ON GAELIC GAMES:SO THE bread's gone stale and the circus has left town. It's almost poignant to remember the sense of alarm that swept through the more nervous GAA followers when the national soccer team began to do well 25 years ago.

The sheer sense of national engagement about watching green jerseys playing a significant role on the international stage was so new and exhilarating there was a view that it would sweep the country, consuming all before it just as ravenously as Michael Cusack’s famous “prairie fire” 100 years previously.

The World Cup of 1990 was the high point: reaching the quarter-finals in the major tournament of mankind’s most universal game. It was natural the GAA might worry about the excessive parochialism of its activities. I can’t remember whether the phrase, “one more World Cup and the GAA is finished” was genuinely current or just a summary of such concerns but I do remember a friend’s parody: “one more World Cup – even a hockey World Cup...”

There’s a bleak symmetry about how Italia ’90, encompassing Ireland’s greatest soccer achievement, was brought to a close by honourable defeat in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico. Losing narrowly to the host country – and apparent champions-elect – seemed as dignified an exit as anyone could have wished for.

Twenty-two years later, the country’s most hapless appearance on the stage of an international tournament ended in another defeat by Italy, this time in a concluding match that was more of an obligation than an opportunity. For the first time we were forced to confront the very things these tournaments had traditionally and defiantly denied: we’re a small country and decreasingly well supplied with the resources necessary to compete at the top level.

Soccer used to be one of those activities that helped cheer up the national self-image: look at us, surprisingly noisy for our size.

The challenges for the game are in the future but the focus up until 10 days ago was the past. A new generation would turn up in another European country and carouse unthreateningly, charming everyone with how easy going we are, regardless of how the team does but yet the team always did surprisingly well.

In an irony – because it was suggested 24 years ago that our supporters’ good humour branded us as instantly distinguishable from the then commonplace violent misbehaviour of the English – the crowds in Gdansk embraced the words of the empire poet Kipling and treated disaster exactly as we had treated triumph by singing and reaching out to our outclassed players on what we must hope will be the most humbling night of their international careers.

Soccer now joins those other things that, in our own minds at least, other countries always envied about us – effortless Eurovision victories, the best economy in the history of the world – and instead becomes yet another reproach to our new-found inadequacy.

The GAA looked back as well and worried that the great international soccer festival would relegate the national games to an afterthought. Former president Peter Quinn’s startlingly prescient belief 22 years ago was that Gaelic games just had to grin and bear it when Ireland was involved in big, international events but that such a phenomenon would not by its nature occur that frequently.

Croke Park’s concerns have been to batten down the hatches in June and wait for the Euro gale to blow out. Does the fact that it hardly whipped up at all signify good news for the GAA? Not really. You can’t argue on the one hand that Gaelic games emerged largely unscathed from the seismic experiences of soccer’s great success in Euro ’88 and Italia ’90 – true though that is – and on the other that there are gains to be made from the disappointments of Euro 2012.

Sports don’t exist behind barriers. There is ebb and flow. Most people are interested in more than one game even if they have a favourite. International success is a powerful promotional tool and Ireland’s presence in Poland was in itself a success even though the outcome was intensely disappointing. But such events create a buzz in the general sporting community. GAA attendances have always done well in the summers that have followed Ireland’s participation in international tournaments.

“Event junkie” has always seemed to me an unnecessarily pejorative term to describe those who attend big matches across the sporting codes. Big events make sport and part of that attraction is to the demographic that values the communal experience and excitement of a big sporting occasion. Sports organisations are always happy to get the gate revenue and no sport is without a floating constituency: hence 22,107 went to Croke Park two years ago to see Dublin play Tipperary in the qualifiers and 43 days later 80,225 turned up at the same venue to watch them contest an All-Ireland semi-final against Cork. Arguably the more big events there are the greater the benefits for everyone.

And it is certainly true that the community at large could have done without the whole Euro 2012 experience turning into the latest tranche of the bad news that has demoralised the country for the best part of the last four years.

The underlying gloom isn’t purely about atmospherics. GAA administrators are well aware of the effect that the depression is having in practical terms – not taking into account the relentlessness of the crisis unalleviated as it is by any plausible timeframe.

Disposable income has been badly hit. Leinster chief executive Michael Delaney questions whether ticket prices are the main issue in deciding whether supporters can attend matches. But ticket prices combined with the cost of motor fuel and ancillary expenses make television viewing more and more attractive, especially for families.

People are in distress and yet the GAA have to balance the avowed desire to make it easier for supporters to attend with the pressing need to fund itself through one of its primary revenue engines.

Emigration has bulldozed through one of the association’s most active demographics, the young and single, and once again rural clubs are losing critical mass and slipping into the ghost world that descended through past recessions and which we hoped and thought could never return.

These aren’t good times for anyone – or any sport.