On Gaelic Games:The theory of the GAA and its congresses is that they are ultimately pure expressions of democracy, opportunities for the massed ranks of members to affect and direct association policy.

Anyone can bring a proposal to their club, debate it and, if supported, take it on to county convention and ultimately to the floor of congress.

In practice this is about as representative of reality as the American political dream of journeying from log cabin to White House.

But occasionally the ordinary member gets to have their voice heard - primarily because they insist on it, as was the case in the Rule 42 debate of 2005.

If we are to judge from the contributions to last year's special congress on proposals to rationalise the intercounty season, there is an appetite for radical change in the area of re-orientating the fixtures calendar away from intercounty activity in order that club players get a reasonable programme of matches.

That desire was manifest in the decision of delegates 12 months ago to implement the proposals before them a year earlier than proposed although this did lead to a certain amount of hand wringing when the reality of the proposals - chiefly no football qualifiers for Division Four counties - emerged from the mists of rhetoric some months later.

The most interesting aspect of the report on developing a better club fixtures' programme, launched yesterday, is that as its prime mover Páraic Duffy explained it is not made up of big, dramatic proposals but a series of thoughtful, carefully road-tested measures to trim back the intercounty season and allow clubs the certainty of a pre-planned intercounty fixture list plus enhanced access to their players.

Few of these ideas are controversial in themselves and having already been fully aired with the counties the final document represents a consensus. No suggestions that failed to capture the collective imagination, such as the awarding of National League prizes to the teams that top the divisions without adding a knock-out phase, were dropped.

In the cold light of day there may, however, be a loss of nerve on implementation, particularly on the part of county officers, who will have to oversee the new calendar and manage the always delicate balance between what county managers want and what the club programme needs.

But with the county convention season looming, every club has the opportunity to firm up any weakening in resolve and insist that the county support the proposals at the special congress in January. As GAA president Nickey Brennan has stressed, this is the opportunity for clubs to do something about the situation.

If January's special congress comes and goes without this report being accepted, there will be no justification for listening to further complaints about the crisis in club activity. It's now effectively in the clubs' hands.

For all that the clubs had reached breaking point and a crisis that had to be addressed, the second of the reports released yesterday is the more shocking and even more urgent.

Burnout is one of those conditions which trigger a vague understanding among the general populace and even many involved in sport. To date what public debate there has been on the matter has been short of the sort of empirical data that could frame discussion and remedy.

There are so many hammer-hit statistics in yesterday's report of the Task Force on Player Burnout that it's hard to know where to start. It's important at the outset to deal with any notion that the far-reaching proposals are the product of some metaphysical, ivory-tower deliberations.

Lynette Hughes, whose PhD research on the issue was a major resource for the task force, is a Tyrone footballer.

Gerry McEntee, who made a forceful presentation on his surgical experience of treating sports injuries, is a double All-Ireland winner with Meath and has just taken charge of the Dublin minors.

The task force itself is an impressive collective of medical, scientific, administrative and coaching experience. There is in short no valid reason not to take seriously their recommendations.

A major problem in Gaelic games is the issue of multi-eligibility, as demonstrated in Lynette Hughes's research. Not alone do young players - and it concerns them almost exclusively - feel obliged to play for several teams but in many cases the managers of those respective teams make little allowance for the training being done elsewhere and demand a presence at their own sessions.

One horror story, privately related, concerns a county where minors doing their Leaving Certificate were hauled out on a Friday night after sitting exams for heavy training. Fearful of losing their places they complied. Later that night one player was dropped off the panel by text message and left distraught in the middle of his exams.

Reading the report it's hard to avoid the conclusion that these players would be better off being professionals, as they would at least enjoy the status of valuable assets.

The suspension for an experimental two years of the intercounty minor and under-21 championships and their replacement by an under-19 grade is the most controversial recommendation and the others simply tighten eligibility for teams and regulate the calendar.

But the challenge for those who want to oppose the proposal is not only to formulate their own but to base any such alternative on the shocking evidence presented to the task force.

Surely this report will be the tipping point in the movement to address an intolerable situation.