A confederacy of dunces

At the time of writing, it is a week since the Football Association of Ireland announced its decision to sell the rights to home international matches to Sky television. There has been an unprecedented expression of public outrage at the decision, which – if it proceeds – will deprive Irish people of the opportunity to see home games live, in the generally understood meaning of the word, unless they subscribe to Sky television, at a minimum cost of 215 Euro per annum.

It is a measure of the extent to which the FAI operate in their own bizarre little cocoon that they have been taken aback by the public anger. But they are not the only culprits in the matter. The Government and RTE must also shoulder their share of the blame for what is undoubtedly a disgraceful betrayal of Irish fans in general and Irish children in particular.

THE FAI

Most of the media reaction has been extremely critical of the FAI. There has, however, been a level of support for the suits on the basis that the deal represents ‘a good bit of business’ on the part of the association. Sky have agreed to pay them 7.5 million Euro for the rights, much more than had been offered by RTE. Sure how could they resist?

A good bit of business? Yes indeed. But only if you regard effectively disenfranchising a very significant segment of the viewing public as good business.

A good bit of business? Yes indeed. But only if you decide, that forcing children to miss Irish international matches is good business.

A good bit of business? Yes indeed. But only if you think that alienating public opinion in a way that will be almost impossible to repair is good business.

A good bit of business? Yes indeed. But only if you believe that putting your ‘friends’ in government – who are committed to giving you a far, far greater amount of money out of the public purse than Sky could ever offer – in a deeply embarrassing position is good business.

Having misjudged the likely reaction to a spectacular degree, the FAI then started to spin. Children could always watch the matches on TV3, we were told. Of course the match would be over. And of course it would be almost impossible to avoid hearing the result in advance. And of course it could never feel the same – but it would be good enough for the kids.

If that pig ignorant dismissal of the rights of children wasn’t enough, the FAI’s glib responses entirely overlooked the fact that parents would have to be willing to let their soccer-mad five year-old stay up until well after midnight to see an Irish international match in its entirety on TV3 – who, under the new agreement, can only begin to broadcast an hour after the match ends on Sky.

When it was obvious that people weren’t going to buy that heap of dung, the spin got a bit more desperate: the FAI were going to look at the option of putting outdoor screens in place, we were told – the Koreans had shown that open-air broadcasting of international games could be a marvellous occasion.

You could just picture it in the main street in Moate alright, the lads from the FAI arriving in their truck and setting up the Big Screen and all the farmers driving into town in their tractors for the occasion, the rain pouring down from the open heavens all the while. And the busy bees from the FAI doing the same thing, in about seventy towns around Ireland, all at the same time. Sure the crack would be only mighty.

Nothing they could say or do, however, could get away from the fact that it was all about money, rather than the public good. Greenbacks were all that mattered. Which is where the Government come into it – or at least they should have…

THE GOVERNMENT

Over the past couple of years, the Government has been engaged in intensive, ongoing discussions with the FAI about the national stadium, and the amount of money that would buy the association’s commitment to that particular pet project of the Taoiseach’s. Bertie committed vast sums to soccer’s ruling body, of which the association has already apparently received about 17 million Euro. The total amount of taxpayers’ money, which the Government committed to the FAI, is close to 100 million Euro.

You might speculate that someone in Govermnent should have thought to attach a condition to this subvention that the rights to home international matches would be sold only to a free-to-air broadcaster. But the truth is that the Fianna Fail/PD coalition’s broadcasting policy has been a shambles. The Broadcasting (Major Events Television Coverage) Act was introduced in 1999, the sole purpose of which was to protect important events from being taken out of the free-to-air category. But it has been dormant since – a terrible reflection on the resolve of the relevant ministers in the last government, Sile de Valera and Jim McDaid.

Having been caught unawares by the FAI and Sky, the reaction of the Government to the announcement was little short of pathetic. It was a matter for the FAI, they said. It was a done deal, they said. The legislation had been dormant because the sporting bodies wouldn’t agree to their events being listed, they said. Anyway, you couldn’t list whole tournaments, they said.

In other words, they were happy to lie down and let Sky roll over them, and over the Irish public. (Incidentally, I have no particular grouse with Sky. I just don’t believe that people should have to buy Sky Sports to watch the Irish international team play their home matches).

Anyway, it took a bunch of journalists to get the kind of reaction from Brussels that the Dublin Government itself should have been articulating. Television Without Frontiers is a landmark EU directive that was designed to deal with issues that would arise from the opening up of television markets throughout Europe. While the directive was concerned with ensuring that competition would be effectively introduced into what had been largely a State and terrestrial monopoly, one of its key provisions was to ensure that EU citizens would continue to be able to view sporting events of national importance on a free-to-air basis.

The word from the EU now was that, far from being a done deal, Sky could beforced to sell the live TV rights back to RTE or TV3 for a fair market value. Not only that: while little or nothing in the law is absolutely clear-cut, the view was that the ruling was specifically designed to allow for retrospective listing of events – and that, if the Government went this route, Sky would be forced to comply.

It emerged also that various other European countries had already specified international football matches under the same legislative framework. No other football association had – or had been allowed to – sell the rights to important home international matches to a pay television station. There was no other possible interpretation: we were the only dorks to have allowed this to happen. And now, the Government were saying too bad – it’s a done deal!

As the scale of their failure became clear, suddenly, the Minister for Sport, John O’Donoghue and the Taoiseach began to throw shapes. They called the FAI into Government buildings for a meeting. Reports suggested that, typically, they told the FAI that the problem had to be sorted out – by the association itself. Mary Harney made the point that the FAI was in receipt of a huge subvention, and that they could not expect to receive taxpayers money in this way and then force people to pay to watch international matches on television. Fair enough. One assumes, then, that the lads in the FAI were put on notice: this deal goes ahead and the money dries up. If they weren’t told that, they should have been.

Equally, the Government should have taken the bit between their teeth and told Sky, as well as the FAI, that the matches would be listed under the 1999 legislation, and that it would therefore be better to find a way forward immediately that wouldn’t involve dragging anyone through the courts.

Either way, it was an abysmal performance by Bertie and the boys from start to finish. If you could drop them before the next match, you would.

RTE

RTE is a sometimes great station that is currently in an awful mess. It is in its current predicament because that is the way that the Government likes to have it -– begging for the injection of cash that an increase in the licence fee would bring. But it is also in its current predicament because there has been an arrogant refusal on the part of RTE to make any kind of open commitment in relation to how it defines its role as a public service broadcaster.

It is quite clear that there is a need for a charter that would set out a mission statement for the national broadcaster, and that would go on to elaborate on what RTE is, what it aspires to, what its obligations and responsibilities are, what public service broadcasting it will undertake, how that can or should relate to its commercial activities and so on. Any such document would, of course, have to be open to debate and its ultimate purpose would be both to inspire people within the station and to provide a benchmark against which RTE’s overall performance could be monitored and judged.

If a charter existed, it might require that the national station would cover League of Ireland football properly as part of its remit. But ratings have become the ultimate, if not the only measure as to whether or not a programme can or should be made. The League of Ireland is not big box office, and so RTE really has shown no interest in covering the game on an ongoing basis.

In fairness to the FAI, they have a right to be irritated by the way in which they have been treated by RTE in this regard. Not only that: RTE clearly played a risky game during the negotiations for the rights to the European championship matches, offering less for the home internationals than they had paid for the World Cup qualifying campaign, despite the fact that the team is now on a high, and interest in the campaign is likely to be intense, unless things go spectacularly wrong in the opening game against Russia in Moscow. It smacks of the same arrogance with which the FAI claim they have been treated in the past.

Clearly, whatever way the negotiations were handled, someone in RTE let the game get out of control. They also failed to alert anyone who might have been in a position to put pressure on the FAI in advance. They could have gone public about the issue when it began to drag. They could have asked if the ‘Major Events’ Act was going to be activated. There are lots of ways in which they might have been able to make the FAI sweat, at least. But RTE let the FAI sign with Sky, without marshalling any kind of support for their position. That is hard to understand, to put it mildly. It’s as if they assumed that it would all fall into place for them because it always had in the past.

Which is why it is fairer to apportion the blame, than to heap it all on the FAI. It took a confederacy of dunces to get us intro this ludicrous mess.

So now, are they going to get us out of it?