ON GAELIC GAMES:Reconciling the cultural differences between the Ireland of close-knit local loyalties and that of major population centres isn't going to get any easier, writes SEAN MORAN

IT’S all happening for the GAA, as August – the crucible of the championship season – arrives with the most compelling set of football quarter-finals since the round was introduced 12 years ago.

In the background Eugene McGee’s Football Review Committee has opened for business, canvassing views on the state of the game. On Sunday the demonstration in Ballyconnell in support of Seán Quinn and his family featured some expansive talk about the GAA standing up for the stricken border businessman and this was amplified on Monday when former GAA president Seán Kelly, now a Fine Gael MEP, approved of the demonstration as “an expression of moral support”.

Earlier in the day, the television schedules for the weekend revealed RTÉ had exercised its priority option on the football quarter-finals by choosing to screen the Dublin-Laois match on Saturday evening, the timing and the champions’ vast demographic making it the box-office fixture of the weekend even if the Donegal-Kerry contest is the most eagerly anticipated of the quarter-finals on football criteria.

TV3 have previously made no bones about their preference for Dublin matches, as they deliver big audiences. RTÉ has tended to take a broader view but on this occasion has passed on what would generally be considered the weekend’s big match.

There are themes running through the above events and they create challenges for the GAA. The FRC has given itself a very broad remit in defining what areas it intends to explore. That includes rule changes and as a result the standing committee on rule changes in the games has effectively been put into dry dock until the football committee’s findings are released later in the year. It will be a surprise if there isn’t a groundswell of support for intensifying penalties applicable to cynical or “professional” fouling.

Already ideas have been floated such as the equivalent of basketball’s team fouls – awarding close-in frees once a specified number of fouls have been committed in order to undermine the value of fouling in the opposition half of the field.

Suspensions for cumulative yellow cards are another item likely to be on the agenda in the near future. These would be excellent ideas because if punishments don’t disadvantage the perpetrators, the overwhelming evidence suggests the breaking of rules for unfair advantage will continue.

Regularly we hear pundits talking about defenders “having no choice” but to pull down attacking opponents – an acceptance that disregarding rules is a legitimate tool in any team’s equipment.

Confronting that attitude is a major task for Gaelic games because not alone do many club and county partisans believe their self-interest is more important than any rules that might get broken but when the authorities charged with enforcing those rules impose punishments and make their displeasure known, the same partisans invariably turn their cause into a campaign against injustice and “trial by media”. So many of those boxes were being ticked in Ballyconnell, the wonder is there weren’t even more GAA people demonstrating.

Supporters of Seán Quinn and his family business see decisions of the courts as injustice, not on the grounds of any reasonably identified shortcomings in the judgments reached so far but because Quinn has been a generous benefactor to the local communities both as an employer and a patron of local activities, especially the GAA.

Or, as Seán Kelly put it: “We’d probably do exactly the same thing down here in Kerry if someone who was very loyal to us was in difficulty.”

Kelly was careful not to get involved in the rights and wrongs of matters before the courts, but his intervention wasn’t helpful to the GAA as it helped sustain a view that the association is somehow collectively supporting the Quinns, which is simply not the case. Mickey Harte, Joe Kernan, Colm O’Rourke, Seán Boylan and Jarlath Burns are all entitled to their opinions but the issues at the heart of the Quinn business collapse are nothing to do with the GAA and there are many within the association who have a very different view of the facts as they have emerged.

The view that rules are handed down by people in Dublin to make life difficult for rural Ireland is not new and in recent times the GAA has had grounds for concern over a sense of alienation between the ordinary membership and the national administration in Croke Park. The urbanisation of modern society has been flagged as a big challenge for the GAA and reconciling the cultural differences between the Ireland of close-knit local loyalties and that of major population centres with their bumper demographics and less rooted communities isn’t going to get any easier.