Wherever in the world the Irish have settled, or so the GAA cliché goes, they’ve taken hurling and gaelic football with them. The places they’re settling in these days are a long way removed from Hayes’s Hotel on All Saints Day 1884.

Five hundred kids receive gaelic games coaching in San Francisco each weekend. The clubs being decimated by emigration are those in London, not those on Ireland’s western seaboard. A team comprising three Irishmen and seven Bretons – the latter the possessors of names their colleagues joked that even Micheal O Muircheartaigh would find it a mouthful to pronounce -kicked football under the banner of Brest Celtic at a tournament in Brussels last weekend. A European GAA board is expected to begin operations before the end of 2000.

Michael Cusack couldn’t have envisaged the above a century ago? A decade ago, nobody could have.

In the interim the tectonic plates of Irish society have shifted, possibly irrevocably. The GAA, rarely slow to move when it realises that needs must, are working hard to follow. On the cusp of the 21^st century, with all the world not a stage but a global village linked by information technology and satellite television, they’ve found they’ve had to.

"Even before the days of the Celtic Tiger, when emigration dried up dramatically, the profile of the Irish emigrant had changed radically," Seamus J King pointed out last year in The Clash of the Ash in Foreign Fields: Hurling Abroad. "The new emigrant was well educated, usually with a third-level qualification or with some specialist skill, and he went into much different work areas to his predecessor.

"There was a much greater independence of spirit, a higher level of confidence and a much lesser need of the prop which socialising with his fellow Irish men and women provided. His work practices were much different, and there was much less of a tendency to join a hurling and football club and play in a local championship. If he did continue to play the game, it was more likely to be with his club back in Ireland, as improved communications made it possible to return home for weekends."

For these reasons, everything has changed in GAA land. Perhaps indefinitely, perhaps for no more than another couple of years. But at the moment the old push-me, pull-you correlation between the economic situation domestically and gaelic games overseas no longer applies.

The time-honoured rule of thumb was simple if heartbreaking. When things were good at home, emigration numbers dried up and the foreign units of the Association were stuck for players. When things were bad at home, hurling and football abroad flourished.

Every second generation brought a new hejira. The hungry ‘30s, the dreary ‘50s, the doom-and-gloom ‘80s. The wild geese spread the GAA wing upon every tide and decamped to Kilburn, to Woodlawn, to Dorchester. Corners of a foreign field that are forever Ireland.

Where they went, the GAA followed. Most of the time it was there before them. The first English club to affiliate to the Association were Wallsend and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who did so in 1885, less than a year after its establishment, while by the end of 1889 there were almost a dozen clubs in the New York-Philadelphia region. The players might have been removed in body from the shamrock shores, but by playing football and hurling they could ensure they weren’t removed in spirit.

(As long as they weren’t Irishmen in the British Army, that is. In 1900 the London county board barred the hurling team of the Colchester-based Royal Irish Fusiliers on the basis that "none but men of disreputable character" were in the army and that the Irishman who took the Saxon shilling "forfeited his claim to Irish nationality".)

The years went by. Championships were won and lost. Rows erupted over illegal players. In other words, GAA life continued in Britain and the US as GAA life always had. Then the 1990s dawned and the Celtic Tiger began to roar.

Even America, usually well insulated from economic tremors elsewhere, has felt the pinch. "There’s been a noticeable drop in the number of players coming out," according to Eamon Kelly of the North American county board. "Philadelphia and other eastern cities have been particularly hard hit, whereas places like Atlanta, Florida and Denver – all high-tech areas – are showing increases. Oddly, the number of sanctioned players out for the summer has grown, which shows that students and teachers will probably always want to come and play in the US during their holidays."

Being geographically closer to home, it’s London that has been mauled most painfully by the tiger. Opinions vary on when the reverse exodus began. As far back as 1992, some observers say. Not really until 1994, others claim. There is no argument, however, that by 1995-96 the homeward-bound trickle had grown into a torrent.

An identikit profile fitted the bulk of the returning emigrants. Now in their late 20s or early 30s, they had arrived in London from the mid-1980s onwards. They were working in the general field of construction, as carpenters, electricians, engineers and so on. They were doing reasonably well for themselves. There was one other broad similarity: many of them had young families, or young families on the way.

The kids were the catalyst. Previous generations of emigrants, when they had children, couldn’t afford to go home and had little to go home to in the first place. So they stayed, with their children growing up as Londoners. This generation could, come the crunch, afford to go home. And they had the Celtic Tiger to keep them warm once they did.

Every Saturday night in 1996 and 1997 there seemed to be a farewell party somewhere in north-west London for some player returning to Erin’s green valleys. Terrific for the players themselves that the rising tide in Ireland afforded them an opportunity denied to previous generations of emigrants. Far from terrific for the Association in London, whose lifeblood had been sustained and renewed by those previous generations.

That blood can now be found splashed all over the walls of the capital’s GAA scene. In the past couple of years Eire Og, St Anne’s, St Malachy’s and Wembley Gaels have folded. Shannon Rovers and Sam Maguires have amalgamated, as have – unthinkable only a few years ago, given their traditional bitter rivalry – Kerry Gaels and An Riocht. But quare times demand quare solutions.

Another high-profile victim was the Desmonds club, founded in 1962 and London senior hurling champions four times in the 1980s and again in 1992, when they followed up by beating Ulster titleholders Cushendall in the All Ireland club championship. In their pomp of a decade ago, Desmonds were spoiled for numbers – so much so that at one stage they had to consider limiting their training matches to two teams of 15 players each instead of the 18 or 19 a side that obtained at the time.

Desmonds could have been forgiven for assuming that the story would remain thus and that they would continue to clock up London championships. It wouldn’t and they haven’t. For Desmonds no longer exist. Mortally wounded by the Celtic Tiger, the club voted itself out of existence at the end of 1997 and amalgamated with Glen Rovers to form Kilburn Gaels.

It would be nice to announce that the new outfit are thriving. It would be closer to the truth to remark that they’re just about plugging on gamely. Only two former Desmondsites remain. Twelve is regarded as a good turnout for training. Lads in their mid-30s who could never make a senior team before are regulars. The situation is not likely to brighten.

"Back in the 1960s and ‘70s the standard of football and hurling here was much higher," acknowledges Tommy Harrell, the London GAA secretary. "The lack of numbers has literally killed some clubs. But there’s been a positive side too, in that it’s made us realise we must get back to basics and turn our attention to the schools in London. In Ireland, the clubs draw from their local school. We want to copy, to get a club adopting a school. We initiated a pilot programme last September involving six schools and next year we’re hoping to double the size of it."

Harrell, a native of Campile in County Wexford, headed off to London in 1960 carrying his suitcase, his boots and his hurley. He and thousands of others of his generation and previous generations. In the past, poor Paddy left Ireland to work upon the railways, to pull switches and dig ditches: because he had to. Now when affluent, well-educated Paddy leaves Ireland, it’s to work in white-collar jobs abroad: because he chooses to. Such emigres are the new constituency for the GAA - that most Irish, most rock-rooted rural of organisations.

These emigres were to be seen in their droves last weekend at the Brussels sevens tournament, which attracted visiting teams from the Hague, Brest, Dusseldorf and Luxembourg. Dusseldorf reached the final, where they were beaten a home side composed mostly of EU heads and computer programmers out on one-year or six-month contracts with Colgate Palmolive in the Belgian capital. Brussels were captained by Cathal Lynch, IBEC’s representative there. The driving force behind the Dusseldorf club was Morgan O’Callaghan, who worked for Enterprise Ireland in that city, was transferred to Munich and has helped set up a new club there. Dresden is another city with its own GAA club. As, ranging farther afield, is Dubai. As is Taipei. As is Manila.

"The challenge for the GAA is to meet the demand for our games around the world," says Barney Winston, chairman of the International Dimension Workgroup. "It’s all about strategic planning. We give the clubs in Europe exactly the same service we offer to clubs at home – equipment, Level 1 coaching, training for administrators. The long-term aim is to enable the overseas units to become self-sufficient. To function by themselves, regardless of the numbers coming out, or not coming out, from Ireland."

For the GAA, the 21^st century has already started.