Opinion: The experience of Gaelic football's rule changes, whether one agrees with them or not, gives a powerful lesson to the world of constitutions Sports are defined by their rules. The rules of Gaelic football are what make it different from, say, soccer or Australian rules football. So it makes sense that changing those rules isn't an easy process.

The GAA constitution requires that changes to the 'Playing Rules’ of one of its sports, like those approved last November to football, be first evaluated by a standing committee and the Ard Chomhairle, approved by a three-fifths majority at a special congress, and can only happen every five years. The Irish constitution also requires a fairly difficult process for change: every amendment, regardless of how technical or small, must be approved in a referendum. When something is important, we tend to make it more difficult to change.

GAA president Jarlath Burns described the recent rule changes as 'enhancements' to bring football back to its ‘basic principles’. But this begs the question: could the GAA vote to change these basic principles? For example, could they vote to remove soloing from the game?

Could they, in a more nightmarish scenario, vote to remove hurleys from hurling? Isn’t there an essence to these sports – things that make them distinctive – which simply can’t be changed? There’s nothing that explicitly prohibits such changes in the GAA’s constitution; it’s a democratic organisation and whatever its national congress approves are the rules.

But our instinct would probably balk at this: to change these things would destroy the essence of these sports. We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences From RTÉ Radio 1's This Week, supporters respond to new GAA rule changes This question touches on a big debate in constitutional law today: are there parts of a constitution that should never be changed?

For many reasons, including the role constitutional amendments often play in ‘democratic backsliding’, more and more legal scholars (and judges) are coming to the conclusion that some parts of a constitution are unamendable, even if nothing in the constitution says this. Because the amending power gets its authority from the constitution, it can’t use this power to effectively create a new constitution. Whatever amendments are made, a constitution’s basic features and identity should survive.

Some constitutions have special rules called 'eternity clauses' that permanently protect certain parts from change: in Germany, principles like human dignity or federalism cannot be amended. Sometimes limits are interpreted by the courts: the Indian Supreme Court has held since 1973 that Parliament (amending power) can’t destroy the constitution’s ‘basic structure’. In contrast to these approaches, the Irish constitution says ‘any provision’ can be amended by the people in a referendum, though Irish courts have recently talked about an Irish ‘constitutional identity’ – a concept generally treated as unamendable when used elsewhere.

An straightforward democratic stance could say this idea of ‘unconstitutional constitutional amendments’ is ridiculous. If a majority pass all the necessary hurdles to make a change, the constitution must reflect this. On the other hand, a constitutionalist may argue that a democracy needs guardrails like this to prevent it destroying itself.

A constitution can’t include anything and everything; it needs substance like fundamental rights or structural checks and balances to be a constitution. Using this logic, there might be good grounds for including some ‘eternity clauses’ in the playing rules of GAA sports so that their essence is protected, or at the very least clearly defined. They could be specific (e.g.

‘there shall be kicking of the ball’/’there shall be hurleys’) or broad (emphasising athleticism, competitiveness etc). Though as in constitutions, two issues would arise: how they’d be enforced and who would enforce them. When parts of a constitution are defined as unchangeable, it tends to give the last word over the constitution to judges.

But a more important question springs out when considering the GAA analogy again: why on Earth would members of the GAA vote to make such radical changes to the rules of Gaelic football? If they did, it would mean something drastic must have occurred in the organisation's membership and ethos to make them abandon centuries of sporting tradition. In such an event, the GAA’s constitution could neither stop such changes nor save the essence of the game.

For basic principles to be truly protected – be they in sport or a constitution – they must live in the hearts of people they affect, not stuck behind the paper guarantee of law. The whole point of being able to change rules is to keep up with changing contexts. This was the motivation for the recent changes to Gaelic football – a sense emerged that the sport was becoming a slow and defensive game.

Defining basic principles is an ongoing collective effort – one generation’s view of what’s 'basic’ may be different to the next. We know the GAA has changed its attitude to fundamentals before – think of the removal of ‘the ban’ (rule 27) on members engaging with non-Gaelic sports. However unlikely it seems now, maybe future generations will see something like soloing as redundant to Gaelic football, and something we think of as relatively minor to be essential to the sport’s character.

Maybe an article of the constitution we hardly think about today will turn out to be hugely important for future generations, and an independent judiciary (which constitutionalists treat as almost sacred) will someday seem unnecessary. While some see the power of amendment as a limited one which can only take place within certain boundaries, the experience of Gaelic football's rule changes – whether one agrees with them or not – gives a powerful lesson to the world of constitutions. Rather than pointlessly holding out against change, sometimes basic principles can only be saved through change.

As John Henry Newman famously said, ‘to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ Follow RTÉ Brainstorm on WhatsApp and Instagram for more stories and updates The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ