That last bit is probably too much to ask for, though.

There's still the visit of the red rose to come, not to mention the soccer internationals and the inevitable delays in Lansdowne Road's planning permission. Enough to keep the opinion pages bubbling on.

Gets a bit tiresome, though. Whichever side you came down on, it would be nice to think that people could now accept that the war is over. Arguments are good. Healthy. When committed folk clash over issues that stir their souls, debate flourishes. It's not always reasoned and it can often get hysterical but it's debate nonetheless.

After a while, however, enough becomes enough.

Accept and move on.

In these pages last week and on Morning Ireland on Friday, John Arnold from Cork called today a sad one for the GAA. He isn't happy about rugby going ahead in Croker while Lansdowne still hasn't had its planning sorted out and he feels let down by the whole thing. Maybe he's splitting hairs on a technicality to hide the fact that he just plumb doesn't want foreign sports to be played there and maybe he isn't but the fact remains that he has major problems with it all.

If we're going to be grown-up about all this, we can't just wave the likes of him and Micháel Greenan away. It's easy to laugh and sneer at the kind of men who go to Congress every year, who sit on committees and know their rulebooks inside out. But they keep the whole show running while the rest of us are content with just turning up and playing or watching and they deserve respect.

And for what it's worth, John and I are on the same page on this. Well, almost.

Okay, not exactly the same page. Or the same book. We're probably not even standing in the same library. But we both have problems weighing on us.

Mine is that in an ideal world, I'd have Croke Park as an Irish equivalent of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. A comeone-come-all home for the best events Irish sport has to offer. The same would go on a smaller scale for all GAA grounds and soccer grounds and rugby grounds nationwide. A sporting country in which we all just got along, where your patch of grass was my patch of grass and we found a way to share it all.

But that ideal world is utterly idiotic and unworkable. It ignores a multitude of factors that deal with the real world and history and finances and the wholly legitimate need for each sport to protect its own land and people and resources. I get all that. I would just rather it if all that wasn't so. But, the debate is over. Accept and move on.

So seeing as we're bedfellows and all, I'd like to tell John a story that might warm his heart. Three years ago, a man called Tom Fitzpatrick took a phonecall from a priest called Fr Michael Troy. Tom is the secretary of Cumann na mBunscol and Fr Michael is a priest at Terenure College in Dublin.

Yup, that Terenure College. The one that started Girvan Dempsey off on the road that led him to Croke Park this afternoon.

Anyway, Fr Michael wanted to know how he'd go about entering a team from the college's junior school in the competition. Couldn't be easier, Tom told him. Just fill out an application and we'll take a look.

He did and they did and within months, Fr Michael's team had made it to the final of one of the 20 junior competitions where they were beaten by St Olaf 's, Dundrum. But then, last December, they beat Scoil Bhríde, Blanchardstown by 3-10 to 3-6 in front of Setanta cameras in Parnell Park to win their first ever piece of primary-school GAA silverware.

One of John Arnold's main complaints is that traditional rugby schools aren't doing anything for football and hurling.

And for the most part, he's right - Terenure College is the first private school to enter the Cumann na mBunscol in the 79-year history of the competition and they haven't been followed by any of the others yet. But just as they set Dempsey off on the road to Croke Park, so they did with Conal Keaney, as did Blackrock College with Mark Vaughan and many others with many others.

There's rugby in Croke Park today. A rugby school is after winning a Cumann na mBunscol title. Sport is a church big enough for miracles of all sizes.