The words of the National Anthem, the name and number of each player in the teams, part of the programme, part of the commentary, maybe the winning captain's acceptance speech, above all the terms for a goal and a point, will be in the Irish language. People in general accept this. Nobody sneers at it, except perhaps for a few people fortunate enough to be fluent in the language who dismiss it as tokenism.

Which it is, of course. But what are the few words of Irish a token of? Tokens are tokens because they're important.

At the Merriman School recently, I went to a wonderful lecture by John A Murphy . . . former UCC professor and member of Seanad Eireann among many other distinctions . . . whose main theme was an examination of the ideals of the men (apparently there weren't any women alive then) who at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th promoted the ideal of an Ireland that would be entirely 'Irish' and separate from England and have its own economic resources, its own culture and, above all, its own language.

There were evident difficulties attached to pursuing this ideal, not least that English would have to be the vehicle for preaching the revival of Irish. Or for example, that intellectuals might be keen on the wearing of Irish wools and tweeds as a patriotic act, but the working classes certainly were not. The working classes, in fact, wanted then, as they do now, to read cheap, sensational English newspapers.

They also wanted to drink and to go to dancehalls, whereas the Irish Irelanders John A singled out wanted to protect them against such foreign, immoral pursuits.

The 'Irish' ideal of republican virtue, he had no difficulty in showing, veered often towards a moral protectionism which contained a strong element of snobbish class superiority, not to mention rural disdain for the city.

Nevertheless, due to the dominance of Sinn Fein after 1916, a version of the ideals of Irish Ireland became part of our official rhetoric. And Irish became, of course, the first language of the new state.

The lecture went off in many fascinating directions and ended . . . it's a long story . . . with John A Murphy singing an Irish Ireland song to the tune of 'Are You There MoriarI.T. ?' Croke Park came into it, of course, and towards the end John A deplored, in an aside, the vulgarisation of the National Anthem by the kind of Superbowl presentation the GAA goes in for and also asserted that the cupla focal are dying out.

They have, indeed, retreated to corners of the national life, and it has been a while since political addresses of any kind began with "a chairde Gael". But still. They have their place.

And it is not unconnected with the huge, unrealistic ideals of the men John A was talking about.

I was in an all-Irish pre-school once, in a disused flat in a tower block in Ballymun . . . a community that at the time had as few privileges and as many social problems as any in Ireland. I need hardly say that the parents of the little children there . . . mostly mothers, but fathers, too . . . had no great reason to be Irish patriots.

They knew well that the kids for whom they were going to the trouble of providing an education through Irish might well end up behind the counter in McDonald's. They themselves had no Irish.

With their school, they were demonstrating on one level the revolution in parenting that happened in Ireland in the last 25 years of the 20th century.

Single parents, in particular, it seems to me, began to want to make it clear that their child or children were getting the very best upbringing a hands-on parent can provide.

What was amazing was that an Irish-language school struck those people as being the best.

If you try to imagine the alternative primary school movement as based on something else . . . on an ideology connected with sport or European languages or socialism or anti-clericalism or vocational training or anything else . . . you realise that there is no national ideal except the linguistic one.

Contemporary Sinn Fein, of course, uses the language to express political nationalism. But Irish carries for other people a non-political nationalism . . . an expression of distinctiveness, of style, of being not run-of-the-mill, of having a big idea of yourself and your children and your country.

Only bigots, these days, sneer at the cupla focal as if it is hypocritical to use a few Irish words if you haven't got lots of Irish words. It is understood that Irish phrases are meant as symbolic gestures, not communication. They're an invocation of past pride. That's how I see them . . . as a reminder of a more hopeful and daring and proud Ireland, because those were qualities of the language revival movement, however improbable or even ludicrous the movement can now be made to seem.

The phrases used today in Croke Park keep, if not alive, then on a life-support machine, a range of values that, though submerged and indistinct, are still accepted as values. Tokens are tokens because they have meaning. It's not much, and of course, it's nothing like a language revival.

But it seems to me very moving that, after a century of its enemies saying that because Irish is of no practical use it has no value, people make the distinction . . . yes, it has no practical use, and no, it does have value.