The first county final that TG4 broadcast live was in Donegal, 25 years ago: St Eunan’s against Eoghan Rua in Ballybofey.
Their production partners, Nemeton, assembled an expedition party from their base in An Rinn, a Gaeltacht outside Dungarvan, and traversed Ireland on a 420-kilometre diagonal.
They travelled in convoy: a truck for the satellite link, a truck for the rigging equipment, a trailer for the generator, and a crew of more than 20 in a minibus. Between getting there and getting set up and getting back it was a four-day trip.
On the day, nothing was smooth. A power supply problem caused issues on the vision mixing desk that resulted in broken pictures in the live broadcast. They were crestfallen.
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A week later they were committed to providing pictures from the Offaly county hurling final, so they summoned an engineer from England to exterminate the gremlins. The equipment was new. They fretted for days. That was the beginning.
We take it for granted now. Every year, TG4 jump into the club championships shortly after alpha and continue to omega. It is the broadcast home of the ladies’ football championship, the minor and under-20 intercounty championships, the intervarsity competitions and it is the principal residence of the national leagues.
It is the only place where you will find live Gaelic games in every month of the year. All seasons, without flinching.
In this respect it is a glittering example of public service broadcasting. Last year, they aired a staggering 222 GAA games, between their TV channel and their YouTube platform, and this year they expect to hit those numbers again. Many of those games are of niche interest, played in front of tiny crowds, causing a ripple in small ponds.
Why is it important? Because media, in all its forms, is gravitating towards the centre in frantic pursuit of an audience. In sport, stories or events that cannot command a mass audience are increasingly marginalised. Diversity is an honourable editorial aspiration, but nobody frames it as a business model. The cornerstone of TG4′s GAA coverage is diversity and inclusiveness.
Their red-letter days are easily ringed in the calendar: the All-Ireland club finals, the national league finals, the last day of regulation games in the National Football League and a handful of others. On those days their output flourishes.
Their coverage of the hurling league final between Clare and Kilkenny last April commanded an impressive audience share of 21 per cent on a Saturday night – which is still the toughest battleground for eyeballs on screens. A week earlier the football league final between Dublin and Derry reached an audience share of 28 per cent and, at one stage or another, 632,000 people tuned in.
After 25 years of live GAA coverage, though, TG4 has never owned the rights to broadcast any senior hurling or football championship games. That may be about to change. At the beginning of August the GAA invited “expressions of interest” for two rights packages, broken into six games and eight games. Those matches were part of the GAAGo schedule for the last two seasons, and before that were shown by Sky Sports – all of them on Saturdays.
The release of these packages to a tender process, less than halfway through the GAA’s current broadcast contracts, comes, pointedly, on the advice of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.
For the first time TG4 has been invited to enter a process such as this. Whether they have the financial wherewithal to launch a competitive bid is still under consideration, but they are actively trying to pull something together.
Applications must reach the GAA by next Monday and, given the dimensions of the market, it will not be a crowded field. Significantly, it is understood that RTÉ will not be bidding. They already hold the rights to 31 championship matches, plus the McDonagh Cup final, and the semi-finals and final of the Tailteann Cup.
They are also joint owners of GAAGo, in partnership with the GAA, and it is certain that GAAGo will be in the running for these rights. There is no suggestion that Sky Sports will enter a bid, and it is not expected that Virgin Media will either.
The vast majority of Virgin’s sports output – European club football, Nations League soccer, Six Nations rugby, horse racing from ITV – is what is known in the industry as “plug in and play”. The pictures arrive already packaged and the only overheads for Virgin are to produce home content from a studio.
Outside broadcast units are expensive and, even for RTÉ, that service is sourced from the independent sector. The production costs of a typical GAA championship match would run into six figures for RTÉ, according to one industry source. GAAGO has lower production values and fewer overheads, but it is not cheap for them either.
Pitching for these rights will be a stretch for TG4 but if they can muster a credible bid the GAA’s response will be interesting. Clearly, the GAA is invested in the success of GAAGo as a long-term project. So far, it has generated small profits and gales of public blowback.
The breakdown of the packages is significant. The eight-game package is light on specifics: All-Ireland and provincial games, in football and hurling. The six-game package, though, is clearly more attractive: two All-Ireland football quarter-finals, one Munster hurling championship game and an assortment of three other games from both codes.
Because they are all Saturday matches the Munster hurling element of the package would likely be a home game for Cork or Limerick. In the early rounds of the season that game would be box-office gold. The biggest selling point for GAAGo is the Munster hurling championship and it is this commercial reality which created such a furore in the last two years. Here is a chance to recover some goodwill.
If TG4 come to the table, looking for that package, they should get it. Not just because they have spent 25 years providing GAA followers with an extraordinary service, not just because they have the talent to deliver superb programming, but because for the GAA, as a community organisation, being a slave to margins is a breach of core principles.
Six championship matches, free to air on TG4, would be a gift from the GAA to itself. Returning those games to GAAGo would be a damaging error of judgment.
