On Gaelic Games: Was the weekend a decisive intervention? Will the GAA have a clearer concept of discipline and its importance to the well-being of the games? Or will president Nickey Brennan - who must by now be dreading further such controversies - end up like Brer Rabbit, getting more and more stuck with each attempt to land a blow on the Tar Baby? 

The air of manly resolve that swept through Croke Park on Saturday as the Central Council statement issued to the public had dissipated sufficiently by the following day for the Louth and Carlow minors to indulge in an uninhibited 29-strong brawl - this at a stage when Carlow were just minutes away from reaching the county's first ever Leinster minor football final.

It remains to be seen what action the Leinster Council takes, but any of the Carlow youths who end up missing such a huge occasion will have a long time to repent their indiscipline.

Should the authorities suspend it's likely there will be a flood of protest about young men missing potentially the biggest day of their careers - "And what about the carry-on at senior games? And picking on young lads." And, and . . .

There will of course be some merit in those complaints. Just three years ago the minors of Cork and Laois brawled around the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick and picked up suspensions.

A few months later someone from one of those counties was on the radio asking why the GAA in concert with the AFL had done nothing about the pre-match attack on Ireland players by Australian opponents - a piece of brainless machismo by players whose inadequacies of technique and self-discipline had already put the test series quite beyond their reach.

No answer came except that no further action would be taken: a permissiveness that arguably set the trend for the two disastrous years that followed and took the international project to the verge of extinction. The lesson is that without consistency everything becomes perilously complicated.

That's the challenge facing the GAA. Inconsistency is no defence against suspension but it undermines faith in the system and drives players and officials mad. Only last week it was a thread running through the grievances aired by the suspended Cork hurlers in their J'Accuse.

Asked at Monday's media conference would it not be simpler for all if referees just enforced the correct punishment for foul play on the field and spared CCCC the dismal routine of sifting through video records to identify red-card offences that had gone unpunished, Brennan began his answer well before tripping a bit.

"We ask referees to do one thing only - apply the rules. That's all we ask. I would have to say that we have had an exceptionally good performance from referees overall . . ."

If we had had exceptionally good displays from referees many of the recent difficulties would not have arisen.

Allowing for the fact the president is hardly going to start bad-mouthing referees in public, the acknowledgement that their one task is to apply the rules is an important starting point.

Do that without fear or favour and there can be no complaints - well, no valid ones anyway.

One of the intriguing side issues in recent weeks has been the state of high vexation with RTÉ within the GAA. At the launch of this year's The Sunday Game, Brennan said some of the errors during panel discussions made him "cringe", and he offered to make expert advice on the rules available to the programme.

He repeated the charge this week, citing the evident belief of TV pundits that the Louth-Carlow fracas was a matter for the CCCC rather than the provincial council.

This comes on top of what are seen as unfair criticisms of players and has induced a frame of mind in Croke Park that must be worrying out in Montrose as the renewal of media rights shimmers into view later this year.

But if even managers and officials appear not to know the rules how surprising is it that some pundits are equally ill-informed? References to players having no right of appearance at CCCC meetings indicated at best confusion about the process. And talk of referees "having dealt with" indiscipline during matches was a symptom of apparent uncertainty in official GAA circles about the rules governing investigations.

Otherwise why would one of the main planks of Saturday's Central Council platform be largely a restatement of an existing rule?

Sceptics cannot be blamed for seeing the weekend as a PR exercise and will be proved wrong only as miscreants are called to account.

Meantime the GAA have at least sketched their road map and offered impressive evidence of widespread acceptance of the new structures.

As for the "culture" of disregard for rules, that can be remedied by making it inconvenient to continue subscribing to the culture.

The frustrating aspect of this is that it would take only eight weeks of zero tolerance for the message to be communicated: if you commit red-card fouls, however the referee responds, you will do your four weeks; if you publicly slag off referees or officials you will be suspended.

At first the squealing would be nearly intolerable - but thereafter a blissful silence.