GAELIC GAMES:What Croke Park needs now is a presence across as wide a number of platforms as possible

FORTY-EIGHT YEARS ago today you could have caught it if you looked carefully, but by and large the 1962 World Cup final was well overshadowed in The Irish Timesby Bloomsday.

The front page that Saturday featured a large picture of Grafton Street taken in the summer of 1904, the year in which James Joyce set the wanderings of Bloom, and there was great interest in the visit of Sylvia Beach, the original publisher of Ulysses, to Dublin to mark the anniversary of Irish literature's most famous day.

That same front page made no reference to the following day’s World Cup final between Brazil and Czechoslovakia (dutifully referred to elsewhere as “dour East Europeans”).

Inside, on page three, under a headline proclaiming that Pele wouldn’t be fit to play, was a modest preview of the match, considerably shorter than the piece beside it looking forward to the “Dublin-Leix” Leinster football championship tie.

On the television page the weekend schedules are free from any programming to do with the World Cup. There is a 20-minute sports round-up on Teilifís Éireann at 9.15 in the evening, during which running time the final would have ended and the result may have been broadcast, and boxing on UTV.

On radio, the BBC Light Programme includes a puzzling three-quarters of an hour’s coverage of the World Cup final from 9.0 to 9.45, which would have encompassed the final 20 minutes or so of the match but maybe was intended to leave room for extra time.

Radio Éireann’s listings include live coverage of Dublin versus Laois from Carlow by Micheál O’Hehir. Co-incidentally, Teilifís Éireann had begun to broadcast the same year and O’Hehir, the first head of television sport, had acquired rights to live coverage of All-Ireland finals, semi-finals and Railway Cup finals.

That Monday's Irish Timescontained a full report on Dublin's narrow victory, and down the side of the same page seven paragraphs on Brazil retaining their title – neither event as important as Surrey losing but maintaining their lead in English cricket's county championship.

So by available reference points the GAA’s championships were doing quite well in competition with the World Cup. It is, however, a snap shot of a world that was about to disappear.

Four years later the World Cup attracted immense attention in Ireland. Not only was it being staged in England but it was the first tournament to have a significant broadcast profile, although it’s interesting to note this was not by any means wall-to-wall. Live coverage was restricted to England’s matches and the knockout stages.

The impact was sufficient that the momentum for the removal of the ban on foreign games is generally accepted to date from that time. It also led to the GAA dabbling in a bit of their own live coverage with that year’s Down-Donegal Ulster final, the day after the England-West Germany World Cup final going out live on both RTÉ and BBC.

Television rights policy within the GAA was guided for a long time by a fear that broadcasting would wreck live attendances. There was some substance to this. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and TV killed the Railway Cups. But it eventually made the GAA’s top fixtures stronger, although the process in each case took its time.

The Railway Cups were only consigned to dust earlier this year – and even that was done on the lingering basis of suspending them for 12 months and undertaking never to raise the subject again – whereas comprehensive live coverage of championships is only 15 years old this summer. Yet attendances have soared in that period.

Last week a GAA delegation met Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan to discuss the proposal to extend the category of matches that must be transmitted free-to-air.

In a way there wasn’t much to discuss. The GAA doesn’t want to lose control over the disposal of its broadcasting rights any more than the IRFU or FAI, but it’s clearly not as critical an issue for Croke Park.

Whereas rugby and soccer have international product to take to the market place, the GAA know they are squeezed between the lack of a truly commercial environment and the demands of the membership.

Although the arrival of TV3 as a terrestrial rights bidder has improved the former situation, there is no appetite among the grass roots for exploiting the attractions of the championships with subscription channels, no matter how lucrative that might prove to be.

The current situation in fact suits everyone. Rugby and soccer can take in what money is available from Sky but the GAA gets access to the bigger audiences on free-to-air.

There is ample coverage of soccer and rugby on terrestrial television. The big international events attract substantial viewership, but the downside for other sports is that the size of that audience depends greatly on the success of the Irish teams. Going toe-to-toe with rugby’s popularity in the past few years has been difficult with not only the national side but the provinces picking up silverware.

Soccer hasn’t posed the same problem since the 2002 World Cup, and in all likelihood rugby won’t be able to maintain the rate of success attained in the past five or six years.

It should also be remembered that football and hurling have been going through a particularly predictable phase, with two counties having won the past seven football All-Irelands and one county the last four hurling titles. In other words, the GAA has room for a bit more variety.

What Croke Park needs now is a presence across as wide a number of platforms as possible. The TV3 rights have given Gaelic games a foothold in those schedules, and wherever there is Irish sports’ programming the GAA needs to be represented.

So far it hasn't been a bad summer. Three matches, two of them televised, went to extra time on Sunday and provided good television. The Sunday Gamehighlights programme attracts a big audience and feeds into the national conversation.

The World Cup final takes place on July 11th and will get conspicuously greater media coverage than it did in 1962.

But a fortnight later the All-Ireland quarter-finals get under way. And the country will still, as usual, be watching.

• Mea culpa section:I have suffered at the hands of Munster football titles in the past couple of days, on Saturday crediting Cork with provincial under-21 titles from 2006-09 instead of 2004-07 and '09, thus stripping Kerry of their 2008 success (and subsequent All-Ireland). But while I took, I also gave – on Monday awarding the county this year's Munster title after the win over Cork at the weekend, which was only a semi-final. The final against Limerick is on July 4th.

smoran@irishtimes.com