GAA President Liam O’Neill has said he was “shocked” by RTE’s “aggressive” reaction to the news that the GAA has sold exclusive rights to 14 All-Ireland championship games to Sky Sports. O’Neill was speaking with particular reference to the line of questioning that he and GAA director general Paraic Duffy faced over the course of several interviews with the state broadcaster yesterday, in the aftermath of the announcement.
"An awful lot of the reaction was misinformed because they reacted before the news story," the GAA President said to GAA.ie.
"And quite frankly, in relation to last night, we are shocked by the treatment we got from RTÉ. Every single one of the interviews was aggressive.”
O’Neill said he felt that the coverage of the deal was unbalanced and too focused on one aspect of the deal - the agreement reached with Sky Sports. The new deal sees Sky Sports take exclusive rights to 14 championship games for each of the next 3 years. RTE will maintain their number of games at 31, while also operating a new worldwide online subscription service to show games to people outside Ireland. RTE and Sky Sports will be in direction competition for 6 games a year, with both offering live coverage of the All-Ireland hurling and football semi-finals and finals.
"RTÉ are our partners. They have got 31 of our games. They have radio, we give them access beyond what would be given to broadcasters in other sports and in other countries. We didn't expect them to be in our favour - we weren't looking for that. We were looking for balance and I don't think we got balance last night,” O’Neill said.
Last night on Newstalk’s Off the Ball, Duffy spoke about the thought process that went into the decision, and admitted he, and his colleague at Croke Park, were aware there would be opposition, but they felt the move was a necessary step to spread gaelic games to a wider audience.
“There’s a price to be paid for making them available worldwide and in a sense by making the games available in Britain we had to [give up] games in Ireland,” Duffy said.
“It’s a question of balance. So, OK , there’s a little bit of pain for people at home…but the Irish abroad for the first time will have access to our games like they’ve never had before,” Duffy added.
O’Neill spoke today of that decision process and why the easier option would have been to carry on selling rights to Irish based, free-to-air broadcasters.
"The easiest thing to do, if Páraic and I wanted to get through these negotiations, all we had to do was say no, to do what we had always done," O’Neill said.
"But we said we would step out beyond that, and I've admitted last night on RTÉ that when you make a decision like this, of course you are nervous.
"Of course you are concerned that it might not turn out as you want it. But the fact of the matter is we have done it now. We've taken that leap of faith and my message to the followers on the ground would be to sit back and enjoy the games you want to go to and sit back and enjoy the coverage and let's judge all of this at the end of the day."
The central strand of the majority of arguments against the new TV rights deal – and one which was heavily pushed on various media platforms yesterday – was that a new deal which puts 14 games per year behind the Sky Sports subscription pay wall would mean long standing, loyal GAA supporters and members would miss out on seeing their own county’s championship games. O’Neill dealt with this line of argument today, attempting to refute it by pointing to previous subscription based deals, with Setanta.
"I take the point that there are some games that people won't see. But there are some games not being televised anyway. There were games last year that weren't televised at all. But nobody jumped down our neck about that. And there will be games this year that won't be televised.
"But all games are covered, in some way or other, by radio, whether it's local or national. And as well as that, there have been a number of games with Setanta for a number of years anyway. And the same fellas who live in isolated places haven't been able to get those. So there is a lack of consistency in the argument here,” O’Neill said.
