Shifting picture in coverage of our games

ON GAELIC GAMES:The departure of two great GAA broadcasting personalities merely illustrates the rapidly- changing media world

A WATERSHED championship summer is getting under way this month. It hasn’t entirely escaped observation but to date the imminent demise of RTÉ Radio’s long-held status as the exclusive national broadcaster of the GAA’s most important events hasn’t attracted much comment.

There have been poignant coincidences. Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh was at the microphone for his final All-Ireland match commentary last September, bringing down the curtain on a career stretching back over 60 years.

Before Ó Muircheartaigh began his career, Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin had been broadcasting an Irish version of his father's GAA results programme on the radio. Eventually, in 1953 he took it over (in circumstances that sound more like Wall Streetthan Henry Street – being forced to tell Ó Ceallacháin senior to step down if he, Seán Óg, wanted to take up the position himself).

It’s easy to overlook how daunting it must have been down the years to conduct an exercise that appears so simple in the age of e-mail and texting: trying to compile results from every county in an era when telephone usage was confined to just a handful of locals and do so in the space of a few hours.

Last Sunday the programme ended after 58 years. Its passing is another milestone in the history of the games’ most evocative medium. Tomorrow there will be a media conference to launch Newstalk’s first championship as a commercial national broadcaster with live radio commentary rights.

These developments are fraught with nostalgia but mark the cultural transition of Gaelic games from a broadcasting policy that demanded above all recognition to one that prioritises variety and the delivery of competing services to GAA members and supporters of football and hurling.

This evolution didn’t occur just in the past few months. It’s been happening for a while but the departure of the two broadcasting personalities, or institutions, illustrates the changing media world.

The GAA and RTÉ or Radio Éireann or 2RN have a long and intertwined history.

In 1926 PD Mehigan, this newspaper’s first Gaelic Games Correspondent under the nom de plume ‘Pato’, broadcast live coverage of the Munster hurling final as well as both All-Irelands.

But it was 12 years later when a Dublin schoolboy, Michael O’Hehir, was given a trial broadcast of the All-Ireland football semi-final between Monaghan and Galway in Mullingar that the golden age of radio coverage began.

In those years before television the sound of O’Hehir’s commentaries were a significant part of GAA and national life.

Pádraig Ó Caoimh, then general secretary of the association, had an acute awareness of the importance of the public image of Gaelic games and was well aware of the power of broadcast coverage.

The GAA contributed for instance to the cost of Radio Éireann’s coverage of the famous Polo Grounds All-Ireland final in New York. And it regarded the station with an occasionally proprietary eye. O’Hehir for instance used to observe the convention that players sent off in matches shouldn’t be named.

There is a fascinating insight into this by Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin, speaking to Radio Kerry’s Weeshie Fogarty two years ago (an interview available on the excellent www.terracetalk.com website), who recounts how, having identified players sent off in his Sunday night bulletin, he was contacted by Ó Caoimh’s assistant and eventual successor Seán Ó Síocháin. O Ceallacháin argued the prohibition was ridiculous given that 50,000 people were present at the match and that it was furthermore unfair on the relatives of players who hadn’t been dismissed that they should be under this cloud of ambiguity. Ó Síocháin wasn’t impressed and effectively threatened the broadcaster with the sack.

Alarmed, he consulted the station sports editor, Philip Greene, and the matter was referred to the controller of programmes, Roibeárd Ó Faracháin, who instructed Ó Ceallacháin to request an official letter from Ó Caoimh to state the Croke Park concerns. The matter was never mentioned again.

O’Hehir would become RTÉ’s first Head of Sport, recounting in his autobiography how Paul Warren of the Teilifís Éireann Authority had invited him to sit on the interview panel to choose the successful candidate. Eamonn Andrews, who chaired the panel, pressed O’Hehir to take the position and he was offered it by the end of the week.

This placed Gaelic games at the heart of the new station’s sports agenda and the rights to cover the senior All-Irelands and Railway Cups were granted for a nominal fee of £10 per match.

Television would radically alter the broadcast environment, but not for a long time; the number of live matches was too small. As the penetration of television coverage deepened, radio became a medium of convenience for people out and about or otherwise beyond the reach of TV – for instance overseas – and not the chosen means of following championship action.

For all the wonderfully evocative phrases that radio could conjure up, the reality of pictures made the public more analytical in their consumption of coverage and facilitating that experience through television commentary became a distinctly separate challenge – hence Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s firm preference for radio.

Nor should the old shibboleth about turning down the television and switching on the radio be taken too seriously. The time lag (sound fractionally ahead of vision) makes that a supremely irritating way to follow a match.

The GAA’s frequent frustration with RTÉ set in as the association began to realise its games were a valuable ‘product’ for a broadcaster and that in the absence of competition the ability to maximise that value was compromised from the start.

Incrementally, a multi-platform model has emerged. TG4 covers a range of matches that would be hard to justify on terrestrial and Setanta provides subscription coverage of Saturday evening league fixtures. The biggest box office attractions among these events would pull an audience on RTÉ, but the GAA can hardly conduct a rights policy on that basis.

Everything is now about data. Results go up on the internet and can be accessed by exiles all around the world or else texted within seconds of a club match ending. Web broadcasting and the fast-evolving mobile phone technology mean that live action is becoming more and more accessible.

This is technologically light years from the Ireland where people gathered in and around those houses which had radio sets in order to experience big matches through the assisted imagination of crackling commentaries.

It’s amazing to think pioneers such as Ó Muircheartaigh and Ó Ceallacháin took the GAA on that immense journey and are still with us to gaze at new horizons.

smoran@irishtimes.com