Mr. Tom Ryan:

I thank the committee very much for this opportunity to meet with it today to share some of the GAA’s perspectives on broadcasting and the role it can play in promoting our sports. Our fundamental mission is to promote playing football and hurling, to encourage people to participate and to foster lifelong involvement that will sustain us into the next generation. Making matches available for people to watch is a key part of that not as an end in itself, but in order to create a profile for the games, to provide enjoyment to a wider audience and, of course, to generate the funds that enable us to further our core ambitions.

The GAA occupies a central role in people’s lives. We know and appreciate that and we know that this carries with it certain responsibilities. In recent years, as attendances at our matches have increased, so too has the demand for televised games. As our competition structures have evolved, so too has our approach to media rights. What the future will hold is by no means certain but it will be different. People no longer watch television in the same way. Sport is perhaps the last bastion of appointment viewing. Behaviours, tastes and attitudes will change and new technologies will emerge. The GAA’s track record is one of flexibility and innovation and we will need to adapt and evolve further just to keep pace with a rapidly changing broadcast landscape. We have done that before.

In order to consider our future, we need to reflect briefly on the trends of the recent past. In 2013, we fundamentally reappraised how we broadcast games. We bundled rights into discrete packages and assigned them, for the first time, to a wide variety of partners across all platforms. The rationale was to reduce dependence upon one partner, to introduce an element of competition, to address newly emerging demands and to prompt innovation in how the games are presented. At that time, we also launched our own broadcast medium, GAAGO. This was a joint venture we established with RTÉ in order to produce our own content and to address niche markets via streaming.

The years since have been very exciting and progressive but have not been without their challenges. Successive years have seen more games shown on TV and increasing commentary about how and where those games should be shown. The Covid pandemic caused us to again reconsider our approach. People could not go to games but the need to enjoy matches in our homes was never more acute. We recast the GAA model completely. Showing every game became the norm and streaming became the accepted way of catering for diverse demand. The sale of media rights in 2022 presented us with an opportunity to learn from that. For the first time, we assigned rights for live games to GAAGO. However, that should not have obscured the fact that the number of free-to-air games on TV is actually higher than ever before and that those games that are on GAAGO would previously either have been on Sky TV or, more probably, not shown at all.

GAAGO has existed and flourished for eight years. The new arrangements and schedule were launched some six months before a ball was even pucked. However, one date change for a game, which was beyond our control, the fantastic match that followed and some unfortunate commentary around our coverage set us on a difficult trajectory for the summer.

I will conclude and offer my apologies to the Cathaoirleach. To be positive about things, it is great that people want to see our matches. The hurling and football this summer have been fantastic. However, the expectation that every single game should be on television is just not realistic. It is not in our interest and not in our plans. We are very grateful for the support of our media partners and the watching public. We look forward to serving that audience in ever greater numbers in the years ahead.