On GAA: There was a collision of events last week that left the ball breaking very nicely for a columnist. The first of these has attracted significant attention whereas the second was a less public affair.

The Social and Economic Value of Sport, produced by the ESRI, focused on sporting involvement and in so doing highlighted the extent of the GAA's role in society.

Then at the weekend Eddie McArdle, Registrar of Northern Ireland's General Teaching Council, delivered the keynote address at a conference for Loreto schools. His themes concerned the role of the educator and its challenges in the unfolding future.

The world he described was depressing but familiar, a place where Marshall McLuhan's global village has become a playground for multi-national capitalism, which manipulates children and adults like the market opportunities it obviously believes them to be, becoming in McArdle's words "a soulless city".

Together with the political project launched by Thatcher and Reagan over a quarter of a century ago, which had at its heart the destruction of community and the elevation of individualism, materialism conditions people to see themselves as consumers rather than contributors.

Consumerism hits hard at children. They are supplied with contrived wants and television and other advertising means there's no escaping the message.

It's impossible, for example, to be unaware of the latest gadgets, which generally involve solitary pastimes requiring no physical exercise and little social interaction.

I was surprised by one aspect of the address. It never mentioned the role of sport in combating these depressing tendencies. That's not altogether inexplicable because some sports have departed far from the recreational innocence they once provided.

Following soccer, which used to be a fondly remembered childhood pursuit, has taken its place as yet another consumer activity. The loyalties of kids are ruthlessly ridden as opportunities to maximise merchandising profits while the game's heroes are frequently sullen and petulant, their alienation from ordinary supporters underwritten by the vast earnings they are unable to shape into a mature or rounded lifestyle.

But sport doesn't have to be about these excesses. At recreational level it should be about enjoyment and learning lessons that will stand to children, as they grow older. The ESRI report makes the point that overall, sport and commercialism don't complement each other. "A market system is not concerned with promoting access to sport on the basis of fairness. One justification for government intervention is to ensure that access to sport is not overly constrained by lack of resources or other forms of socio-economic disadvantage."

The report doesn't cover children's sporting activity (and also omits horse and dog racing) but that doesn't matter in this argument. What is hugely heartening is the numbers involved in volunteering their spare time so that sport can be available to children.

Fifteen per cent of the population contribute in this way, from coaching to driving to matches and it is immensely to the GAA's credit that it supplies 42 per cent of all those volunteers.

The involvement of so many people in Gaelic games is a major contribution to the community. Team games challenge the primacy of the individual and emphasise the importance of collective effort and responsibility to team-mates. They value people on the basis of what they contribute to the overall effort rather than where they come from or their material circumstances.

Some weeks back in one of those surreal gatherings that Fianna Fáil have been organising in recent years, US sociologist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, came over to explain "social capital" to the party that individualised the tax system, the better to subordinate the needs of society to the demands of the economy.

The ESRI report refers to the process by which the GAA's "wide range of social and cultural objectives" has become focused on "civic nationalism" and "community ethos". Gaelic sport, with its infra-structural focal points, and community involvement is the antithesis of the "bowling alone" phenomenon (the decline in team bowling since the 1950s, which Putnam used as a metaphor for social alienation in his book).

Yet the report doesn't accept as given that sport is a generator of social capital and questions the assumption. But the questions are an interesting starting point to consider the role of the GAA in society.

Firstly, it is pointed out that the benefits of sport heavily favour men and so discriminates in its allocation of social capital. But within the GAA that imbalance is being addressed and even the data in the report finds that of the 42 per cent of sports volunteers active within the GAA, the breakdown between men and women is a comparatively even 23 to 19.

The exclusion of children from the report means that the growing numbers of girls playing camogie and, particularly, football aren't reflected in the playing figures.

Secondly, there is a similar bias within organised sport in favour of the middle classes. This can be seen in the fact that higher professional and managerial positions lead the way in an analysis of volunteers' occupations.

Whereas there is a danger that, particularly in urban areas, more affluent sections of the community with better-resourced clubs will be at an advantage, few clubs are so homogenous that the children being catered for are exclusively middle class and it can also be argued that in terms of the fundraising that goes into the development of physical facilities and the volunteers who provide coaching, clubs are fulfilling a redistributive function.

Thirdly, it is argued that sport can be seen as a source of tension. Examples given include racism and homophobia. Yet that reservation can be turned on its head because the local club has vast potential to integrate and assimilate people of whatever background with its emphasis on recreation and shared interest in children's activities.

Ironically the fourth reservation about sport's contribution to social capital concerns professionalism and specifically talks about "commoditising" sport to the exclusion of locality and community.

Which is, of course, where we came in.

smoran@irish-times.ie