Seán Moran: Anyone who has been caught up (unwittingly) in soccer hooliganism will know that it's a disquieting experience. Having been already startled by some minor disturbances outside a soccer ground, a friend and I had the alarming sensation of seeing a police van in Edinburgh hurtle towards us while serried ranks of soccer fans parted and dived out of the way with the practised ease of synchronised swimmers.Gaelic Games

By the standards of the time (early 1980s) it was a fairly trivial incident in that we eventually worked out that the vehicle wasn't going to stop and were forced to leap inelegantly to safety. And furthermore that was Britain and that was soccer.

Apart from the incident in which a bottle, tossed whimsically into the air, landed in the crook of my arm at the 1986 All-Ireland hurling final, GAA fixtures in my experience - and that of virtually everyone else who attends them - are free from the sort of casual violence that used to disfigure soccer on a regular basis.

The 20th anniversary of the Heysel Stadium disaster at the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus is sobering for the memory of the events that unfolded that night but also for the reflection that the GAA in a way was fortunate to survive until the modern, safety-conscious era without anything going terribly wrong at its venues, particularly Croke Park.

What happened in Brussels that night was one of those occasions when everyone's chips get called in. Uefa had been insane to select a venue that was literally falling apart, its crumbling structures yielding an arsenal of bricks and masonry for any troublemakers and grossly compromising the safety of ordinary spectators - fatally when a decrepit wall collapsed.

The Belgian police were unprepared and under-resourced for what was to happen on the night and in the face of a deteriorating situation failed miserably to restore order.

Clubs and soccer in general had done little to curb the menace of misbehaving supporters and, although Liverpool's fans wouldn't have been seen as high-risk, circumstances meant that not much aggravation would be required to start the clock running on the dreadful events that were to followed.

The confluence of these factors cost 39 lives.

The modern Croke Park would emerge from the post-Heysel world, greatly shaped by the response to the disaster. There had already been serious concerns at the 1983 All-Ireland football final between Dublin and Galway. In those days before all-ticket matches cash was taken on the turnstiles of both the Canal and Hill 16 terraces. This meant a complete inability to gauge numbers.

Far bigger crowds arrived on the afternoon than there was room for and the ground had to be locked.

Followers gathered outside and began to force the gates. Eventually the gardaí decided it would be safer to open up and people streamed in.

The northern end of the old Hill terrace was lethal: not properly structured, inadequate crush barriers, topped by a grassy mound and plunging into a steeply raked, dilapidated concrete terrace. Fortunately nothing happened to trigger a crisis and the Hill's inadequacies weren't pushed beyond tolerance.

The GAA duly took note and from then on, All-Ireland football finals would be all-ticket. This wasn't really enough and soon events would strongly suggest as much.

English soccer was centrally involved in three disasters, which changed the whole approach to grounds and safety. Only weeks before Heysel, Bradford City's Valley Parade ground was the scene of a fire that engulfed a rickety, wooden stand and killed 56 spectators - focusing attention on the consequences of antiquated infrastructure.

Heysel was a key influence on the disquiet in the Council of Europe, which saw the establishment in 1985 of the European Convention on Spectator Violence and Misbehaviour at Sports Events, whose series of reports established guidelines for all such events and venues.

This was one of the main planks of the Government's Code of Practice for Safety at Sports Grounds, published by the Department of Education in 1996.

The Hillsborough disaster in April 1989 focused attention on the conditions for spectators and their treatment at sports grounds. The Taylor Report in Britain examined the situation nationwide and made a number of recommendations such as all-seated stadiums.

The equivalent study in Ireland, chaired by Mr Justice Liam Hamilton, echoed much of Taylor's findings although the findings on terracing weren't damning and left the question open. The Government's Code stated that there was no reason to believe "that terraces cannot remain a perfectly safe area for viewing major sporting events".

The effect on the GAA of these influences was obvious. In 1987 Liam Mulvihill, the GAA's director general, floated the idea of abandoning Croke Park and developing a greenfield site outside of the city. He presented the idea in his report to the association's annual congress as an alternative to radical redevelopment of the headquarters ground. Central Council chose the latter course.

Even though Hill 16 had been demolished and rebuilt in 1988, the state of Croke Park was by the 1990s a matter of serious concern. The old Cusack, more than 50 years old, was beginning to disintegrate and in the wake of the soccer disasters, safety standards were beginning to bite.

Peter Quinn was president of the GAA when the model for the new stadium was launched and he remained involved on the financial side of the project for most of the past 15 years. He remembers how serious the whole situation had become. "The authorities had already started to reduce the capacity and it would have been down to the mid-50s (50,000s) within less than a decade, probably a lot less."

Faced with this imperative the GAA took the decision to push ahead with the redevelopment. It was a brave and decisive response to do this rather than throw up a new Cusack Stand and potter along. That bravery has been rewarded by the soaring construction costs that would have made the project virtually unaffordable had it been delayed much longer.

One of the doomsday scenarios painted in the Rule 42 debate is that of English soccer hooligans rampaging around Jones's Road. In a strange way though they have already made their mark on Croke Park.