Anybody hear the death knell for the Dublin Olympics this week? You should have. Most of the noise boxes who trumpet merrily about the veritable paradise which Ireland represents for major sporting events were eerily silent as the Irish version of the World Equestrian Games shut shop.

No sound bites from Gay Mitchell, no chirpy circular from DISC. Nothing but the sound of silence.

We don't have much in this country. No fully completed, decent stadiums, no big tracks, no formula one circuits, no big swimming pools. We have fields, though, and roads running between them and enough tradition in horses and bikes to make playing host to events relating to horses and bikes feasible.

Pat McQuaid and the team who brought next year's Tour de France stages to Dublin must be thanking their stars this week that they got the wax dried on the seal before the full World Equestrian Games debacle unfolded. Having secured an event for which we appear to have a tradition, an audience and a venue, we have made a hames of it.

This week wasn't even the first time we cancelled our hosting of the Games. In April 1996, we pulled out too, only to step back in several weeks later.

Indeed, since we secured the "privilege" of playing host to the World Equestrian Games back in Tampa in 1994, the business has been fraught with uncertainty and punctuated by rows and bungling.

To have failed finally this week brings ignominy to the country and, worse, puts us out of the running for many events in the future. We could not have chosen a more select audience for whom to demonstrate our incompetence; couldn't have given a better show, either.

From the rows over Government money, to the squabble with the RDS, to the withdrawal of principle sponsors, to the departure of Michael Geoghegan, to the final inevitable cancellation of the event, the World Equestrian Games have been a debacle.

When the cancellation came this week, the first call to the Irish Olympic Committee wondering what was going on came from Juan Antonio Samaranch. Mr Samaranch's concern is rooted in his close relationship with L'Infanta Dona Pilar de Borbon, the head of the World Equestrian Federation, the sister of King Juan Carlos and a member if the International Olympic Committee. (IOC).

The people who run world sport live in a different universe to the rest of us. While the evaporation of the Games made little impact in the Irish media this week, the ripples will be felt in Lausanne in a few weeks when the horsey people on the IOC settle down to a week of conferencing with their counterparts from the other Olympic sporting federations.

The saga of the Irish World Equestrian Games will be chronicled in little rooms with tables and spring water, it will be written up in the house trade publications such as Sport Intern, Sport Business, The Hula Report. Ireland starts a few steps behind the posse the next time it looks for any sporting event to come here.

The lessons have to be learned. The warning signs concerning the Equestrian Games were there before Ireland ever bid for them. In 1990, when Sweden ran the Games, they financed the event only by raising their national sales taxes and setting up official gambling on the event.

In 1994 things got worse. Paris was supposed to stage the Games but pulled out and The Hague stepped in late. The company running the Games filed for bankruptcy within a month of the Games concluding. Their losses came to £4 million.

What was Ireland doing undertaking a major, six-discipline event without a broad range of financial guarantees nailed down? When Charlie McGreevy, among others, travelled to Tampa in 1994 to lobby for the Irish Games, key among the factors influencing the decision was the Government's bond of £1.5 million to underwrite the Games. All but £250,000 of this is lost now.

The £6 million in private sponsorship which the organisers were due to raise never came on stream, although deals with Nissan and Pulsar were achieved late in the day. (Nissan subsequently pulled out.)

The agreement with the RDS to stage the showjumping, dressage and vaulting events was not secured, and failure to do so meant that as late as this spring those events were being switched once again to Punchestown, where a £300,000 cross country track will now sit as a sort of historical curiosity.

The television deals weren't in place either. That was a critical omission. RTE came on board earlier this year with a promise of 70 hours coverage, but, in terms of what is needed in broadcasting income and sponsor bait, RTE are small players.

In terms of the organising of these events, a salient quote comes from Howard Shenk, chairman of the organising committee for the North American Equestrian Championship in 1995. "Inexperience is your biggest expense at one of these things."

Losing an executive as experienced and as instrumental to the process as Michael Geoghagan seems like a disaster in retrospect. Inexperience has certainly cost us money and influence this time; £10.9 million isn't an awful lot of money to spend for an event which might have brought 75,000 visitors and £100 million income to the country.

If we lacked the wherewithal to raise the money, and hadn't tied down the guarantees either in terms of TV, sponsors or venues, what were we doing in the deep end?

What were the last Government doing through the months coming up to the General Election, when Nissan's £2 million rescue package got shakier and shakier in the absence of TV sales.

Enda Kenny had kept a tight reign on the finances flowing out to WEG Ltd, but in the spring of 1997, with an election looming and the chance to dump the fiasco back into the laps of Charlie McGreevy and Jim McDaid, there was a curious silence from Kenny, Bernard Allen and the new Irish Sports Council.

What is needed in future if we are to regain the lost ground is a central brains trust where those with experience of the strange world of sporting politics and sporting finances can be consulted before, during and after bids.

Such a body does not have added credibility by being chaired and fleshed out by former sports people to whom we all feel goodwill. It needs to be run by those to whom Juan Antonio Samaranch and his friends speak when they are looking for an opinion, a steer or an off-the-record assessment.

We have lost a lot of valuable money form the sports kitty through this fiasco. It won't the last time we do so unless we grow up and cease to view sport as some golden spring of happy good vibes, unpolluted by the toxicity of the real world.

Time for re-appraisal. Time for realism.