Normally, football and hurling matches in February are the preserve of the diehard supporters, huddled together to keep warm at the back of the stand (if there is a stand)...

This year, things have been different. The astonishing 55,000 who turned up in dreadful weather to watch the Dublin/Armagh tussle is one thing. A full house for a home Cork league game (even if it was against Kerry and offered the novelty of floodlights) is something else. Just a couple of years ago, fewer people turned up for a league FINAL involving Cork just down the hill in the Bog by the Lee. Even the O’Byrne Cup attracted bumper attendances, including over seven thousand at the final. Reports are even coming in about big crowds (well, several hundred) at hurling challenge matches at the most obscure of venues.

So, what is the significance of all this? Is it just a passing thing, or does it reflect something more profound? An Moltóir is inclined to think that a significant shift in the public’s attitude to Gaelic games is occurring, and that the GAA needs to be on its toes to seize the opportunity thereby created. Last year’s All-Ireland football championship was probably the best ever. Marvellous contests watched by huge crowds were the order of the day. Probably tens of thousands of people attended their first ever championship game and were enthralled by what they saw. It is hard to imagine anybody attending one of the big games in Croke Park last summer and not being moved by the experience.

This was the real thing: the carpenter from the house three doors down the street, or the first cousin’s boyfriend, performing wonderful feats of skill and athleticism before a baying crowd of 70 or 80 thousand, the vast majority of them from the competing counties and desperately proud of that fact. Compare this with the nightly and weekend fare offered by Sky Sports, where you need a degree in linguistics just to pronounce the players’ names and where half the average home crowd for a Manchester United game comes from outside Manchester (and indeed, outside England).

There is, in other words, a massive potential audience out there for properly packaged Gaelic games on a year-round basis. This will become apparent once again when the National Hurling League kicks off in two weeks time and massive crowds turn up for the Division One games. The hurling league, of course, has always had the ability to draw huge crowds for regular series games: in recent years Nowlan Park has witnessed attendances of in excess of 20,000 for games between the Cats and both Waterford and Tipperary. The thing is, properly organised and presented, the National Leagues are capable of drawing these kinds of crowds on a regular basis.

But is the GAA capable of reaping this potential harvest? Well, Croke Park has a poor record when it comes to catering for its devoted base of support. It has no scheme for rewarding regular supporters with preferential access to championship tickets. One of the great strengths of GAA is the high proportion of women and children who attend the games. Yet there is little provision for family groups, and toilet facilities for the legions of women supporters are generally appalling. The big-match catering facilities in Croke Park (outside the Premium section) are an insult to the paying public.

Some of the weekend’s match arrangements are symptomatic of Croke Park’s attitude to its support base. The highly attractive Dublin/Tyrone game was set for Parnell Park, with a capacity half the size of the crowd which might otherwise have turned up. Meanwhile, the Dunloy/Mount Sion club hurling championship game was shunted off to Mullingar a venue which, in accessibility terms, suits nobody. Why couldn’t both games have been played as a double bill in Croke Park? The ‘suits’ will mutter something about protecting the pitch, but to hell with that. It is three weeks since the last game was played there. The weather has been excellent all this week.. A hurling/football bill in Croke Park on Sunday would probably have drawn a crowd of 30-40,000. For the hurlers in particular, it would be a great thrill (and a great reward) to play in front of a big crowd at headquarters. Instead, three and a half thousand turned up at the game in Mullingar.

The GAA obviously hasn’t changed much since they fixed the 1975 All-Ireland Under-21 football final between Dublin and Kerry for Tipperary Town. Just a few weeks earlier the same teams had played in a controversial senior All-Ireland final, and a lot of the players were involved at under-21 also. Of course, a huge crowd turned up which the ground in Tipp Town wasn’t really able to handle. Besides, you could hardly get a bag of crisps in the town itself that Sunday afternoon (from a recent experience it hasn’t changed much). If the game had been played just a few miles up the road in Thurles, not only would the crowd have been accommodated in comfort, but the locals would have spent the previous week preparing meat teas and plain teas for the famished hordes descending on the town. Plus ça change (as one of my Gaeilgeoirí friends might say).

An Moltóir reckons that a properly presented National League would draw regular crowds of 10,000 or more to Division One games, with much bigger figures for the knockout stages. This would give the GAA enough funds to pay for players’ training and even give the players a few bob to compensate them for their efforts. There might even be a few euros left over to pump into the development of facilities and coaching in the participating counties. If the National Leagues were to be merged with the All-Ireland championship, to be run off on a round-robin basis starting in March, average crowds would probably double to 20,000. If Clare hurlers, for example, played four home matches with an average attendance of 20,000 and an average admission of 15 euro, that would generate revenues of €1.2 million. You could give a panel of thirty players €5,000 each and it would hardly make a dent on this. You could hire thirty coaches for a year with the remainder. And that is before the knockout stages are reached.

So what are the chances of the GAA seizing this opportunity, which simultaneously caters for the massive latent demand for matches which An Moltóir believes is out there, and has the possibility of generating a massive additional revenue stream (boosted by accompanying advertising) to support the development of Gaelic Games? Answers on a postcard please, addressed to “The White-Haired Boys, Croke Park, Dublin 1”.