Malcolm Noonan (Green Party)
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Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit.

Mike Kennelly (Fine Gael)
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I welcome the Minister of State and thank him for coming to the House to take this matter. I tabled it in order to get the Minister with responsibility for sport to make a statement on the growing concern that top-level GAA matches are increasingly being placed behind paywalls despite the significant public funding the GAA receives from the Exchequer. This denies thousands of ordinary supporters access to our national games.

There is growing anger and frustration about the GAA's decision to put the major championship matches behind the GAA+ paywall. This weekend, Kerry will be playing Donegal in one of the biggest games of the entire summer, and supporters are being told they must pay extra to watch it. The Minster of State visited the centre of excellence in GAA headquarters in Kerry recently. He saw for himself the parade of former greats and heroes of Kerry football on that wall, and where people are going in the context of future development as well. This Saturday's match will have the biggest players in the country involved. It is the biggest clash of all in the championship so far, and to air it on GAA+ is simply not right. People accepted GAA+ initially because they were told it would help cover games that would not otherwise be shown due to scheduling clashes. Supporters understood that. They understood the need to give smaller counties and less prominent fixtures exposure. However, we have reached a point where the biggest matches in the championship are being hidden behind a paywall.

People feel deeply let down by that because the GAA is not just another sporting organisation ; it was built from the ground up by ordinary people in every parish in Ireland. It was built by volunteers standing at gates collecting tickets in the rain. It was built by coaches driving young lads and girls to training and games three nights a week. It was built by mothers and fathers washing jerseys, making sandwiches, organising fundraisers and selling raffle tickets. It was built by people mowing and lining pitches, painting dressing rooms and keeping clubs alive through sheer commitment and community spirit. Nobody did those things for profit. Gaelic games are amateur sports. People did not give up their evenings and weekends in order that one day the biggest championship games could be locked behind the paywall relating to a subscription service. That is why people feel so strongly about this. They feel the games are being taken away from the very people who built them. There is something fundamentally unfair about asking lifelong supporters, many of whom gave decades of voluntary service to the GAA, to take out another subscription just to watch their county team play in the championship.At a time when we should be doing everything possible to showcase Gaelic football and hurling stars, we are instead making them less accessible and less visible. One statement made during the week said it was like putting the family jewels in the back of the closet and hiding them away.

There is another side to this that decision makers may not fully appreciate. For many elderly people living alone, watching championship matches on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon is a huge part of their week. It helps pass lonely hours and gives them something to look forward to. The same is true for people in hospitals and nursing homes and those who can no longer travel to matches. Many are not comfortable with streaming services. Some do not have smart TVs, smartphones or laptops. Others simply cannot afford it. They are being shut out from something that has always been part of Irish summer life.

We also have to remember that the taxpayer supports the GAA substantially through the sports capital programme - I am proud that every club in Kerry has got money from it - major infrastructure funding, Sport Ireland grants and local authority investments. In 2024, the Government provided €97 million in public funding to the GAA. That is taxpayers’ money. It comes from ordinary people, who are the same people who fill the stands, keep the clubs alive and give their time freely year after year. Yet, these people are now being told they cannot watch their own national games and their own local heroes unless they pay extra, download the apps or have strong broadband. We saw this clearly over the past weekend with Tipperary versus Clare in the Munster hurling championship. RTÉ offered to show it and the GAA refused. Why refuse free access when the public already funds the association so heavily?

The Government will and should continue to support the GAA. I am calling for that because of the extraordinary role it plays in Irish life and communities across the country. However, the GAA has a responsibility to remain accessible to the people who sustain it. This coming Saturday I will be listening to the Kerry versus Donegal game. I will not be attending. I will be listening to the great Kerry radio coverage by Timmy Moynihan and Ambrose O'Donovan. I will not even attend. They are bringing games back to life again for people who cannot view them. Like Mícheál Ó hEithir and our own Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh they are bringing those games back into our sitting rooms again because that is the way it is going.

I call on the Minister for sport to engage directly with the GAA and urge it to change course as quickly as possible. I asked this ten days out last week and I am glad the Minister of State has come to the House to see if we can come to a conclusion and bring back the free-to-air channels for people to watch.

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Senator for raising this. He is bringing the capacity to advocate on behalf of his county on a sporting matter into the Oireachtas in the same way I know that he and many of his family have done on the football field in Kerry. This is an important matter and something of great interest to people across the country, particularly in both our counties with regard to the matches coming up this weekend.

The reality is that the GAA is an independent body that makes its own decisions about matters such as this. It is responsible for the management of the commercial rights to its games and competitions. We all know that a challenge for the GAA and all sporting organisations is how to strike a balance between generating revenue from such rights and ensuring as wide an audience as possible for the games. We all understand the desire of sports fans to see as many matches as possible shown on television, especially those involving their own counties. We have come a long way from the days when the great Mícheál Ó hEithir was broadcasting on television and people were gathering around one TV set to watch. That has grown to a situation where we have seen a significant increase in the number of GAA and sports games shown on television, even over the past ten or 20 years or more. As I was growing up, there were not nearly as many games shown on TV across any sport, particularly GAA, as there are today. That has generally led to an accessible situation in how people access their games, but there is a challenge for organisations as to how they balance that in the context of how much is free-to-air. There is also a balance for the Government with regard to how much we intervene in directing what should and must be available and designated free-to-air.

There are a significant number of games available free-to-air on public service broadcasters. It is important to point out that a number of Gaelic games are designated for free-to-air coverage and will not go behind a paywall. These include the All-Ireland senior inter-county football, hurling and camogie finals. The designation of major events, including sports events, is a statutory process to ensure that certain events, not just sporting events, which are of significant cultural and societal importance to Irish audiences remain available for free-to-air viewing. However, it is not intended to designate an entire competition or all of one sport's events, as I know many sports fans might want. If we had a free hand and I had a free hand and was not looking to be proportionate I would like to designate all Donegal games as free-to-air. I am sure the Senator would like to do the same with Kerry, but we have to be proportionate about where the State intervenes and where it does not in that regard. Other than those events designated for broadcast as free-to-air, the question of which sporting events are broadcast and how is primarily a matter for the sports body concerned. Where and how the matches are shown is not a matter for Government.

The Senator mentioned the Government commitment to funding the GAA and other sporting organisations. That is something we are proud to do because it provides great value in terms of the return the public gets for the wonderful opportunity to engage in sport in their local communities. I was glad that with the Minister, Deputy O'Donovan, and the Minister for public expenditure, Deputy Chambers, we secured €750,000 for the GAA in the most recent budget to develop the game of hurling across the country. That is something we look to build on and continue to support in upcoming budgets as well.

We do not have any plans to designate more events as statutorily free-to-air. There are limits on how far we can go on that. We all agree it is important that the GAA considers everything in the round and tries to make as much available free-to-air as possible but retains the capacity, as every organisation must do, to decide what games should be on television. Obviously, not every game is on TV. In the past number of years, with online streaming, many more are available through channels that would not have been there before, and they would not have been available at all previously.

There is great anticipation for the game this weekend. I am looking forward to it, following on from the great contest we had in the national league final. I hope Donegal can repeat that on this occasion and are fresh from the past three or four weeks, although I am sure Kerry will be lying in wait and have other ideas. That should mean it is a great event. It is unfortunate that we both will not be seeing it free-to-air on this occasion. I would have liked that to be the case, but this is ultimately a call for the GAA and that is appropriate. For the State to intervene in a way that makes directions as to what games are and are not shown outside of the big showcases and finals over the course of the year would be a step too far.

Malcolm Noonan (Green Party)
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I welcome Deputy Ivana Bacik and her guests to the Public Gallery. I hope they enjoy their stay.

Mike Kennelly (Fine Gael)
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I thank the Minister of State for his response. I respect everything he said about being proportionate, the GAA and values, broadcasting rights, commercial views and rights and all that. However, the one thing I did not get is that we need to start engagement with the GAA. We need to call it into the sports committee within these Houses and open this conversation up. This Government is doing its best to support the GAA across the country and so has every other government. They have kept pitches and clubhouses open and accessible to people who want to play football but then it comes to the biggest games of them all. I am not just talking about Kerry and Donegal. I know the Minister of State is a proud Donegal man. Donegal is a real rural county, like Kerry, and a lot of people cannot access that TV, and the Michael Murphys, Jason Foleys or David Cliffords of Kerry. They cannot. I will give the Minister of State one word: "volunteerism". Many moons ago, an underage game was due to take place in Finuge, near Listowel. There was only one car and two adults available They put every kid they had into that car. They were stopped going over the bridge in Listowel as they headed for Finuge six miles out the road. When he stopped them, the garda said, "Oh my God. What's going on here?" The volunteer, the great man behind that wheel, said, "Guard, I'm on my way to an underage game six miles out the road". There were legs and heads everywhere in the car. The boot was open and there were legs hanging out. The guard said to him, "How many have you?", and he said, "If I had one more, I'd have a sub." That was years ago, and the same person is being prevented from watching the game next Saturday, which is wrong. I call on the Government to bring the GAA before the relevant committee in order to start the conversation. What is happening has to be reviewed.

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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This would be a good issue for the committee to explore and something the Senator, working with the committee, would be able to do. We do not have any plans to extend the reach of Government in relation to deciding what games should and should not be on TV. We all want to see as many games as possible. We have many more now than we did a few years ago. It is challenging when a game like this, that is so looked forward to, is not shown on television. It would be a worthwhile conversation to have in relation to examining the GAA's position on this. If the committee has any proposals it wants the Government to consider, it can submit them.

Ultimately, it is about what is proportionate for the Government to be involved in and what is not. We have capacity in the State to designate certain games free to air. We have done that for Gaelic games. How far we take that is a question that has to be given strong consideration in terms of what is appropriate and what is not, bearing in mind the independence of sporting organisations, what access to games serves the public well and the capacity of independent sporting organisations to conduct their commercial and financial affairs.

Mike Kennelly (Fine Gael)
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It was never about profit, though.

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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It is fair to consider where the balance lies, and it is open to the Senator to engage with the sport committee on that. In the meantime, I know we will both be-----

Mike Kennelly (Fine Gael)
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Best of luck to Kerry. The Minister of State did not mention that.

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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-----looking forward to the contest this weekend.