BEFORE every football or hurling match in Ireland's Gaelic Athletic Association, whether that match is between two powerful counties like Cork and Kerry or two parishes that sit side by side in the distant bogs of Donegal, all players and spectators turn to face the Irish Republic flag that has been hoisted into the breeze above their heads.

The flag is known as the Tricolour. It came to be accepted as the national flag after it was hoisted over Dublin's General Post Office following the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule.

The flag consists of green, orange and white panels. In simple terms, green represents the Catholics, who fought for freedom from British rule, while the orange represents the Protestants, who wanted to remain under British rule. The white of the flag represents the truce between them.

That truce included the scything off of six counties to form Northern Ireland in 1921. The other 26 counties comprise the Republic of Ireland.

For GAA followers, the formation of Northern Ireland has always been a hated imposition. In turning to face the Tricolour before every GAA match, they acknowledge the battles of their forefathers in fighting for independence from Britain. And they sing for the day when the 26 counties of the Republic and the six counties of Northern Ireland are united under one Irish flag.

The song they sing is A Soldier's Song, which was the anthem of those fighting for freedom from British rule in the 1916 to 1921 period. Later it became the Republic's national anthem. It is sung in the Irish language (which is mistakenly called the Gaelic language; with Scottish and Welsh versions as well as Irish, there's more than one Gaelic language).

I first experienced the singing of A Soldier's Song before an inter-county hurling match between Limerick and Cork at Limerick's Gaelic Grounds when I was living in Ireland in 1998. I was struck by the silence as the players and spectators turned to face the flag. The singing was deeply felt; it was from their souls. Then there was another respectful silence. It was easily the most moving experience I'd had at a sports ground, and in most other places besides.

The noise returned as the players lined up in position to add another chapter to the tradition of Irish games. And what a noise it was. The sombre singing had punctuated what was otherwise a riotous carnival. Spectators jumped about in the green and white of Limerick or the red and white—the Blood and the Bandages—of Cork. The nickname befits Cork's leading role in the War of Independence against Britain.

By the time of the hit-off, spectators were shouting at everything and nothing, and—in some cases—laughing, presumably at a great gag by one of their off-siders or simply at the outright joy of the occasion.

And then, whack! The ball, known a sliotar (pronounced "slitter"), went flying through the air and back again. Hurleys, the sticks that are like fat-bottomed hockey sticks, clacked into each other during tight skirmishes or were shoved along at ground level to try to retrieve the loose orb.

One of my main memories of the match is Sean Og O'hAilpin, Setanta's oldest brother (Og, means young, in that he carries his father's name), haring along with the sliotar balanced on the flat part of his outstretched stick. Then, with barely a step to balance himself, he walloped the sliotar downfield.

After a comfortable win to Cork, we joined the rivers of fans who poured into the nearby pubs. Over pints of Guinness, we met a couple who invited us to stay the night at their house.

The next day we went on a walking tour of the places made famous, or infamous, by Angela's Ashes, the book set in Limerick that at the time was the biggest publishing hit in the world. If culture is described as that which makes up the palette of a society, we had a thoroughly cultural weekend.

Around that time I interviewed Sean Og. He was then a 20-year-old commerce student who was home from Dublin City University (where he was studying his degree in Irish) to do a placement at a bank in Cork City. Sean was wearing grey slacks that were fraying around the pockets and black shoes with holes around the toes. It was at that moment I realised the true dedication of GAA players, who play as amateurs whether they’re representing their parish or their county.

To Sean, it was an honour to have the chance to play Irish games (he was a footballer as well as a hurler) at the top level. Even during a quiet counter meal at lunchtime, his eyes widened when he spoke of what it meant to play for Cork.

"You're playing for the Blood and Bandages," he said. "You're playing for your county."

Australian football was first codified in 1859 by sons of the British Empire. The game had aspects that were truly Australian but it also featured a British mindset, at least until the time of the First World War.

The GAA, by contrast, was formed in 1884 specifically as an antidote to British Imperialism. Hurling had been played on fields in the Irish flatlands for a thousand years. Football, played in the hillier areas as well as on the flat, was a more recent game.

The two games were codified as a means of encouraging Irishness. The British viewed the organisation with deep suspicion.

And so did the Irish treat British games with suspicion. The following story may be apocryphal, but you give it some credence because it's said to have happened in Kerry, the strongest Gaelic football county, whose sense of independence is so strong that it's called the Kingdom.

Kerrymen were so unimpressed when a soccer association tried to build pitches in the Kingdom that they laced the fields with shards of glass.

Thurles, a town in northern Tipperary, is the spiritual home of the GAA because that's where the meeting was held between seven men to form the organisation in 1884. Throughout the GAA's existence, however, its home base has been Croke Park, which is just over the Liffey River in north Dublin.

Given the GAA's political nature, it follows that Croke Park is a political ground. The terraced area is called Hill 16 because it's made from the rubble that was left after the Easter Rising against British rule in 1916. The ground's main stand, the Hogan Stand, is named after Michael Hogan, the Tipperary footballer who was killed when British-backed Irish policemen opened fire during a challenge match between Tipperary and Dublin in 1920. Thirteen spectators were killed that day, which continues to be known as Bloody Sunday.

Croke Park, or 'Croker', as it's known to Dubliners, hosted only GAA games until 2007. Then, after much agonising, the GAA allowed the dreaded British games, soccer and rugby, to be played at Croke Park while rugby's headquarters, Lansdowne Road, was being refurbished.

International Rules matches returned to Croke Park in 1998 after an absence of a decade. The Irish team for that series included Jarlath Fallon, the Flying Postman, and Sean Og De Paor, a defender from an Irish-speaking area in Connemarra in the far west of Galway. A totally Irish-speaking area is known as a Gaeltacht. Such areas are confined to isolated pockets along Ireland's remote west coast.

Peter Canavan was a corner forward (think small forward) from County Tyrone whose cunning troubled the Australian defence. Anthony Tohill was a midfielder from County Derry who had played Australian football with Melbourne's reserves in the early 1990s—until there was a mix-up with his university arrangements and he returned home. Tohill, who became a highly decorated Gaelic footballer after returning to Derry, is the coach of the Irish team in this series.

Tyrone and Derry are two of the six counties in Northern Ireland. The coach of Ireland's 1998 team, Colm O'Rourke, explained to me that the Northern footballers were especially proud to play Australia because they were representing what they regarded as the true Ireland, the 32 counties. In Northern Ireland, playing GAA sport is a political act.

The Australians won the first match in the 1998 series. My main memory from that day is the beaming smile of Wayne Carey as he led the Australians back to their rooms. Carey was a competitive beast; even a kick in the park would have been an intense affair when he was in his prime.

But after the victory over the Irish I was struck by the genuineness of his joy. He later told me that captaining his country to victory was one of the greatest moments of his football career.

The Australians' victory served to fuel interest in the second and last match of the series, which was also played at Croke Park. The crowd for that match was 71,000, a record for an international match in any code in Ireland.

The Irish banked on their team winning because of greater skill. But it was the Australians' fierceness that ignited the crowd. Every time the Aussies laid a tackle, there were 'oohs and aahs' throughout the stadium. The Irish did end up winning the match through greater skill with the round ball.

The 1998 All-Ireland football final was won by Galway, the county of the pacey postman Ja Fallon. The Galway men impressed because they made acceptance speeches in Irish. They were well-educated young men who were mindful of their country's traditions. Despite those traditions, Fallon confirmed the changing ways of sport in Ireland when he played rugby in the off-season with the Galway-based province of Connaught.

The 1998 All-Ireland hurling finals included the experience that taught me most about the GAA. About three-quarters of the way through the second half of the semi-final between Offaly and Clare, the referee called time and marched from the field.

Players and spectators looked at each other in disbelief. There should have been 10 minutes to go. Offaly at that stage had the momentum and looked set to overhaul their opponents.

Offaly fans were upset. Their response was to jump the fence and stage a sit-in protest on the field, where they waved their white, green and yellow flags and demanded the referee's return.

The protest became quite fun. I remember standing on the terraces and witnessing the laughter of spectators who made various comments along the lines of: "Only in the GAA." All GAA fans understand that the amateur underpinning of the sport means there will often be amateur performances. The referee, a schoolteacher from Galway, had made a forgivable mistake.

I imagined the outrage there would be in Australia if a timekeeper had lopped 10 minutes off the end of an AFL game. Someone would surely get the sack.

In Ireland, the errant referee became a small-time celebrity—and the solution to the problem of the shortened match was simply to play a full-length rematch the following week. Offaly won the rematch and then, in a victory for the underdog, went on to defeat the mighty Kilkenny in the final.

International Rules is nothing like hurling in that it's been conceived only in recent decades, since Harry Beitzel took an Australian squad known as the Galahs to Ireland in 1967.

The game has been designed to give the players of two indigenous codes the chance to represent their countries. And, despite it being a contrived game, it means so much to the Irish to win. It matters to them because they are representing the dreams and deeds of their forefathers, who fought for the freedom to express their Irishness under an Irish flag.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the AFL or its clubs