Bone-chilling times out there. Setanta Sports swirls down the plughole and leaves behind it a huddled mass of leagues and teams with deep craters in their accounts, Formula One tears itself asunder, even so star-crossed an entity as newly-crowned NBA champions the LA Lakers have to go trawling in the pockets of its richest fans to pay for a victory parade. Every day hatches another example of real life elbowing its way rudely into the world of sport. The temptation to pull the covers over your head and leave instructions not to be woken up until it's all over grows ever stronger.

In our own tiny corner of the cosmos, the latest round of loop-da-loop over the government grants for GAA players seems like small beer in comparison and yet the publicity-grabbing ability of this one subject would put Lindsay Lohan to shame. Ever since the day Charlie McCreevy announced his tax-break for professional sportspeople and stood accused of discrimination in the GAA pages the following week, it feels like barely a month has passed without some sort of fall-out story.

When you consider that McCreevy's finance bill was announced almost seven-and-a-half years ago now, a roll of the eyes upon its very mention is more than forgivable. Once more with feeling, however, for this is core stuff. It tells us much about not only the future of the GAA but also about how the rank carelessness of government types can create shitstorms that outlast even them.

Watching Martin Cullen during the week, you couldn't help but be struck by the one constant that has been on show through all of this from the Ministers For Sport who've been involved. Cullen and John O'Donoghue have been steadfast all along in their vagueness on the subject, albeit in completely opposing ways. More and more the central theme of the brilliant English political comedy movie In The Loop becomes clear – politicians aren't generally evil or machiavellian; mostly, they're just a little bit inept.

When O'Donoghue first got tangled up in the idea, he was in pure parish-pump politics mode. Ah yeah, sure we'll find a few quid for ye somewhere along the way, lads. Whaddya want? Five mil? No worries, sure isn't the country awash with money?

Somewhere, somehow, O'Donoghue was going to see the GAA lads right. But there was never any detail to go with his fine intentions and indeed, the original €5m figure only ever got into the public domain back then through a slip of the tongue. In the end, the fact that it took the guts of six years for the GPA to get anywhere close to nailing the government down to an actual commitment and a workable draw-down mechanism was an indication of just what a flyer O'Donoghue had taken in the first place.

But those were the times. When the party's in full swing, you just assume the fridge won't run out of beer. So you promise whoever you like whatever they like and leave whoever's coming after you to go make their own arrangements. It's different now though.

And yet, different though it is, Cullen's commitment to non-committal vagueness is just as absolute as O'Donoghue's was. Except he doesn't have the mattress of seemingly unlimited cash to fall back on that his predecessor did. There was a gigantic hole in the story he fed us in Croke Park on Wednesday and yet he left the stadium having waltzed through just enough obfuscation to get him by for another day.

It breaks down like this. The government gives €10m a year to the three biggest sports and, euro for euro, it's one of the best 10 millions it spends in any sector. Among hundreds of other projects, the GAA uses it to build new clubs in the sprawling new suburbs of west Dublin, the FAI uses it to keep inner-city kids off the drug carousel, the IRFU uses it to bring rugby to outposts like Donegal where it can now boast 22 clubs less than a decade after having only had two. Cullen swore on Wednesday that €10m a year will survive the economic apocalypse, for it is too solid an investment to be taken back.

The €3.5m that went to the GPA last year was money above and beyond that €10m. The government, as John O'Donoghue had intimated all those years previously, went and found it somewhere. You could do that kind of thing in the boom. You can't do it now. The money, Cullen told us on Wednesday, simply doesn't exist now. But still, slipping effortlessly into vague mode, he said there remained a chance that the GPA would get its grants scheme. How that would occur, he wouldn't say, other than to intimate that he had some ideas. He threw out some more fine words about how he wanted to safeguard the future of the scheme and not have this issue come up year after year on an ad-hoc yadda, yadda, yadda.

But if the money isn't there, it isn't there. Cullen says he'll be meeting with Dessie Farrell when the GPA chief gets back from holidays this week and at some point in that meeting he's going to have to come up with a way of magicking the funds out of somewhere because there's simply no prospect of it coming from the €10m whose virtues he was extolling on Wednesday. And the notion of bullying the poor, put-upon Sports Council into finding it at a time when they're already cutting costs right across the board doesn't stand up either.

The further you reason it out, the more likely it appears that the scheme will ultimately be scrapped. Speculation is doing the rounds to the effect that McCreevy's tax break for professional sportspeople could be one of the measures to bite the dust when the Commission On Taxation reports back next month. Although the scheme has proven a wholly inexpensive burden on government coffers so far in its short lifetime, the first generation of professional Irish rugby players will be retiring over the coming five years.

Outside of jockeys and the occasional golfer, Brian O'Driscoll, Ronan O'Gara and the rest are pretty much the first group of men to make a serious living out of playing sport while still living in Ireland and they'll be entitled to claim back 40 per cent of a decade's-worth of tax paid the day they hang up their boots. A tax break that started out as a pretty cheap way to fund a few sporting votes could get pricey fairly quickly.

Although it would surely be a serious false economy to nix the scheme – this year's rugby success alone is justification enough for it to be continued – that doesn't mean it won't happen, at least in some form. And if it does, then it's going to be very difficult for the GPA to argue their case. Spokesman Seán Potts told the Sunday Tribune yesterday, however, that even were the tax-break to disappear, it wouldn't change their stance.

"The principle of our scheme will be protected even if that happens," he said. "Although that tax break was one of the points on which we based our submissions, there's also the carding scheme for elite athletes to consider. We would say that there should be parity of esteem in that regard as well. If the government was to stop funding sportspeople entirely, then obviously we would have no claim to make. But I don't think they're going to do that."

No, they're not. But if the GPA want to go down the road of comparing someone warming the bench on an inter-county panel with an athlete or swimmer trying to make it to the Olympics, they're going to find plenty of people to argue with them and they're not always going to win. And in the end, pointing to their cultural contribution to the fibre of the nation will also only get them so far.

For everything a context. It was tough to begrudge the GPA their grants scheme when they first started looking for it because everybody was getting on well back then. It would have been – and was – a nice thing to do. But we can't afford the nice things now that we could then. Everybody knows that, the GPA included. It's tough to see them being looked upon so favourably by the public this time around.

mclerkin@tribune.ie