Gaelic Games Interview: Seán Morantalks to journalist, broadcaster and political handler Liam Cahill, now the man behind the hottest Gaelic games website
The disappointment wasn't unique to Liam Cahill at the time. Having decided to walk away from a successful career with a big multinational in order to surf the seemingly infinite possibilities of the internet in September 2000, he discovered that whereas there might be a gap in the market for a GAA-based website, there wasn't a sustainable market in the gap.
"My intention was to build anfearrua into a commercial proposition but it didn't work out that way. Then the whole dotcom bubble burst and I had to reconsider the whole thing."
These days Cahill, a Waterford native now living in Meath, former hurler and Gaelic games enthusiast, whose CV is a 30-year swirl of public affairs, journalism, broadcasting, politics and public relations, combines two of his most ardent interests in pursuing a career in political consultancy while still running his website, anfearrua.com, the most popular GAA discussion board on the internet and one of the big three websites dedicated to Gaelic games.
He set up the site with his own funds and whereas it now just about covers its costs through advertising, no one is yet taking any remuneration out of it.
Cahill monitors and promotes the site and has the voluntary input of a number of columnists as well as Shane Kelly, brother of Meath footballer Niall and a Leinster club medallist with Dunshaughlin, who is advertising manager.
"I started off paying everybody but it soon became clear that this was burning money so I said that if anyone wanted to walk away I'd have no hard feelings but that if they wanted to stay I'd keep going and hopefully we could make money in the future. Everyone continued to contribute.
"The basic investment hasn't been paid back but the capital set-up costs have been met as well as the updating of the software and server so it's not costing too much now."
Advertising comes in slowly. The big, blue-chip GAA sponsors such as Guinness, AIB, Bank of Ireland and Vodafone all take ads when their sponsorships are in season and there is a click-through deal with Google, which earns the site roughly one dollar every time someone accesses an ad dropped down while reading a page or thread.
(Cahill is at pains to point out that this doesn't happen each time someone sees the ad but whenever they click on it. Although at .2 per cent the click-through rate is quite good it only realises slightly less than $1,000 per annum.)
There had been inklings that a career in journalism might be on the cards. Cahill began his Leaving Certificate on the morning that a school essay he had written on what it was like to be a Leaving Cert student was published in this newspaper.
But the 1970s were largely spent in the public service, albeit he graduated towards the communications and PR end of departmental activity.
Active in trade union affairs, he also maintained a sideline in freelancing for Hibernia magazine and contributing Irish language pieces to the Irish Press.
This left him cut out for the job when RTÉ went looking for an industrial relations reporter in 1979 and so began a decade in broadcasting, which took Cahill through economics and politics specialities.
A special secondment during Ireland's EU presidency in 1990 opened his eyes to the possibilities of working in the public relations area and he moved to AIB for three years before becoming a programme manager in the Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition of 1992-94.
That Government's unexpected fall led him to become head of media at Intel, a move he feels mightn't have happened with an Irish private-sector company.
"I think having been associated with a political party (although not a Fianna Fáil supporter, he was David Andrews' programme manager) might have set off alarm bells for Irish companies but Americans have a view that political backgrounds are useful and it's not unusual for people to move from Washington into the private sector.
"When I trained for a few weeks in the US, most of my counterparts were Democrats, although Intel would be seen as a Republican corporation in California."
Intel was interesting place to be in the mid-1990s as the internet was taking off as a mass communications facility. When Cahill started in the company he was one of roughly 100 - out of 4,000 or so employees - who had access to the worldwide web, which needed a managerial permit. One of the communications reforms he piloted through was to allow everyone access.
It was the company intranet that sowed the seeds of anfearrua. Having worked out that no one was reading the on-line bulletins he started to write articles about community achievements by employees and any awards they'd accumulated. He also started to post reports and photographs of the matches played by Intel's hurling team.
It was a profile of distinguished Tipperary hurler Tommy Dunne, an Intel employee at the time, that brought home the potential of such pieces. "I organised the profile and up to 4,500 read it that week. Remember this was a bulletin that virtually no one read when I joined. Anyway the Americans got interested in Tommy Dunne when they saw the piece and it went around the world, ending up with something like 50,000 readers."
Realising there was a readership for GAA-related material among the rising generation of IT workers, Cahill innovated An Fear Rua, an adaptation of An Fear Mór - a character he had invented for the Intel intranet - a character with a fictional club and community history behind him and who gave his name to the eponymous website.
That amusingly surreal side of the site is slightly neglected in the output of features, opinion pieces and press releases posted on the site as well as a discussion board that accounts for about 80 per cent of the site traffic. Other statistics include a readership that is 70 per cent male and 65 per cent under 35; 85 per cent live in Ireland with the rest based in Britain, the US and the rest of the world.
Having studied for and taken a law degree when in the public service, he has a natural wariness about the still unfolding shape of on-line defamation. Although there are some cases in the system the Supreme Court has yet to make a determination on the parameters of internet responsibility.
He hopes the bona fides of website administrators will be taken into account but no one knows and he doesn't wish to be the one finding out in some scaldingly expensive action down in the Four Courts.
Every day he checks the discussion board for the latest threads and also receives the assistance of several contributors, also with legal backgrounds, who contact him as soon as they spot anything with potential legal ramifications.
This is no guarantee against trouble. "You watch as much as you can," he says, "but often it can be the 41st posting on a thread that goes mad after 40 perfectly reasonable ones."
It's worked well so far and only twice has the site been contacted directly to take down a thread - and in one case it had already been deleted.
Cahill accepts three is also what he terms "a propriety issue". Anonymous posters can say what they like about anyone and it's up to the site to filter out the unacceptable, whether or not it's potentially defamatory. Tighter registration rules have been introduced in response to this and evolving technology.
One topic he relentlessly pursues is the occasional campaign to "out" players.
"Every now and then you get this 'such and such a player is gay'. I kill it immediately and bar the poster. The government I worked for decriminalised homosexuality and you could say it's not libellous to describe someone as gay but it's not anyone's business either. There is a certain homophobic tendency still out there but it's not welcome on the site."
Other issues that arise include "flaming" (intense or abusive criticism of other posters) and attempts to identify contributors, which isn't permitted either.
Having seen traffic rise (in one case when a profile of Cormac McAnallen published on the site was read out on Morning Ireland a few hours after the Tyrone captain's terrible and untimely passing), Cahill's ambition is to move the site on to the next level.
With 2,000 articles and 30,000 discussion topics available, anfearrua.com attracts up to 5,000 visitors a day in the high season.
"Content has always been important and I would like to see the ratio between content and discussion balance out at 50-50, or something near that. We're also planning a breaking news service and the introduction of podcasting."
Details of all these innovations will follow, Liam Cahill promises as he heads into the crisp afternoon.
Media, politics, computers, Gaelic games and the questing enthusiasm of a 19th-century anthropologist: who could be better qualified for the job?
