Sporting ecumenism a distant dream in the Ireland of 1954

Nothing beats being there.

There’s no disputing that, but if this St Patrick’s Day you don’t happen to be ‘there’, then being sunk into a sofa doesn’t sound too shabby an alternative.

Channel-changer in hand and TV surfing the Irish Sea, between the club finals at Croke Park and the Grand Slam showdown at Twickenham, there may be no better celebration of the national holiday this year than to avoid it.

To stay indoors, curtains drawn, dog muzzled and kids sedated. No disruptions. It’s a free-to-air sporting feast after all, and all made possible by the broadening of broadcasting choice.

Impressive Dublin show Kerry the scale of the task ahead

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Kilkenny get the better of the rattle and hum with Wexford

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Mayo leave Kildare staring relegation in the face

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Antrim show some spark as they see off lacklustre Offaly

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It wasn’t always that way, of course. Those not so olden times were very different. A single channel and a strict sporting diet – you got what the sole broadcaster gave you. Or, more properly, you got whatever it could accommodate or afford.

It was that way for much of the opening decades of the Irish TV experience. And before that, it was the same for the Wireless.

From the mid 1920s to the early 1960s, Radio Éireann was the only live broadcast source for Irish sport and, year in, year out, its St Patrick's Day showpiece was the inter-provincial Railways Cup finals in hurling and football.

Nothing else got a look in. Until it did – and then there was uproar.

This first significant breach of the GAA’s monopoly on St Patrick’s Day sports broadcasting came in 1954, when the national holiday threw up an unusual clash of sporting fixtures – the traditional Railway Cup finals at Croke Park coinciding with a soccer match pitting the League of Ireland against the Scottish League at nearby Dalymount Park.

Radio Éireann’s solution to a scheduling headache was to be even-handed, to make an accommodation for both. It would divide the wavelengths to allow for the broadcast overseas, via the Radio Brazzaville service, of commentaries from the hurling and soccer matches together. Home audiences, meanwhile, would enjoy coverage of both Railway Cup games from Croke Park, with reports and intermittent commentaries from Dalymount Park.

A sensible compromise?

Not so, said the GAA, aghast at the very idea of “composite broadcast”.

What Radio Éireann proposed, the GAA decided, was no more than a ‘hotch-potch of hurling-cum-soccer’ to which they had not given their prior consent. They hadn’t even been consulted about it.

Certain tension

To compound matters, the inclusion of soccer in the overseas broadcast would come at the expense of any coverage of the Railway Cup football final. It wouldn’t do.

Indeed, so incensed were the GAA hierarchy that they ramped up the rhetoric in an effort to derail the broadcaster’s plans. The word went out that they were being made a ‘mockery’ of; that they were being ‘insulted before the world’; that Radio Éireann had chosen to inexplicably break with almost three decades of established tradition. The GAA’s president, Michael V O’Donoghue, declared they would have no truck with such an “abortion of nationality” as was being proposed, even if it meant depriving the Irish abroad of access to their games.

If this reaction appears overblown, it was hardly surprising.

For all that they depended upon each other, the GAA and the state broadcaster had no shortage of form. Indeed, a certain tension was hard-wired into their relationship and it didn’t take much for it to crackle into life.

Almost 20 years previously, in the mid-1930s, the GAA had taken umbrage at Radio Éireann’s decision to begin reporting together results from different sporting events, its general secretary, Pádraig Ó Caoimh, considering it an ‘insidious method of introducing non-Gaelic pastimes to the attention of the Irish public at large’. He even went so far to contemplate whether the publicity gained by radio coverage was ‘entirely neutralised by the manner in which it is provided’.

As with this spat, the furore about the St Patrick’s Day broadcasts in 1954 was not so much about broadcasting as about control. Who had it and how it was wielded.

For the GAA, the St Patrick’s Day controversy was essentially about extending its own ‘ban’ culture (the ‘ban’ being the rule which precluded GAA members playing or watching so-called foreign games) into the broadcasting realm by making it a condition of access to their games.

For Radio Éireann, it was about holding the line on editorial independence. "We cannot let the Gaelic Athletic Association decide for us what other sports we should or should not broadcast and at what time," Maurice Gorham explained in a letter to the Croke Park authorities that found its way into the national press.

Lost out

In the end, neither side climbed down and all lost out.

The national holiday passed without any hurling commentary being broadcast to the domestic audience. And there was no commentary at all – on either the hurling or the soccer matches – made available to the Irish overseas.

None of this was considered serious enough an outcome to give pause for reflection.

On the eve of St Patrick’s Day, the GAA’s Central Council met to congratulate their president and general secretary on their unwavering insistence that the broadcast of their games should not be shared with any sport deemed ‘alien’ to Irish values.

Everywhere, indeed, the GAA presented a face of offended innocence. And not just by way of public pronouncements from its official ranks.

In a personal, handwritten letter he addressed to then taoiseach Eamon de Valera at his Blackrock home, the Limerick-based journalist and historian, Séamus Ó Ceallaigh, gave voice to his own anger and disappointment.

For nearly 30 years, Ó Ceallaigh claimed, the St Patrick’s Day broadcasts from Croke Park had served to capture ‘the atmosphere of that great nerve centre of Irish Ireland’ and he considered it ‘an insult to everything we hold dear from a national broadcasting service to attempt to force down our throats during the Croke Park relay a broadcast of a game that holds very unhappy memories of the British garrison for many people in this country. I expected better from a native government and I actually cried to think that you, as leader of the government, was a party to such a betrayal of everything we hold sacred.’

Mark Duncan is a historian and founder of the InQuest Research Group