THIS COLUMN RETURNED to the Oireachtas Committee room last week, a first return since John Delaney’s Vow of Silence as the FAI’s short-lived Executive Vice-President.
Delaney said little beyond his opening statement on that occasion, whereas last week his successor as CEO Jonathan Hill indulged in exquisite understatement.
The Committee meeting’s agenda was a discussion on the future of sports broadcasting, and when it came to the League of Ireland, Hill said the ideal scenario would be to combine free-to-air games with more on a traditional sports PPV channel. He quickly conceded that “the reality is that this ideal scenario cannot always be created.”
Later in the day, TG4 Director-General Alan Esslemont sat in the seat vacated by Hill and it dawned on this column that the ideal scenario can easily be created: the LOI’s natural home is on TG4.
RTÉ reliably bridle at neglecting the league while Virgin Media have recently dipped their toe into coverage, while the LOITV streaming service – which has curiously not drawn GAAG0-level ire from rural TDs about poor oul’ fellas not being able to work HDMI cables – provides access to all games in the men’s LOI and the women’s Premier Division.
This is a far better situation than existed only a few years ago, but the streaming service is exactly that, a service: it won’t draw the floating voter, who exist in the constituency of free-to-air television, where the schedule is too unreliable to build an LOI audience. In television terms, the League of Ireland remains as George Byrne described it on RTÉ’s coverage of USA 94: a minority sport.
If the League is going to grow as a television product, it needs to annex a weekly time slot in which there will always be a live game shown. We have years of evidence that this will never happen on RTÉ, with the jury still out on whether Virgin Media will take the plunge. If they don’t, there is an obvious alternative: the League of Ireland’s natural home is on TG4.
The league and the language share what is, to indulge some LinkedinSpeak, sineirgíocht.
Both are ostensibly in the care of official bodies but have more accurately become grassroots and somewhat subversive movements, having been cast aside by Official Ireland.
In the State’s early years, the Irish language became another sacred cow for which the government believed they found a decent slaughter price. In 1927, when a Commission tasked with reviving the language recommended to the State that secondary school education should be made free to Gaeltacht regions, the government recoiled as, according to historian JJ Lee agreeing to this would have meant setting the template for funding free second-level education everywhere else in the country, too. As Lee writes, “An approach towards equality of educational opportunity was too high a price to pay for the gaelicisation of Ireland.”
And so successive governments displayed our native genius for ambiguity in paying lip service to a native langue they did not speak. In making the language compulsory, the State also made it calcified: it became mandatory at school and a necessary shibboleth for select public service advancement but successive governments could never create a society in which the language could flourish, so committed were so many in never straining beyond their own cúpla focail.
There are now signs of change in the margins, however. Although the latest Census recorded a slight drop in the number of daily Irish speakers outside of the education system last year (down by 1,835 people to 71,968 in 2022) there was an increase in the people who said they can speak Irish. Most obvious is the language’s growing cultural impact through film and television and music, about which Una Mullally has written in the Irish Times.
“Crucially, this revival is not coming from the top down, it’s emerging from the bottom up”, she writes. “This sense of emergence means it has roots, not instructions. It means it’s deep, not shallow. It means it’s open, not elitist, and loose rather than dogmatic. This coalescence is creating a cultural moment and movement that is organic.”
There is a similar movement underway in the League of Ireland, where clubs have modelled themselves as a nexus for their local community and brought people along with them. Growth is undeniable: there’s been a 29% rise in attendances since 2019.
Like the Irish language, the appearance of official approval masking financial abandonment has defined Irish football for decades. The FAI must take much responsibility for this of course, but equally, they have not had access to proper funds. As their own recent infrastructure report makes clear, Irish investment in sport is half the EU average. The same report shows that the rise in LOI attendances is about to bump up against the ceiling of ramshackle facilities.
“The time for photo opportunities is over”, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin told the Dáil last week, “and it is time for cold hard cash.”
Some cold hard cash should also go to TG4. They get half the State funding that Welsh language channel S4C get, in spite of serving a larger population. They have played a vital role in inching the Irish language in from the margins - most obviously in their part-funding of the extraordinary, Oscar-nominated An Cailín Ciúin - and they can do the same for the League of Ireland.
TG4 have a proven track record of innovation in sports broadcasting and of raising the profile of competitions: they made such a strong case for the GAA’s National Leagues that not even RTÉ could ignore it forever, and were showcasing women’s sport long before the 20×20 campaign came along to shake everyone else out of their ignorance. The GAA club season and rugby’s Celtic League are further examples of diamonds polished by TG4 whose glint then caught the eye of bigger broadcasters.
“Society, the State and the media have given the message to female athletes that their sport is second rate and the fact that, in the same way, society, the State and the media have given the message to Irish speakers that their language is second rate”, TG4 Director-General Alan Esslemont told the Dáil last week.
TG4 have already broken new ground in showing live games from the women’s Premier Division, and Esslemont says TG4 would like to expand that coverage while also moving into the men’s league, but they need more money to do so.
“This year, we could do an awful lot more with an extra €2 million, not only in sport, but in other areas”, Esslemont told the Committee.
TG4 are the sports broadcast equivalent of Brighton and Hove Albion: taking unsung competitions on a relative shoestring and making success stories of them for others. They should be given more funding, and they should work their magic on the League of Ireland.