There's no prize . . . or grant . . . for what's changed matters.

Brennan's greater familiarity with his brief and the issue is one factor. The diligence and sincerity of GAA welfare officer Paraic Duffy, another. The real trigger for change though has been the GPA's threat to pull the trigger, to threaten strike. Before that, there was no urgency. There is now.

Next Friday, in the CityWest Hotel, the GPA will mix business with pleasure, holding its AGM at 2.30, followed by their annual awards dinner. The AGM will be mostly perfunctory house-keeping, the awards, a celebration. The result of the ballot to strike won't be declared or even known that day. The postal dispute up north has meant the deadline for the ballot has been pushed back until next Wednesday, 31 October. Over the weekend though the votes will be added up and early the following week a press conference will be declared to formally state what can already be assumed . . . the GPA membership will abstain from inter-county games for the duration of 2008 until there's a resolution to the grants issue.

From certain vantage points throughout the GAA world, the energy and time the GPA have invested in this issue seems extraordinary and excessive. The list of charges is endless. That this is all about money, a gateway to professionalism, a further wrench in the increasing gulf between the county player and his club counterpart and volunteer. Farrell refutes every count. For one, he says, the five million isn't about money; it's is about principle, recognition, respect . . . and credibility. When Paul Galvin spoke in August about the GPA needing to make a stand on some issue and "nail" it, that resonated with Farrell.

Galvin might have forgotten all the issues the GPA needed to "nail" to keep in existence, but the essence of his argument was valid; to progress the GPA needed to "nail" an issue. Like the grants one.

"It annoys the life out of me when I hear critics say 'Ah, this'll be the road to pay for pla'. The one question I'd ask any GAA man is this . . . does he feel it's right that GAA players are discriminated against in the eyes of Irish sport and politicians? In 2002 the politicians introduced lucrative tax breaks for professional athletes while other athletes in other sports were receiving government grants from the Sports Council. There was state acknowledgment of the contribution other athletes were making yet in the middle there was this body of intercounty players who politicians were saying ad nauseam how great we were for our contribution to Irish society.

"If you can stand over that and tell me, 'Yeah, top GAA players shouldn't be acknowledged and respected like other athletes', well, then, we know what the issue is, but I tell you, you won't get a politician who'll say no if asked whether inter-county players should warrant some recognition for their contribution to the social fabric of this country. Either county players warrant such status or they don't and if they don't then let's cut out the lip service and platitudes, but if they do, then publicly recognise it and provide for it in some form."

He doesn't buy the slippery slope argument, even if he accepts it's that genuine fear which is probably what the GAA's reluctance to the grant scheme all stems from and it's a fear the GPA perhaps haven't appeased adequately. Those fears though, he maintains, don't stand up to rational scrutiny. Who objects to college players getting bursaries from the GAA over fellow players and students? Why say the grants will be the start of the slippery slope, and not when sponsors logos' started appearing on jerseys in '91 and the association is so aggressively seeking new sponsorship and television deals? Didn't the GPA clearly state at its EGM in Portlaoise 18 months ago that it was neither seeking nor advocating pay-for-play?

The accusation that the GPA are removed from the club player has a tendency to both amuse and irritate Farrell. For the last two years he has been solely a club player. The 15 years before that, he was a club player too. For years he's been helping out coaching underage teams in Na Fianna. This past two years, he's been involved with the Dublin under-14 development squads.

Donal Og Cusack has coached his own club team for three of the last four years. He's a club player, a club coach; a volunteer too. You couldn't pay him or Kieran McGeeney, says Farrell, for the time they've spent freely in the GPA's and GAA's, cause.

"You hear people saying, 'If players started getting money for it, I'd walk away from it' but that hasn't happened and it won't happen. I help out with teams because I derive great satisfaction in seeing them enjoy the game and it's like that for volunteers throughout the GAA. I think there's a lot of goodwill towards us. Last year when we had the 15-minute delays before those league games, RTE's Sunday Sport did a vox pop of supporters at those games and they nearly unanimously were in favour of what we were doing. Yet there is resentment to the county player out there and I think it's cultivated by some officials.

"I've been a club player this past two years and to be honest, I'm amazed how passive club players can be at being held to ransom by inter-county competition. They're used to it. But it shouldn't be that way and inter-county players shouldn't take the blame for it.

This is about administration and setting down fixtures and sticking to them.

"People tell you the GAA is all about the grassroots, not the county scene, but it's a symbiotic relationship. The grassroots are hugely important and I don't know a county player who doesn't appreciate that but there has to be a realisation that the shop window is the intercounty game. That's where the money is generated to run the association and it's that funding then that nurtures those county players. Both scenes are totally dependent on the other.

"It's the GAA that have endorsed the inter-county competitions, negotiated the TV contracts and big sponsorship deals on the back of the inter-county game. But if the inter-county game and player is causing that much of a problem, then let's do away with the thing, or else have a situation where it's not about the best 30 players in the county; let's pick them out of a hat and let that 30 play. If you disagree with that, then don't blame inter-county players for playing to the best of their ability in a structure and set-up devised by the GAA.

There's this myth that county players are all about themselves. I take great umbrage to the idea I'm not a GAA man. Believe me, if I felt what we were doing would damage the GAA then we wouldn't be doing this."

Down the line, he sees GPA and county board men realising they have more in common. Just as the GPA have been on the record for years that they'd expect to get a small slice of any new television deal, he's amazed how county boards haven't been more vocal in requesting a greater share of gate receipts.

They're nearly made to feel guilty for all the money they're spending on preparing teams when those teams are generating that money tenfold in gate receipts. And he can see the GPA broadening its spectrum. This past month hurlers from Antrim and footballers from Limerick were supported by the GPA for their objections to recent wellpublicised tweaks to competition structures. "That's what the GPA should be about and that's where we need to get to and for players to realise they can direct the rest of the membership."

But, first the fight for official recognition and before even that, the fight for those grants. That needs to be nailed.