LOCKER ROOM:The thought police and and society shapers are squeezing the colour from the world and making it a hostile place for those of large and generous spirit, writes Tom Humphries

SOON THERE will be no such thing as sunflowers. Relentlessly the world gets greyer and more antiseptic by means of small, imperceptible twists of the screw.

You wake up one morning and lie there vaguely aware of the soft, electronic hum of the ordered but arid universe and you realise that the massed armies of public-relations consultants, the serried ranks of therapists and self-help experts, the light brigade of media cynics and society shapers have squeezed all the damn colour out of the world.

There is a fascism abroad relating to human behaviour. It doesn't take much deviation from the norms prescribed to us to be pronounced mad and unviable and so out of step that a call to the witchfinder-general needs to be made.

I was talking with somebody over the weekend about Lar Foley. Those of us who worshipped Lar often find ourselves talking about him, swapping stories and memories. At such times I wonder occasionally if this world would have accommodated so large and strong a character were he in his prime now.

Lar wouldn't have thrived in a world when a man can have his season taken away from him for a minor assault on a referee's notebook. And the loss would have been the world's.

Usually the changes that make our lives more monochrome are tiny and graduated and decided upon in some airless, germ-free meetings of people with no colour in their faces and no joy in their hearts at a modern conferencing facility to which none of us are privy. Some mornings, though, you wake up and realise that things have changed drastically in a very short space of time.

On Friday the GAA had a night for Danny Lynch, who is leaving us as PRO of the association after 20 riotously colourful years. And word came through that same day that Noel O'Reilly had passed on after a brief illness. It's a duller world this morning.

One of the most enjoyable days I have spent in this job was an afternoon in Belfast with Noel and his confederate Brian Kerr when they were preparing a youth team for a game in that city some years ago. The pair of them were legendary by then. There have seldom been Irish victories of such hope and happy innocence as the string of underage successes they delivered to us.

They were legends and hadn't yet been kicked over by a world unappreciative of their genius. Few of the players they delivered to the top podiums followed through on their potential but it was there and Noel and Brian had a way of extracting the best from everyone. In an old-fashioned world, that was the essential genius of coaching.

They had no secrets. The journalist could sit in on team talks, wander among the happy players. Noel and Brian shared a love of music, which means nearly all memories of dealing with them are soundtracked in my head.

Whereas the modern player arrives to mingle with his "team" equipped with iPod, Blackberry and personalised DVD player so that his mood of pristine sulkiness may never be broken by interruption, Noel would devise quizzes and talent contests and all manner of social diversion to bring players together.

The quiz teams would be picked to maximise the cohesion. The questions would be devised not to bamboozle anyone but knowing that certain players would know the answers to this one and certain others the answer to the next and all of them would get a laugh at the one after that.

Noel and Brian operated with a minute attention to detail which our top players find to be a thing of wonder when offered to them by Giovanni Trapattoni but found tiresome when mediated by two of their own. They were also a comedy double act.

"Goes to show you never can tell," said Brian that day in Belfast about a young fella who had against the odds been retained at his club.

"Chuck Berry," said Noel automatically.

And so it would go.

"What's the grub like?" asked Brian as we queued for lunch.

"Chicken or pork or something," said the physio.

"Buffet?" asked Brian.

"Yeah," said Noel, "what was her big hit?"

"Who?"

"Buffy Saint-Marie."

"Aw, give us a minute and I'll think of it."

You don't get a sense of humour with a Fifa training badge but you should. And you don't get a sense of how to handle people.

One other moment from that day stands out. There was a young fella wearing green that night, called Pádraig Drew, who should have been a wonder at Everton but it never worked out and he was home again drained of confidence

Noel and Brian took time out that day to have little chats with him, telling him how brilliant he was. They knew he needed to hear it.

"Same in his school," said Noel to me that day. "They said to me, 'Look at him, he's useless.' And I said, 'No, he's better than the rest of what you have put together.' They didn't even understand that."

Noel understood. Brian understood. They knew there were real people behind all the stats and figures and a young lad ditched by Everton was as exciting and real a person to them as a young fella making the journey the other way.

Noel had very little time for the GAA but I suspect he would have liked Danny Lynch the way we all do. Friday was a night of Danny Lynch stories, the best of which, as always, were told by Danny himself.

You look at the GAA Danny came to work for 20 years ago and look at it now (we were eating and drinking in the players' lounge in the heart of an immense and modern stadium - even that was unimaginable in 1988) and Danny has been there through it all, through every drama and convulsion, whispering like a consigliere into the GAA's ear, advising what do to next, how to respond.

The GAA didn't always know enough to listen but it listened often enough to survive and thrive. Danny has the GAA and Ireland in his heart. And his heart, rather than any surveys or polling data, always told him how the GAA or Ireland would respond to change.

Among the (reproducible) stories I liked best was the one where Danny, who as a civilised man in every respect had announced that the IT revolution stopped at his door, was to be heard in animated fashion one day in the corridors of Croke Park arguing that he knew what he was talking about. If there were any doubters, he said, they should go into his office and check the file on his computer.

Among those marching into the office smiling triumphantly at the news that Danny had indeed been engaging with the very computer he had sworn never to touch was the GAA's IT boffin at the time.

We could only imagine the faces when the search party entered Danny's office and struggled to see the computer under the Everest of old-style paper files piled up and over the thing and stretching to the ceiling.

There are so few men of tall and striking colourfulness anymore. There is no Lar. No Eamon Coleman. Danny has retired. Noel is gone from us. Characters like Páidí, like Brian Kerr, like Danny's friend and former flatmate Moss Keane, have been shunted from the garden. The sporting world will soon be describable by means of results and generic press releases.

That world will, as Noel and Brian would have said, be moxy - moxy referring to an environment that combines the worst of manky and poxy.

We'll miss the joy of sunflowers then, in that grey, moxy place, won't we?