The Media: Let’s Use Them
Opinion

Long rounds of negotiations have come to a close, and the televising of the GAA for 2005 has been sorted out after the Irish TV networks getting into a bidding war that has lasted for months.

RTE are holding on to the rights to the championships for the next three years. Setanta have secured Friday night and Saturday night National League and club games. TG4 are hanging on to their rights to Sunday afternoon league and club games as well as the live broadcast of the league semifinals and final.

It would be difficult to imagine life without RTE’s highlights show, The Sunday Game. Many people’s earliest memories of the GAA will include coming home from the big game and watching it in shortened form followed by Michael Lester discussing it with the ‘expert’ of the day and then awarding Man of the Match. It is almost a national institution, not unlike the BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon or the FA Cup Final in the UK, both of which were deemed so important that they were awarded special status to preserve their roles in British life. In the UK, some sporting events are recognised in law as ‘listed events,’ i.e. events that are “generally felt to have special national resonance,” and “contain an element which serves to unite the nation, a shared point on the national calendar, not solely of interest to those who follow the sport in question.” Such events are broadcast on free-to-view terrestrial TV and not consigned to the pay-per-view or subscription-based channels where they would not be viewable by the general public. This is a recognition of the importance of sport, and access to it, in national life. It is for this same reason that RTE, in its role as national public broadcaster, should always retain the rights to the All-Ireland Championships so that the audience is as broad as it can possibly be for these important national occasions.

That said, a bit of competition is always healthy. Very little changed in the Sunday Game’s format until UTV got in on the act with their own highlights show, The Gaelic Game. The competition for viewing figures undoubtedly spurred RTE to modernise their show in response to the lively and lighthearted style of their new northern competitor.

BBC Northern Ireland were also keen to bring the GAA to the masses in the north when they obtained the rights to broadcast their own highlights show, The Championship. It was a time when a lot of people, particularly in the north, were taken aback by how much coverage gaelic games were getting, but today we come to expect it.

Setanta’s entry into the fray has effectively driven up the price for RTE to retain the main rights whilst leaving Setanta with a relatively small slice of the action. All of this has turned out to be good news for the GAA. If the broadcasters are scrambling over the top of each other to get broadcasting the games, let them bid away. It’s all more money for us, and at the end of the day it all goes back into games development since we don’t have a players’ salary market to bleed it dry.

As for GAA fans in North America, it has become a tradition to get up early and go to the pub to see the game live. It is necessary because of the expense of watching pay-per-view on Setanta; it is only economical for pubs to screen it. This works fine for live broadcasts since no major sports network like ESPN or Fox Sports World would want to devote a few hours to what remains a minority pursuit, even if it isn’t exactly peak viewing time for them. However, there is still a gap in the market that has not been filled. If you didn’t get up to see the game, you have to rely on going to the pub later in the day in the hope that the landlord caught it on his VCR. What if you want to watch the highlights later in the day at home? There’s not much you can do.

Now, if you can watch girls’ softball and high-school lacrosse games on ESPN (and yes, you can), surely there’s enough demand for at least a GAA highlights show on one of the main cable networks. Think of the long term benefits to the association if gaelic games were to hit the mainstream media at a decent hour of the day. Few things are as fascinating as the look of amazement on a man’s face when he sees a game of hurling for the first time, and a lot more people would be interested in getting into hurling and football if they just knew that the games exist. If the GAA is serious about promoting the games here, this is an angle worth pursuing.

© 2005

[This is an opinion column and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Western Division Board. Disagree or agree with it? Discuss it on the messageboard!]