What’s the summer sideshow this time?

June 12, 1988.

Like everyone else old enough to appreciate it at the time, Declan Bonner can tell you exactly where he was that day when Ray put the ball in the English net in Stuttgart. Unfortunately, in contrast to almost everyone else in Ireland, he wasn’t actually watching it.

Instead Bonner had a game to play in Clones. The Leinster and Munster Councils read the tea-leaves long before that summer, realised that an Ireland-England game in the European Championships would be best avoided and arranged their furniture to suit.

The Ulster Council never budged. The Donegal v Armagh provincial semi-final had been set for the afternoon of June 12 and, by God, on the afternoon of June 12 would the Ulster championship fixture between Donegal and Armagh take place.

Donegal were beaten by eight points on the day and fortunate it was only that. That just put the tin hat on it for Bonner who had more reason that most to be peeved at missing the historic events in Germany.

Like so many people then and now, Bonner was a man of diverse sporting tastes. Though best known for his exploits with Donegal, he spent almost a decade playing for Finn Harps in the League of Ireland and even played for both one winter’s Sunday back in the 1980s.

“The biggest roar that day was for the news Ray Houghton had scored,” he remembers. “It was an eerie atmosphere. Armagh beat us well and most of the crowd decided to get out early and find somewhere to watch the Ireland match.”

It has been Bonner and Donegal’s misfortune that, though there have only been three days over the four summers of 1988, ‘90, ‘94 and 2002 where the championship and an Irish game overlapped, they have been party to them all.

In 1990, they bettered Derry in another provincial semi while Ireland and Egypt were getting up Eamon Dunphy’s nose and Bonner had gravitated from the pitch to the commentary box for Highland Radio (via a stint as county manager) when the same counties met at Clones in 2002.

That last occasion highlighted the head-in-the-sand approach like no other. With Ireland and Spain’s World Cup knockout stretching to extra-time and penalties, there were less than 2,000 people in the ground when Donegal and Derry began.

Another 3,000 finally poured out of the Clones pubs when the drama in Suwon was over and into the ground deep into the first half.

As an image, it was appropriately symbolic of the long-held suspicion within the Association for the ‘Garrison game’ but, by 2002, the GAA had more or less come to grips with the realities of life that came with an Irish soccer team making the Big Time.

Back in 1988, though, it was all new and no-one could have predicted the speed that the ‘Boys in Green’ bandwagon would accelerate. After all, Ireland’s last friendly at Lansdowne Road before the Euros couldn’t even attract more than 20,000 people.

The arrival of Jack’s Army into an eco-system where the GAA’s primacy was always taken for granted was watched with interest. So much so that a congratulatory message from GAA president John Dowling to the team after Stuttgart made national news.

By 1990, everyone was that bit wiser. In both codes. Giant screens at the RDS for events in Italy were attracting greater crowds than most GAA games could pull outside of Croke Park and the men on Jones’ Road launched a three-month advertising blitz to counter the global glamour.

GAA clubs nationwide bought giant TV screens to show the action from the ‘Group of Death’ and Dowling sent another good luck note but that sort of stuff was old news and, elsewhere, battle lines were being drawn.

Coincidence or not, this was the year that the GAA accepted an invitation to renew the Compromise Rules link with the Australians and hurling and football games were played at Toronto’s SkyDome on what was planned to be an annual basis.

A Limerick motion to Congress asking permission for a one-off soccer match at the Gaelic Grounds to celebrate the Treaty 150 celebrations was rejected but the Cavan chairman was moved to express surprise at the lack of support for the team at Italia ‘90.

Weren’t the Irish representing us abroad, he asked? They were, but a study commissioned by the FAI later that year would confirm the fears held by many GAA folk with figures showing massive growth among people playing soccer. Those conflicting emotions — wanting to see the Irish team do well but not at the expense of GAA — have survived the 10-year absence from a major championships and have been in evidence in the run up to Ireland’s 2012 Euro campaign.

“From October to May our games receive less coverage than rugby and English soccer,” GAA Director General Paraic Duffy told Congress last April. “If our games this summer are under-reported on account of wall-to-wall coverage of soccer and the Olympics, championship attendances will be adversely affected.”

The trend in previous years has shown championship attendance figures dip significantly in June when the Irish team has been in action yet the graph has recovered as often as not to post overall increases.

One GAA official suggested in years past that the sight of mighty exploits by Irishmen on foreign fields helped instil a desire among people to witness something similar in the flesh and, in Ireland come summer, there is only one arena where that heady cocktail of high drama and heaving crowds mixes. And every week, too.