The GAA and RTE have nothing to fear over facing an Oireachtas committee to explain its broadcasting deal, says John O’Mahony.
It appears as though both parties will be formally asked to come before the Oireachtas Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sports and Media amid the fallout from streaming service GAAGO’s exclusive rights to a number of high profile Championship games, particularly in Munster hurling.
It’s become an increasingly political issue in recent days, with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tanaiste Micheal Martin both commenting publicly on the matter.
Much of the outcry rhymes with that of the controversy when Sky Sports was awarded exclusive rights to Championship games back in 2014. At the time, O’Mahony was chair of the Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications, which then GAA director general Paraic Duffy and president Liam O’Neill sat before to rationalise that particular deal.
Former Fine Gael TD and senator O’Mahony said: “If they’re on media outlets or TV that it’s kind of more soundbites than substance. I know the time of the Sky controversy, I think the GAA might have been reluctant to come in but I suggested to them that you can very much put your full point of view here at the time.
“I would encourage them to come in. Those meetings can go on for two or three hours and from the politicians’ point of view, they can ask all the hard questions
“Of all of the work that I would have done in Dail Eireann, I would have found that the committee system was actually a great system for dealing with things.”
The ex-Mayo, Galway and Leitrim boss is a committed subscriber to GAAGO but feels that judgement should be held until a full season of the broadcasting deal, which is split between RTE and the online service, has been completed.
“I was talking to [GAA director general] Tom Ryan at the match [Connacht final] on Sunday, at the reception beforehand.
“I have the GAAGO myself and I find it good but I can see where people say that the paywall issue is a big one.
“What I said to him at the time was, ‘Let’s see it for a year and see how it works out’.
“I think it’s good value to sign up for the year. In my case, I got in early, it was only €59.
“I’d be willing to give it a year to see how it works out and you get an overall picture of the full year.
“I think it’s not made easy by the fact that the inter-county season is so condensed now and there’s so many games every weekend so they couldn’t all be on television really.”
The fact that two high octane Munster hurling games haven’t been free-to-air over the past two Saturday evenings while one-sided Munster and Connacht football finals were on Sunday last has inflamed the issue, though RTE’s Head of Sport Declan McBennett has pointed out how there is a contractual obligation to show all provincial finals live on terrestrial television.
“What he’s saying there is that if you’re mandated to show those it’s sometimes difficult to get the balance right,” said O’Mahony.
“The Clare-Limerick one, the All-Ireland champions and so on, and Cork-Tipperary as well, it was just maybe the GAA would see that as a bad bounce of the ball but at the same time it’s important that this debate is had.
“If they’re called before the committee, and it’s been suggested that they will, that gives everyone a chance to articulate both sides of the argument and maybe improvements can be made from there then.”
When it was suggested that contractual obligations around provincial football finals, which have a dwindling audience, should be relaxed to allow more appealing fixtures to be shown free-to-air, O’Mahony replied: “I’d be old school from the point of view of provincial finals.
“I managed eight teams to win provincial titles and I would value each one of them and I know the lads that I managed would value them as well, particularly I suppose Leitrim in ‘94.
“Now, after one-sided provincial finals that we’ve had at the weekend, maybe you could argue that you should go back to a seeding situation in each province where you couldn’t have a situation like you had in Connacht this year.”
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