplings from all areas of the media arena and political zeitgeist and pronounces on the wellbeing of Gordon.

In a less formal and certainly less amusing way we are all contributors to the Gahdaq, the index which tells us how stock in the ould GAA is doing. Every week brings developments. Croke Park might be trying to tighten the lid on a Corkonian uprising over the Lansdowne Road/Croker business, then a National Director of Hurling might get appointed and the week might end with Dessie Farrell announcing that the players are "baying for blood." For Gordon Brown all that action would make for a landmark week. For the GAA it's business as usual.

It's swings and roundabouts and things which go around coming around again. What makes a Gahdaq unreliable but good fun is the fact that although the GAA is an immensely busy organisation with busy little capillaries running hither and tither everywhere, its metabolism is actually very slow, glacially slow and any index of change would have to measure decade-on-decade rather than week-on-week.

That conservatism has served well and in the current instance of the players and their impatience on the grants issue it is worth bearing in mind. The grants will come. To work they'll have to be paid retrospectively. If everyone is smart they'll be backdated to the start of this season. There's no need for anybody to be baying for blood and no need for lots of people in the same organisation to be pressing their noses up against each other and asking their friends to hold them back.

In the long term what influences the Gahdaq the most is the things which don't make the biggest headlines. On Saturday the Dublin Colleges beat Midleton CBS, the Harty Cup holders, in the All-Ireland semi-final in Nowlan Park. In terms of the Gahdaq this is a small blip but for those looking at long-term trends in the market it is a positive.

You look at Dublin's underage profile in recent years and you see something. A couple of Leinster under-21 finals left behind in heartbreaking circumstances. A colleges All-Ireland final a few years ago. Another one on April 29th this month.

Last year's Leinster minor title. Kilmacud's All-Ireland féile win. The appointment of a remarkable hurling development officer to the county and the subsequent vital signs of life in what was a hurling wasteland.

Dublin is producing a generation of hurlers who aren't inferior and don't feel inferior to the game's aristocracy. And the county is producing enough of them hopefully to negate the effects sometime soon of seepage to the senior footballers.

This week Ger O'Meara, who defected to football some time ago, came back to hurling. The county football squad looks young and settled. Perhaps the best young hurlers in the county will be permitted to become the best senior hurlers in the county over the next few years.

This is important not just for Dublin but for the Gahdaq generally. In the long term reviving hurling and spreading hurling is perhaps the greatest challenge the GAA has. In that respect, the appointment this week of Páidí Butler could be of greater long term impact than Dessie's "baying for blood" remark.

Páidí Butler is a Tipp hurling man who will take up his post under the presidency of a Kilkenny hurling man. There is money in the association at present and it needs to be spent on making sure that Tipp and Kilkenny and Cork don't win as many All-Irelands in the next 50 years as they have in the past.

Páidí's credentials as an evangelist are impeccable and for his energy and ideas it would seem the GAA have picked the right man. We've come across Páidí twice in the last few months. Once on a bitterly cold Sunday morning last autumn up in the Phoenix Park giving a coaching session for the Dublin development squads in camogie and again in January on an equally miserable Saturday morning up in O'Toole Park in Crumlin giving a coaching workshop to several dozen Dublin hurling mentors.

His organisational efficiency and his relish for getting the job done, his infectious belief that anybody from anywhere could hurl or coach hurling, were inspirational.

He is what is needed. Dublin needs him and what money he can cadge for promoting the game in the city. The north needs him badly. We were in Antrim yesterday for their game with Limerick and, after an encouraging start to the league, it was a little poignant to see Antrim a second behind in thought and deed yesterday.

They need Páidí Butler in lots of places. I was thrilled last week to find in my pigeon hole in work, a history-cum-celebration of the Four Roads club in Roscommon. I've seldom seen a GAA publication which conveys the happiness and tradition of club life quite like this.

Four Roads is a little oasis of hurling in a world of football, a tight little club thriving like a rock plant in an inhospitable environment. They need their days in the sun and they need to be linked up to the greater hurling world.

Páidí has a lot to do and the energy to do it. What he needs to realise is that the Gahdaq has to be viewed from a distance in time. In the short term Páidí Butler operating in a big conservative association will not be able to please everybody.

The job is so multi-layered. Schools hurling needs reviving and needs to be plugged into the club network of coaches. Top counties need preserving, the next layer need bolstering. The best young players everywhere need, as they are appreciating in Dublin now, to be put in touch with the sort of coaching that can make a player better within half an hour. The rest need to be given games, tons of games and coaching tons of coaching. The weaker counties need plan.

And the game needs a national planting programme. Between the GAA and a large sponsor isn't it possible to run a national campaign through TV and other media getting kids to hurl. Make and give away through the clubs a 100,000 dinky little 26 and 28 inch hurls, and the same number of T-shirts. Give dozens of branded sliotars to clubs. Get parents involved and push the game from the bottom up.

It is, as they say, push and pull in Páidí's game. Pushing the grassroots up through broader participation. Pulling the elite players through by means of better coaching and better competitions. Enthusiasm and vision, hard neck and a genius for delegation is what's essential for pushing and pulling.

The Páidí Butler we know has those qualities.

It didn't look like such a great week on the Gahdaq but in years to come it may be seen as a good time to have bought in.