LockerRoom: The oul GAA club where we sported and played is not unusual in that it finds itself spending more money in a week than it comes across in a fortnight. So fundraising is an ongoing fact of life and bank heists are a possibility.

The latest wheeze is a forum for elite athletes to be held next Saturday in DCU at the same time as the GAA Congress unfolds with all its scintillating speechifying just down the road in Croker.

The ironies of course are heavy enough even for a sports journalist to notice. Depending on which way you walk, St Vincent's is probably the nearest GAA ground to Croke Park. We get a nice view of the stadium and often when I'm sitting in the press box in that same stadium I look over and locate the club by means of its graceful (but very expensive to run) floodlights.

While the GAA debates whether to keep Croke Park for itself next Saturday, a golfer (Padraig Harrington), a rower (Sam Lynch), a sailor (Aaron O'Grady) and a runner (Catherina McKiernan) as well as Kieran McGeeney and Henry Shefflin will be giving their time to help a GAA club keep going.

Funny thing is that not one of those contacted to take part needed more than a phone call to persuade them. Even the sixth-best golfer in the world just said, "Yeah, no problem," with such serene grace that we kept waiting for him to call back to say he'd made a dreadful mistake.

Luminaries from rugby and soccer were invited too but next Saturday is a busy day in the professional games and they declined regretfully. Nobody threw Rule 42 into the discussion. Nobody accused us of having necks harder than Ruby Walsh's backside. All did what they could. It is sport after all.

While the blazered chieftains gather in Croker next Saturday to discuss the future uses of their big field, St Vincent's of Marino won't be the only GAA club fundraising. Up and down the country clubs will be peddling lottos and bingos and quiz nights and céilí nights and golf classics and race nights and fumbling in the greasy till for just about anything that can be used to buy a few sliotars and footballs.

A few years ago in Vincent's we marked the juvenile pitch out in squares and inserted a huge brown cow who waddled around the grid for the afternoon while wagers were made on where Daisy would dump. Many people said the cow's lack of pace, poor positional sense and failure to deliver brought them back to the days when I played full forward for the junior Bs.

Anyway, night fell before the stage-struck animal delivered anything hot and steamy. We gave thanks, decommissioned Daisy and thought of Archbishop Croke and wondered if this counted as an occasion of sin.

The constipated cow was Irish and so was the grass she digested. We could not then be accused of ". . . daily importing from England not only her manufactured goods, which we cannot help doing, since she practically strangled our own manufacturing appliances, but together with her fashions, her accents, her vicious literature, her music, her dances, and her manifold mannerisms, her games also and her pastimes, to the utter discredit of our own grand national sports, and to the sore humiliation, as I believe, of every genuine son of the old land."

Phew! It was s**t on our field but it wasn't soccer (sure, sure, as a Leeds fan I sometimes find it hard to know the difference, but that's a lament for another day.) We all owe a lot to Archbishop Croke and his rousing letter exhorting the populace to return to such racy pursuits as "leaping in various ways", "top pegging" and "top in the hop" (sorry, Bish, I'm just not that sort of gal), but that charter belonged to a different, more tremulous time. As did the Ban, which entered the GAA's rule book a century ago this year. As did Michael Collins, who was firm in his wish to protect the Gael from the evils of soccer and believed it was the intention of the Crown to destroy Irish culture. "The peaceful penetration of Ireland," as the big fella called it.

Left to our own devices we've done a grand wrecking-ball job on Irish culture ourselves but football and hurling survive and prosper and it's time to place a little confidence in their innate durability. The end of the Ban didn't consume the games.

Television didn't kill them. Sponsorship and advertising didn't wither them. Ireland playing in three soccer World Cups didn't make them go away. Renting the field out to Neil Diamond didn't smite them.

Irish people watching rugby or soccer in Croke Park won't damage the games either. (And of course originality not being any concern of this column, it's worth saying that if they don't watch those games in Croke Park the cunning divils will watch them someplace else anyway.) What it might do is provide some funds for the games, for the coaching of the games, for the evangelisation. Two-thirds of any rental windfall should be put aside just for the employment of hurling coaches. The other third for football coaches. Chuck some money at camogie and women's football too. The potential for growth there is only starting to be tapped.

What happens in Croke Park next Saturday is about the GAA's confidence in its own standing within the culture. It can continue to be an organisation ever tolerant of the vices of itself and the virtues of others or it can change with the confidence that Croke and Cusack and the boys would have wished for it 100 years on.

A century past from the institution of the Ban do we believe we have nurtured an oak or an orchid? The stadium in which the vote will take place is a brick-and-mortar symbol of a certain confidence. Using that stadium for the fullest benefit of the broad GAA community would be a flesh-and-blood sign of deep confidence from the blazers.

By now all the other arguments are redundant. The patriotism angle is a bust. The "public purse contribution" business is a canard. Frank Brazil Dineen bought Jones' Road for the GAA a century ago for £3,250 and since that bold move those few acres have given more to the Irish people than the Irish people have given to Croke Park.

The threat to open up all GAA grounds isn't a starter. I don't know of a club ground which isn't overused already.

There's no value either in sifting through the entrails of the various unfortunate events which reduce the FAI and the IRFU (rugby's blazers are, incidentally, almost blameless in the husbandry of their resources) to scouring the For Rent ads.

We're all in the state we are in for better or worse and if the past matters so much that it shackles and hobbles the GAA, well than the GAA has failed. In the 100 years since the Ban was formally slipped into the rule book as an expression of what was perhaps a necessary protectionist mentality, the GAA will have managed to erase the Ban only from the rule book not from its mind.

The association can cower behind the door like an oul wan peering out with the latch chain on. Or the stadium can be placed on the world map. The games and the plain people who play them and love them are owed the latter. It's time for the GAA to stand up and refuse to cut its noses off to spite its face.

It's so simple. Abolish Rule 42 and if the new Lansdowne Road is ever built (this column isn't alone in doubting he'll live to see it) international rugby and soccer will slip back across the river, leaving the GAA wealthier and with a central, undisputed and unbegrudged place at the centre of Irish life.

Or the GAA can slip back a century or so. The association can point out that it's no business of the GAA if soccer and rugby fans must pass near a locked Croke Park on their way to the North Wall to catch the boat to see national teams play in Blighty. The GAA can keep pleading that what other associations do is no business of any true Gael. There's a certain stubborn logic in that stance. The same logic which presents us with a view of a clump of ostrich arse when the bird buries its head in the sand.

Next Saturday can be a confident step forward or a shameful shuffle backward.It can be glasnost or it can be ghastly. What happens in Croke Park will affect how a lot of people feel about the GAA for years to come. The GAA has the chance to confound its critics, to step up and sing. More than that it has the opportunity to remove forever the need for columnists to blatantly plug club fundraisers right at the end of their column.

(Tickets for the wonderfully ecumenical From the Frontline: Elite Athletes on Their Trade are available from thehelix.ie or 01-7007000.)