Back in April, Kilmacud Crokes took on Erin's Isle in the Dublin senior football championship.

There was a time when they were two of the strongest clubs in the country.

Crokes were All-Ireland club champions in 1995. Three years later, Erin's Isle were beaten in the final.

But the result of their clash two months ago told a story - Kilmacud Crokes 10-12 Erin's Isle 0-7.

The Isle's stronghold is the north Dublin working class area of Finglas, and the county team was once backboned by their players - Keith Barr, Mick Deegan and Charlie Redmond.


Crokes hail from the affluent south Dublin suburb of Stillorgan.

As a snapshot of how the class divide is increasingly affecting the GAA in Dublin, that night was telling.

Brian Kerr once pointed out that you don't get many Olympic sailors in Tallaght or soccer players in Foxrock.

But it's also clear that Dublin find it hard these days to recruit Gaelic footballers in Tallaght and other working class areas.

Go back to the late 1980s and early 1990s and three Tallaght clubs gave the Dublin footballers Joe McNally, Paul Curran, Dave Foran and Paul Bealin.


There are now five Tallaght clubs, but none of the five have a player on the Dublin squad.

Val Andrews, the well travelled coach, is affiliated to Ballymun Kickhams - a club that straddles working class and middle class areas.

He feels that vast west Dublin suburbs - which are predominantly working class - don't have enough GAA clubs to cope with the numbers.

Tallaght, for example, has a larger population than Kilkenny, but has just five GAA clubs.

Clondalkin has a larger population than Longford, but has just one - Jim Gavin's home club, Round Towers.

"Maybe we're a bit insular. The GAA wasn't proactive in expanding as much as it needed to,'' he said.

"But the bottom line is this: soccer is the working class game. Full stop.


"There's a soccer tradition there. It has deep roots.

"I do think that GAA penetration into the real working class areas has been poor.

"Working class Dublin people didn't have a GAA tradition.

"If you look at the working class areas where there are clubs, it's basically because you had an influx of country people who set them up.

"Ballymun Kickhams was set up by country people coming to Ballymun at that time."

In an interview with the Irish Times on the occasion of the GAA’s 125th anniversary, director general Páraic Duffy acknowledged that it is a problem.

“We have become a more middle class game in Dublin. To be fair, the Dublin County Board recognise that,'' he said.


"But it is a major challenge because you have to commit so many resources and send in so many volunteers. The GAA asks so much of its clubs that it probably puts people off.

“In working class Dublin, soccer is by far the biggest sport. We have some very good clubs in working class areas but overall participation and interest in our games is very, very low.

"In vast tracts of urban Ireland there is very little interest in our affairs. That’s the reality.”

The last two Dubs to win the Footballer of the Year awards were the sons of doctors who went to private, rugby-playing schools - Michael Darragh Macauley at Blackrock and Jack McCaffrey at Belvedere.

The economist and broadcaster David McWilliams feels this is part of a trend that has become very striking, especially in the comfortable south Dublin suburbs.


"My father founded Dalkey United in the '50s and I played for them in the '80s,'' he said.

"Dalkey was either a rugby place, or a soccer place. And that was the case in the surrounding areas.

"Rugby, if you were posh. Soccer, if you were a bit less posh.

"Des Cahill and I were brought up on the same road, and I remember his efforts to get us to play GAA.

"But Dublin GAA could never compete with Manchester United or Spurs or whatever.

"In the early '80s, Dalkey United was the key sporting organisation in Dalkey, and by a long way.

"Cuala was very much a poor cousin, so much so that Dalkey United leased the top pitch and gave it to them."


McWilliams feels that a societal shift made a massive impact in many areas.

"I went away, went to college, and I came back, and began to see something totally different,'' he said.

"Initially, there were inklings, then the obvious nature, and then the predominance of GAA as the main sport around here.

"If you look at it, it ties in with the socio-economic change of south Dublin.

"The most successful people in Ireland since the introduction of free education in the '60s have been the sons and daughters of small farmers.

"Their kids become school-teachers, and their kids become doctors and lawyers.

"They live in south Dublin and send their kids to private schools, but retain the love of GAA.


"That's the main reason why GAA has gone massively up the socio-economic bracket in south Dublin."

Andrews thinks McWilliams is on to something.

"Those that moved to Dublin from the country prize ambition and education, and probably know the system better to get on in it,'' he said.

"Look at the amount of soccer clubs that own pitches and facilities compared to the GAA.

"That's down to agrarian stuff. Country fellas know how to get land.


"The game seems to have become more fashionable.

"People used to look down their nose at you if you said you were into GAA."

McWilliams believes that there's a paradox at play with some in Dublin GAA.

"I think there's an antipathy to south Dublin on the part of the parents who bought the biggest houses in south Dublin,'' he said.

"I've heard what I would call the GAA professional fathers being quite aggressively anti the rugby culture of south Dublin.

"And yet they're very happy to send their kids to the private schools that propagate the rugby culture.

"But they ensure that their kids play GAA outside of school."


We should be wary about making assumptions about different areas in Dublin.

Ballymun is seen as working class, but many of the Kickhams' players come from the middle classes.

As Tommy Carr has pointed out, in his days with the club, he played alongside teachers and Gardai - and he was an Army officer.

Both Tomas Quinn and Ger Brennan play for St Vincent's in Marino, an area that has become gentrified over the past 15 years.

But Vincent's gather players from far and wide, some due to family connections with the club.


Quinn actually hails from well-heeled Portmarnock, while Brennan is from Dorset Street, a part of the north inner city that has been ravaged by crime and drugs.

Brennan earned a scholarship to Belvedere, as part of their social inclusion programme.

"A lot of lads who grew up around me became sidetracked and our paths diverged," he told the Sunday Independent in 2015.

"But they are really good guys, they just caught up in the wrong thing."

McWilliams feels that the GAA has one distinct advantage.

"You've also got to understand that the GAA is run very professionally by professional people,'' he said.

"You can be partner in a law firm or PWC by day, and be a volunteer in the local GAA club by night.


"You don't get that in any other sport. You don't get the seepage of professional ethics and standards in soccer, for example.

"You don't get it in rugby because the club game in rugby is dead."

To McWilliams, the GAA has long since been playing catch-up in Dublin.

"I've always suspected that the default game here is soccer,'' he said.

"It's the main participation sport. I would think that, in Dublin, soccer has much deeper roots than GAA."