Sports Organisations Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-21 ============================================================ Charlie McConalogue (FF), Donegal 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. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-21/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:59+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-21