Seán Moran On Gaelic Games: How about that television programme on Monday night! House prices could fall by 30 per cent. Eeek!

Looks like all of those people who give out about people discussing nothing but property values at dinner parties haven't heard the half of it yet.

There's something in the Irish psyche that distrusts the upbeat. It's not exactly a desire for things to go wrong - although when they do, there's always plenty of grim satisfaction - but a belief that the positive is not a default setting and that unpleasant reality waits malevolently around the corner.

Every silver lining has a cloud.

So it was no surprise that last Saturday's annual GAA congress was punctuated by occasional ripples of schadenfreude, as every now and then delegates chewed over Martin Breheny's interview with former association president Peter Quinn in that morning's Irish Independent.

It wasn't quite eschatology but Quinn re-iterated a lot of his concerns about how the GAA is administered and the perils of complacency at a time when the association's affairs appear to be going well.

Speaking of the challenges facing the organisation, he said: "There are plenty of them too, mainly in the area of competition, but we're not addressing them. If you're in business and you don't address the challenge of your competitors, you don't survive and it will be the same in sport into the future."

You didn't need to be an intimate of the Croke Park hierarchy to understand they would have been sorely vexed to read this on a morning of the weekend in question. And indeed they were.

One issue was the timing, on the main day of annual congress. Yet it's hard to think of a better occasion, albeit there was an uncomfortable contrast between the former president's animated anxieties and that afternoon's - even by the standards of the genre - particularly somnolent motions list.

Another issue was the fact the interview had been long on problems and short on solutions, something that was cast in an even poorer light by Quinn's non-attendance in Kilkenny.

That wasn't an entirely fair charge. The last time Quinn came up with solutions, he struggled to find an appreciative audience for them. As chair of the Strategic Review Committee and one of the principal movers of its various recommendations at the special congress held in January 2002, Quinn had had plenty of opportunity to reflect on the association's reluctance to embrace radical change.

I interviewed him some months after the SRC report fell on stony ground. His current views were well established even by then.

"The big change that has occurred," he said, "is that for a century the GAA could and did function as an administrative organisation rather than as a management - in the classic sense of 1960s and '70s theorists. I believe that it can no longer operate as an administrative body and must change to a pro-active, management style. We're not there yet because when the pace of change is slow the longer it takes and the bigger the danger to its position in Irish life.

"That approach creates its own problems. It may be a simpler environment in which to operate but the administrative model is no longer of value. I believe there's a need to focus on change, but that's not everyone's view nor probably do a majority accept that change is needed.

"There is a view that everything's worked well for 115 years. This year's championship was tremendously successful and both championships have been in recent years. So why change it when it ain't broken?

"When I come across that attitude I go back to the combination of practical and academic - I worked in both areas - in my business background. That taught me that most organisational problems occur when an organisation appears to be doing well."

In reply, GAA officials will strongly argue the SRC report hasn't been just gathering dust and that many of the recommendations gradually slipped into rule and practice, even if that didn't happen immediately.

But even that response - and there was evidence of its ongoing nature in president, and SRC member, Nickey Brennan's reference during his speech to the 2002 report's proposal that provincial secretaries be renamed provincial directors and report primarily to Croke Park - overlooks Quinn's main source of agitation.

Put simply, it is now over five years since the SRC reported and as stated in the interview, the GAA should be moving on to its next strategic report and not by implication be still fiddling around with unimplemented aspects of the previous one.

There were other reasonable points made, none more so than the caution that the GAA must get over Croke Park and its associated kudos. This was doubly interesting in that it came from one of the main influences on the whole redevelopment project. And it was sobering to take on board the reminder that the stadium was well into its shelf life at this stage. The norm with such structures is a life span of about 50 years - which means Croke Park has less than 40 years before it needs replacing or rebuilding.

That mightn't be of personal concern to most of those present at congress last weekend (although I personally hope to be working on the redevelopment) but it is a major planning issue.

For instance, you'd do well to build the current stadium for much less than €600 million at today's prices. This year Croke Park paid over €6,000,000 to Central Council as a first dividend/repayment. It would take a century of that to cover the cost of a new development.

At this stage of its development, the old Croke Park was about to add the Canal End terrace to the old Cusack Stand and was 10 years from replacing the old Hogan.

Whereas the great attraction of the new stadium is its integrated design (even if it took around 10 years to complete), the downside is it must be replaced all at once.

Obviously the GAA of the future will hope to have set aside funds, have access to loans and public funding to embark on such a project but Quinn was right to draw attention to it.

Nonetheless there are limits to the applicability of the business model he has used over the years to judge the GAA's structures. Corporations may be slow to change but persuading them isn't anything as complex a task as getting a mass-participation, largely voluntary organisation with unwieldy decision-making structures to agree it needs reform.

Identifying a vehicle of change that can attract broad support is one of the principal challenges facing the GAA.