Followers of Gaelic games may find it hard to believe, but a lot of people don't know who Michael Cusack is, much less that this is the centenary of his death. They may even feel a vague hostility to the word 'gaelic' when used as an adjective about anything except coffee. He was a founder of the GAA, let me tell them, and add that they're right if they sense that the word 'gaelic' has designs on them. The GAA was not only a sporting organisation, though gaelic football and hurling and camogie are games. It was a cultural project, in an Ireland which had been ruled by England for hundreds of years, to invent or strengthen native ways of doing things . . . to get rid of the Englishness in our heads. Propelling a ball forward with a curved stick, or kicking and carrying a ball was proposed as more Irish and more nation-building than mainly kicking (soccer) or carrying (rugby) a ball.

The astonishing thing is that so it was.

The brilliant, patient organisation and work that went into all the de-Anglicising initiatives of the late 19th century . . . the Gaelic League was another one . . . did bring about a kind of interior independence.

Nearly all the visible effects of that achievement have been abandoned in my generation. Where now, for example, are there people who deliberately use the Irish versions of their family names? Where is there anyone under 60 who knows how to write their name in the lettering and spelling their parents used? I mean, of course, where are they in the Republic of Ireland.

Northern Ireland is a different matter.

James Joyce lived till 1941 and he was always in touch with home, and it must have roused conflicting emotions in him to see that, though he parodied Michael Cusack with unbridled exuberance in the figure of the citizen in the 'Cyclops' episode of Ulysses (he is particularly unfair to the citizen's dog, Garryowen), 'the nationalism the citizen represents proved historically to be the agent of Irish modernisation and the music of the future'.

(Terence Killeen, Ulysses Unbound. ) What Joyce presented as nationalist rantings and ravings have become part of the national discourse . . .

and a particularly tired part of it.

That still leaves the GAA the sporting organisation. How is it doing?

Well, it would have been a happy thing for the Merriman School and for everything else that's going on in Clare if Clare had beaten Kilkenny last Sunday and the county was headed for an All Ireland hurling final. Dubliners have no idea how much it means to a rural county to win a big match. It unleashes the self-belief and energy of the locals in an almost pitiable way. It's like the pathos of how much a person changes when someone falls in love with them, and it begs the question: why can't a person or a county be as empowered all the time? But correspondingly, a defeat is absolutely and profoundly depressing. And all the more so if you're one of the counties, like Clare, that have just about a big enough population of hurlers to occasionally achieve the combination of skill and motivation that brings a team to the very top.

If I mention women, I'm not changing the subject. The GAA is going to pay for not perceiving women as equal partners in the organisation at every level except the playing field itself. Anna Mae McHugh, for example, who runs the National Ploughing Championships, would be a dab hand at running the GAA and would be a very handy role model. Women! you may say impatiently . . . what the hell have women to do with what's wrong with the GAA? But I'm inviting you to be shocked, because saving the GAA is going to depend on new thinking, on starting again from someplace new. Outside the box.

The problem is twofold. One is that the GAA pretends its competitions are national, though everyone knows that more than three-quarters of the county teams in hurling and football have between little and no chance of winning a title. It is becoming harder and harder for a team like Clare to prevail at top level against the few where fine hurling is a tradition and practice in every townland. The future is going to have to see competition organised on a smaller or larger geographical unit; or on a handicap system. Anything, as long as its less sad and divisive than the present set-up.

That is, if there are players to play the games. The GAA's present wealth and power is an inverted pyramid that rests on the effort and sacrifice of the individual player. Those were readily donated in the decades when Ireland was held immobile by poverty and emigration because there were immediate, local rewards for being a good player . . . a job, a top girlfriend . . . in a society in which there were few other rewards. But just as the physical range of players has changed since Cusack's time, and the parish is not a true limit since everyone got a car, so the world is now full of other gratifications.

How long will modern men go on training all winter and all the rest when even their expenses are not met, if their county has no hope of a title? And if money is ever more of a presence as soccer players become ever better paid? All in all, planning the future of the GAA demands leaders with the cultural insight of the original founders. Cusack, thou shouldst be living at this hour.