On Gaelic Games: So much in life is about timing and its capacity for irony. The point won't have escaped John O'Mahony during his contemplations of the past few weeks.

During the 15 years since 1991 we've known two things about O'Mahony's relationship with his own county: one that he was foolishly and casually cut adrift by Mayo after four years of impressive achievement, and two, that he wanted at some indeterminate future stage to return to the helm.

The loss in the first instance was primarily the county's. When O'Mahony walked away from the job because he hadn't been allowed choose his own selectors, he was in the midst of rebuilding the team that he led to the 1989 All-Ireland final.

That summer of 1991 was a watershed for football. It featured the first crack in the Leinster-Munster duopoly that had ruled the game for over 20 years and signalled a new, egalitarian era. With their experience and managerial acumen, it's not fantasy to speculate that Mayo could have been Connacht beneficiaries of this brave new world instead of the punch bags they unhappily became in the early 1990s.

In the second instance the loss is O'Mahony's. In the years throughout which he micro-managed achievement almost beyond imagining for Leitrim and Galway and watched as Mayo flirted with - and were cruelly rebuffed by - success he must have occasionally visualised the circumstances when he and his own county would heal the by now ageing rift and move forward together in formidable harmony.

But it's pretty unlikely that those daydreams ever featured circumstances in which Mayo had reached two of the previous three All-Ireland finals and with the nature of the county's expectations on an almost chemical high.

Because of his cautious demeanour O'Mahony is sometimes open to the perception that his every move is calculated with infinite precision and that can obscure the depth of his feeling for Mayo football.

In 1974 he won an All-Ireland under-21 medal and nine years later repeated that feat as a manager. His name was made in senior football for the work he did with his own county. He taught many footballers in St Nathy's and knew that one day he'd be back to spend his wealth of experience amongst his own.

So this week's decision to take over the Mayo seniors wouldn't have been taken lightly and, regardless of how much it owed to the political realities of his fledgling Dáil campaign, he is now in control of the senior county footballers - with all the demands, burdens and attention to detail that brings when O'Mahony takes on a task of this gravity.

For those who know him at all there is no doubt, should his football and political quests cut across each other, about which one will keep most firmly on course. The difficulty of the demand that he take the county now wasn't so much that the circumstances might be less than ideal but that it might compromise fatally his first and maybe last shot at a political career.

In what way are the circumstances less than ideal? Well pretty much in every way.

Politics is a slog. It's serious examination as opposed to pub quiz. With the list system proportional representation of many European countries you're either high enough up the list or not. In Britain the national swing takes you in or out with few exceptions. But here you work hard for recognition and even harder for votes.

O'Mahony wanted to give his campaign, which at six months is in election terms a sprint rather than a sustained run, full attention. But with his football stature so full of achievement outside the county, to knock back the county board entreaties for a second successive year would have been potentially damaging, particularly with the opinion polls vividly pointing up the scale of his task - getting from three per cent up to somewhere like at least 10 - if he's to have a chance.

Were he elected or at the start of a Dáil cycle, the Mayo post would have been well manageable but right now O'Mahony is homing in on a May that brings both an election and Galway in the championship. Not ideal.

Then look at the circumstances of the team. They're almost diametrically opposed to those pertaining in Mayo, Leitrim and Galway when he took over.

So much time had passed since any of those counties had achieved something of note that the new manager had time and patience on his side.

The scenes in Mayo on reaching the 1989 All-Ireland final were akin to what might be expected should the county finally bridge the gap yawning back to 1951 - and it's a sobering thought that since reaching that final for the first time in 38 years, nearly half that period has elapsed again and still no sign of Sam Maguire.

This time around most Mayo people will be realistic about what can be achieved in the immediate term, but O'Mahony nonetheless knows that it will take an All-Ireland to create the sort of scenes that he helped bring about previously in the county as well as Leitrim and Galway. To have the nature of success so tightly circumscribed is also less than ideal.

He is also acutely aware of the need to adjust the notion that he has arrived like a messiah, the last piece in the jigsaw that depicts Mayo's next All-Ireland. The county at present more convincingly fits the profile of needing to come around the block again, rather than take one last step to fulfilment.

The circumstances of this appointment make it the most challenging - and you suspect in his mind the ultimate - challenge of an immensely distinguished career in management.

On Tuesday night after his announcement as Mayo manager O'Mahony fitted in four meetings, two football-related and two political. It's the sort of work-rate and balance he'll hope to maintain in the months ahead.

In the long term no one is better equipped to develop the county's prospects at senior level. In the short term the conviction he brings to that task may compensate him a little for the lost political focus.

He may regard it as clutching at straws but there's a precedent from a different time and place, from which O'Mahony can draw some encouragement.

The late John Healy said when writing, at the time of a difficult looking European election in 1984, about the prospects of the last Ballaghaderreen man to combine football celebrity and national politics: "The GAA won't forget Seán Flanagan in Centenary Year".

The timing was right and they didn't.