LockerRoom: Did you feel a little uncomfortable when Steve Staunton announced he was getting out his magnifying glass and deerstalker and heading off to explore the possibilities of the Granny Rule?
It's not that the Granny Rule hasn't been good to us. It is a munificent little loophole of a rule, through which we have dragged ashore respectable talents and convinced ourselves we were taking back a little of what we had lost in the diaspora.
Stan made the point that his kids are English-born and if somebody was to tell him they couldn't play for Ireland he'd be mad as hell. I'm English-born myself and if somebody was to tell me I couldn't play for Ireland I would say fair enough, I'm old and fat - but I see Stan's point.
I don't know though if Stan's argument would be so strong if he were talking about his grandchildren. The emotional twang isn't so great when you think of a kid with one Irish grandparent but otherwise an impeccable sense of Englishness or Scottishness or whatever.
Certainly it's nice when you get a young fella with an English accent who challenges you to say he's any less Irish than you are, but are those the type of recruits we're lining up? Kevin Kilbane, for instance, grew up with the Pope, JFK and the Sacred Heart looking down from the wall in the parlour. His mother's plat du jour every jour was potatoes and cabbage. I don't have the heart to tell Kevin Kilbane he shouldn't be playing for Ireland. Nor Gary Breen, with whom it is possible to sit and reminisce about All-Ireland finals of the 1980s which he saw and loved.
Nor should we be telling them such a thing. We should, however, be examining our needs and our priorities. We are into a different phase of our development as a footballing nation now.
The great glut of successful Oirish recruits came to us before the Celtic Tiger did. Aldridge, Houghton, Townsend, Cas and the boys. The success of the side they played in was in sync with a growing national self-confidence. Now we are out the other side of that process. Economically and footballwise we're a little more grown-up.
The legacy of the Charlton era was a boom to the game here. How the FAI have managed that boom is hardly open to debate. Soccer at underage level is well run and well organised.
It's true the FAI - from which virtually no blazer has ever evacuated without benefit of a golden parachute - have turfed out Brian Kerr, who was the one man with a long-term vision for Ireland's soccer development.
Kerr's legacy, though, has been the implementation of a blueprint for harnessing that post-Charlton boom.
In soccer terms we are like a young economy coming out of an era of protectionism. The Granny Rule served us well in the growth stages. It protected us from all ignominy and got us to a few championships. It's a tender area to start poking about in but surely we should start imposing limits on ourselves now in terms of where we trawl and how deeply we fish.
David Kitson of Reading was quoted in the Evening Herald during the week speaking a language many footballers would not understand: selflessness.
"I wouldn't do it," he said of cashing in his granny's birth cert for a green jersey. "It's got nothing to do with Ireland or the Irish people, and I am certainly not naive enough to think I am good enough. It's just that I don't believe in the grandparent rule and it's something I don't like about international football.
"We have a terrific young talent here at Reading, called Shane Long, who has just played in two FA Cup ties against West Brom. I don't want to be the player standing in the way of him or Kevin Doyle playing for their country."
Begob and bejapers, we nearly dropped the turnips when we read that.
So is the new regime to go fishing for those guys who'll tell us they "love the Irish set-up" when we know their agents love what an international profile does for their earning power? The guys for whom England (or whoever) never came knocking?
If we don't care so long as they can help us be successful, then what value do we put on the success. What about pride and identity?
There's no doubt if we're smart enough and cunning enough we can stroke it so we have a whole team of Granny Rule geniuses. The Observer runs a little feature every week under the title (lifted from elsewhere) The Boy's A Bit Special.
Yesterday the featured player was 17-year-old Owen Garvan from Drumcondra, who is featuring in midfield with Ipswich these days. By all accounts he's a fine prospect. And he came through the system of Irish soccer. Will he be kept out in a few years by a processed Paddy who made a smart career move? For every wishy-washy Irishman, we find there's a vanished chance of international football gone for somebody who grew up in the game here.
There's something visceral about nationhood. The national team should reflect some of that. Let's pretend the young assistant manager at Walsall had 102 caps for Trinidad and Tobago and was known for his passion and knowledge of the game, etc. Would he have been threatened with the Irish job? No.
There is a pleasant reassurance to be had from Stan's Dundalk accent. When he says we're all in this together, you know he means emotionally as well as professionally. He talks about passion, as an Irishman.
The flip side of the argument is obvious, of course. Tony Cascarino in full flight was one of the great sights of the last couple of decades of Irish international football. Tony had no eligibility really but he gave it his all and it never seemed to matter. Surely, though, the days of needing a Big Cas are over. David Kitson's words were a reminder we have reared a generation of players specifically to succeed Cas and the boys.
Is it the case that David Kitson has a hard view on this but the FAI have no policy whatever on the matter, no sense of duty to those who came through the system?
Why not whittle down the grandparent rule to a parentage rule? If a kid has played for England already why not leave it at that? You might say it's a shame to tell a 15-year-old that if he plays for England that's it - he won't play for Ireland. But why not? Let him discuss it with club and family and then tick a notional box choosing his preferred international eligibility. Indeed the whole business would be cleaner if when a player came to signing professional forms he was required to state his eligibility and preference.
It's not supposed to work on the basis that a professional will wait and see what offers come along before settling for Ireland. We're better than that, surely? These lukewarm , take-it-or-leave-it merchants should be left on the shelf. If we have no top-class strikers, well then we have no top-class strikers. That's what makes international soccer so interesting.
We're all post-tiger now and it's a harder, shinier Ireland we all live in. Greed is good and success is imperative. We have a notion of ourselves which seems baffling to those of us who grew up in that Ireland which was crippled by its own inferiority complex. Remember when it made us happy just to go to the odd tournament and to be well liked?
The whole Croke Park thing has ramifications which were hardly foreseen. The GPA's plaintive whine on behalf of the oppressed footballers and hurlers of the nation is but the start of it. The very concept of Irishness is suddenly on the agenda again.
Perhaps Croke Park will become a modern version of Norman Tebbit's infamous cricket test. What does Croke Park mean to those who would wear the green jersey? I don't think there is a person who lives in this country be they of Leitrim or Lithuanian stock who doesn't have some feeling about Croke Park in their hearts. Those feelings may range from pure hatred of the GAA to curiosity, from polite indifference to bafflement about its place in Irish life, but there is something there, some part that recognises the place the stadium occupies within our culture.
If your sense of nationhood is so vague that you can't recognise or pronounce the name of the place where Ireland will soon play, then perhaps you should be looking at the birth cert of your other granny. There's a queue behind you.
