Sir, – Since April 1st, entire orchestras have played a concerto of doom on the world’s smallest violins because armchair GAA fans in Ireland have lost their entitlement to see every championship game for free. The grassroots are being “sacrificed”, we are told. The GAA’s international units are a “smokescreen” for greed. The “diaspora” is shoved inside sneering quotation marks, its concerns about previous broadcasting arrangements dismissed out of hand.
Meanwhile in America, GAA fans board planes and make six-hour flights across the country to play in the North American Championships. We rent buses and make road trips twice the length of Ireland to get to our games. Californian college students skip their graduation ceremonies to drive 2,700 miles to play in the National College Hurling Championships, an echo of the previous year when a team coming the other way from Indiana spent 52 hours on a train for the same purpose.
Non-Irish people across the world are waking up to the beauty of Gaelic games and getting involved. This, plus a surge in emigration, means that more jerseys are washed, more nets hung and fields lined far from Ireland’s shores.
Are we not part of the GAA grassroots too? Is a home-bound fan in Ireland really more important than those of us who promote hurling and Gaelic football internationally, often against enormous odds and overcoming logistical problems that people in Ireland can barely conceive of?
Critics of the Sky broadcasting deal are correct that there is a disconnect in the GAA, but it is not between management and the grassroots. It is between the critics and the association’s growing membership outside Ireland. Yours, etc,
EAMONN GORMLEY,
Chairman,
US National Collegiate
Gaelic Athletic Association
Campbell,
California