Forget that for a moment and take stock of what it is an apology actually means. In general, however many dictionaries you care to check out will point to three factors which conspire to make one up. A wrongdoing. Regret for that wrongdoing. Expression of that regret.

There's a fourth factor, however, an intangible that's mentioned nowhere in any definition but without which an apology is just words written on a page or spoken out loud. The expression of regret must be meant. For it to carry any weight, it has to be backed up by belief. Belief that wrong was done and that it should be not only regretted but seen to be regretted in order to go some way towards making up for it. There is no doubt that Brady and McCaughey meant what they said to Central Council, no question but that they felt regret for what happened in Omagh. What happened last week, however, through a combination of galling GAA incompetence and disappointing cute-hoorism on the part of the counties rendered their words as meaningless as if they'd stood up and read out the alphabet.

This is how it goes in GAA disputes. You don't agree with me. I don't agree with you.

There's nominally some committee or other who can stand over us with the power to make a decision on which of our standpoints is more valid but neither of us really agrees with it. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if someone on that committee wasn't bearing a grudge against me from that row a few years back and you know for certain that there's a bias against you because you're from wherever it is you're from.

Neither of us trusts, neither of us compromises and neither of us can afford to appear weak-willed because if we give an inch, we'll have to go back home and hear about it from our people. You have to live where you live and I have to do the same. If we compromise, we've sold out.

And for what? For the good of the game? Why should I care about the good of the game if you're not bothered? Let the gombeens in Croke Park worry about it. Let the media cry away all they like about it.

They'll bawl away about us for a while but they'll still be using us to sell their papers through the summer.

And so on and on we dance, round and round like drunks wrestling outside a nightclub until eventually everyone loses interest and remembers us only with distaste.

Think about it . . . top of the head, did Ryan McMenamin serve a suspension for what he did to John McEntee last summer? Top of the head, which side won the Mark Vaughan dispute? Put on the spot, the answers (yes, for the game against Monaghan but it was thrown out in time for the Dublin game; and Vaughan's club Kilmacud Crokes, but only after months of red tape was cut through) are lost in the mists of memory for all but the most anoraked. But the over-riding impression is an eye-rollingly bad one.

Try this one, though. Top of the head, what happened to John Mullane in 2004? That, everyone remembers. He got sent off in the Munster final and took his punishment, meaning he missed out on the All Ireland semi-final which Waterford lost to Kilkenny by three points. And even though he ruefully admitted afterwards his certainty that he'd have made up the three-point margin and more, he wouldn't hear of going to the courts to see if there was a loophole for him to exploit to allow him play in the game.

There were those who thought in the aftermath of Sean Kelly's lauding of Mullane's restraint that maybe the president was going overboard with all the praise.

Here, after all, was someone who struck his marker with his hurl and someone, frankly, who hadn't had the most spotless disciplinary record up to then. Why hold him up as a paragon of virtue?

Because the reality is that that's where the bar has been set. That's how for granted we take GAA violence and how ludicrous we find the idea of someone not grabbing every advantage going. We look for crumbs of comfort where we can and a man standing up and admitting that he was wrong and that he deserves his punishment shines through like a lighthouse above the rocks.

Maybe we got carried away but that's what a little sliver of hope does to you. The thought that maybe the players would take it upon themselves, like Mullane did, to shout stop so that the GAA didn't end up rivalling the tribunals as the legal profession's prime meal ticket was a wildly encouraging . . . if admittedly quaint . . .

notion. And a big part of the reason we latched on to it so readily is that it meant that maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't have to rely on the association to do it themselves.

That, of course, has been the other side of this. There probably isn't a person in the land who can't understand why the seven players did what they did but there are plenty who can't understand how the GAA would let them get away with it. To listen to Kelly at various stages during the week was to realise that he was one of those. To his mind, the CDC had this wrapped up tight; the people taking care of dealing with whatever loopholes there are were both qualified and determined to do so. When it all fell to pieces, he had no problem admitting the whole farrago was an embarrassment.

There's no other word for it.

It is embarrassing that Paddy Russell had to put his name to a letter stating, "I confirm that I did not see nor did any of my match officials report to me, any incidents that would have involved me deciding to take disciplinary action involving the following players other than what I reported in my official match report."

It's embarrassing that when the most basic common sense holds that someone who compiled evidence against the players shouldn't be part of the appeal, that ball was dropped as well.

Most of all, it's embarrassing that the association doesn't have the disciplinary wherewithal to suspend players for being involved in a mass brawl and have those suspensions stick.

Interestingly, the word from the Tyrone camp is that if the players had been charged with striking or attempting to strike, they wouldn't have appealed. But because they were charged with bringing the association into disrepute, it was felt that were they not to appeal, it would be tantamount to accepting the label of being a stain on the association.

Owen Mulligan, Kevin Hughes and Michael McGee are nobody's idea of that. (Nor are any of the four Dublin players, for that matter, although it's understood that had the Tyrone players decided not to appeal, neither would the Dublin ones. ) It's a reasonable argument and one which lays bare precisely the extent to which the GAA messed this up.

They can't say they weren't warned. It isn't like they don't know what they're dealing with these days. It's not as if the lengths to which members of of the association will go to for the right result isn't obvious. Think back over the cases of McMenamin, Vaughan and Mullane. McMenamin's team won the All Ireland, Vaughan's won the Dublin and Leinster club crowns. Mullane's got beaten in the semi-final of a competition they could well have won had he decided to exploit a technicality.

When that win-loss ratio is the only message teams can be expected to take on board, the will to cure indiscipline and the expertise to enforce that cure has to come from on high. They couldn't have failed more spectacularly to do so than they did last week.