ON GAELIC GAMES:IN THE teeth of what appears to be never-ending recession, the GAA's commercial health comes into focus with a confluence of events over the past week. Yesterday, saw the announcement of the All Star football nominations. The scheme, now styled the GAA/GPA All Stars and sponsored by Opel, marks its 40th anniversary this year.
Originally sponsored by Carrolls, the cigarette manufacturers, the scheme – founded by print journalists after an idea of the late Mick Dunne – was the GAA’s first foray into major sponsorship.
At the end of last week, we also saw the retirement of Dermot Power whose involvement in the commercial and marketing activities of the association made him a key figure in the development of revenue streams – Croke Park stadium, broadcast rights and championship sponsors – now vital to the well-being of Gaelic games.
I might as well declare a personal interest here. In my days tilting at academic windmills – or for the more literal-minded of you, my time as a slothful undergraduate – I had numerous dealings with Dermot in his capacity as student manager for the Bank of Ireland Trinity College branch. It was through him I became introduced to the key lifestyle accessories of credit, cheque books and – just as they were making their miraculous appearance in our lives – ATM cards.
But I always associate Dermot Power’s ability to meet the needs of clients with a meeting in December 1982 when aside from my usual supplications, I happened to mention that a 21st birthday party was in danger of being inconvenienced by a shortage of equipment. A barrel of Harp had been procured, but we had no dispenser. Without missing a conversational beat, the bank manager reached under his desk and pulled out an old Tayto box containing the required apparatus: “The complete banking service,” he declared triumphantly.
His journey towards more important and better resourced clienteles soon began and it was through the All Stars scheme that he entered the world of the GAA.
It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of the All Stars at its inception. It wasn’t just the nature of the scheme, although it’s unusual to have such dominant sports awards in this part of the world and the system of formal recognition was very much borrowed from the US. But the scheme was the GAA’s gateway to serious sponsorship.
It was only that same year, 1971, that the association accepted the concept. The McNamee Commission declared sponsorship acceptable in chapter eight of its final report; more pertinently it declared tobacco and alcohol companies as acceptable commercial partners. This cleared the way for Carrolls to sponsor the scheme in its first eight years. The cost of the scheme on an annual basis was put at £30,000 by the middle of the decade. It probably came a decade too late for complete success in that the whole issue of tobacco sponsorship was already contentious by the time the scheme came into being.
Tomás Roseingrave, the social scientist and at the time of the McNamee report director of Muintir na Tíre, entered a minority opinion arguing against cigarette and drink industry sponsors – a view he continued to articulate in years to come.
Motions to congress in the mid-1970s sought to disconnect the GAA from the sponsorship and Fr Leo Morahan, Mayo county chair, was a constant critic.
Kerry wanted to know in 1976 – startlingly the first congress addressed by a woman delegate – how much the scheme cost to administer and whether the GAA couldn’t pick up the tab itself. The then general secretary Seán Ó Síocháin responded bluntly that the sponsorship was all about revenue for the GAA and this practical attitude earned the approval of congress.
By late 1977 the new Minister for Health Charles Haughey was flagging government disapproval of the link between alcohol and tobacco companies and sports sponsorship. Within a year Carrolls had abruptly terminated the sponsorship and handed it over to the Bank of Ireland.
On another theme, it’s surprising how restrictive the view of live broadcasting was until comparatively recently. The McNamee Commission wanted to stop the coverage of All-Ireland semi-finals and prevent any extension to provincial finals, but most of all it wanted engagement on the quality of broadcast coverage.
It’s striking to see how hostile the attitude of some GAA units towards RTÉ had become by the end of the 1960s. A Roscommon motion to ban live television failed in 1969, but there was a vigorous debate on the subject and the alleged failure of RTÉ to give the GAA’s games and activities adequate exposure was cited as an argument in favour.
It was argued that the GAA was furnishing 10 hours of television broadcast a year for £4,500 – against the industry average of £1,290 per hour’s programming.
Forty years on and there are now 30 separate packages of media access rights and according to the 2010 accounts, annual media earnings accounted for almost €11 million.
Commercial and sponsorship earnings have sky-rocketed, largely due to the big national deals, originally with Guinness and Bank of Ireland and latterly with the various multi-sponsors.
It used to be the big concern of the GAA’s annual financial reports that the ratio of its gate receipts to other income would rise too high – at times over 70 per cent – making the organisation too reliant on match-generated revenue. But that didn’t mean the lower the better and Tom Ryan, the GAA’s financial director, has expressed reservations about gate receipts generating too small a proportion of annual income; in other words that you don’t want the core activity dwindling because all other revenues are ultimately dependent on it.
By last year, the gate receipts at €25 million were down to around 44 per cent, but it’s unlikely commercial revenues will continue to be quite as buoyant in the current economic environment. Nonetheless, it’s worth bearing in mind that for all the disapproval of commercialism and the tensions that can arise between the membership at large and the easily characterised fat cats of Croke Park, the GAA won’t be getting money anywhere else in a hurry.
