[Tá leagan Gaeilge le fáil anseo]
If any sport can lay claim to being Ireland’s “national game” it is surely hurling, whose long tradition stretches back to Cú Chulainn. But in reality, hurling has long been a minority sport. By the latter half of the nineteenth century its prevalence had dwindled to a few loyal pockets in Galway and Tipperary, and it was only the founding of the GAA in 1884 that led to its resurrection. Michael Cusack, co-founder of the GAA, had a particular fondness for the stick-and-ball game, having been inspired by memories of the hurling played in Clare during his pre-famine childhood. He had an aisling, where, in his own words, he hurled “with the Fenians of sixteen centuries ago from Killarney to Tara”.
Over the past century-and-a-half, the GAA has since become Ireland’s most powerful cultural institution; compelling evidence of what can be achieved by dedicated amateurs who believe in the right of all to participate in the nation’s cultural endeavours. In 2018 hurling was inscribed into UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
But there are still wide swathes of the island where the sport is barely played at all. Nor is it necessarily advancing: “Hurling needs oxygen”, as Cork all-Ireland winner Dónal Óg Cusack has repeatedly said. Over the past decade, both the hurling membership of the GAA and the association’s executive have tried to boost participation in Ireland’s national game. Nowhere needs oxygen more than the five counties of Cavan, Fermanagh, Leitrim, Longford, and Louth, none of which possess more than five senior hurling clubs. In November 2023, the GAA’s Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) proposed that these counties be expelled from the National Hurling League and confined to the Lory Meagher cup, the hurling championship’s bottom rung. The CCCC estimated that almost €1m was spent annually in preparing the five county teams for intercounty competition, an amount they argued would be better spent on grassroots development within the counties.
The CCCC’s proposals were received with almost universal negativity. But their mere existence demonstrates how tenuous a grip hurling has in many areas, especially when compared to Gaelic football. No county in Ireland, not even Kilkenny – the only county that doesn’t compete in the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship – has fewer than five senior Gaelic football clubs.
While the CCCC’s proposal failed, two other successfully implemented reforms have had decisive impact in recent years. The first of these is the establishment of GAAGO, a subscription TV service co-owned by the GAA and RTÉ, which has since evolved into GAA+, solely owned by the GAA.
Following on from the GAA’s 2014 broadcast deal with Sky, which established the precedent of paywalling championship games, GAA+ provides hurling and football games on a pay-per-view basis. Cusack’s assertion that hurling needs oxygen was embedded in a broader criticism of how this service has operated, such as the pay-walling of big matches in the Munster hurling championship. His argument, echoed elsewhere in the national hurling media, is that the introduction of pay-per-view lowers the profile of the game, making it less likely that children in areas such as Cavan or Fermanagh will be inspired to pick up the hurl.
There is some truth to this “can’t see, can’t be” mantra. Seeing stars of the game excel at the highest level can inspire enthusiasm in budding players. As a youth in Kilkenny, I adored the great DJ Carey, and seeing him in person or on television made me want to hurl. I remember mimicking the celebration of Waterford’s Dan Shanahan in an under-10 club match, and as a teenager I became obsessed with pulling off a backwards handpass in a game because I had seen Joe Canning do it. But the power of visible role models depends on another more fundamental condition: that young hurlers have the possibility and the will to play in the first place.
This fundamental condition relates to the second major reform: the implementation of the so-called “split season”. What this entails is the reorganisation of the hurling calendar, so that the intercounty season runs from January to July, and the club season runs from August to the end of the year. Both reforms are interconnected. Due to the split season, there are more intercounty games happening in a shorter period of time. Television scheduling constraints compels the provision of some kind of streaming service. The criticism of GAAGO/GAA+ is therefore often linked to criticism of the split season: both changes supposedly deprive hurling of airtime, and therefore of “oxygen”.
There is undoubtedly the sense of an established tradition dying off. It had been a fixture of the GAA calendar since the post-revolutionary period that the hurling final would take place on the first Sunday of September, and the football final the third. But with the advent of the split season, August and September – hurling’s greatest months according to journalists such as Roy Curtis – are now given over exclusively to club championship. The elite intercounty senior championship has been relegated to a three-month window, where once, along with Gaelic football, it dominated the airwaves from late spring to early autumn.
There is – at least for those lucky enough to be from counties that regularly contested finals – a nostalgia for that time of jersey days, pennants, and county decorations that brightened the first few weeks of the new school term. Now, fans must be content with a championship that ends in July, resulting (so says Cusack) in a “compressed season, where there’s only eleven weekends of hurling”.
Grassroots hurling
But there are not “only eleven weekends of hurling” per year – there are eleven weekends of elite hurling. Only three per cent of active senior GAA players participate at intercounty level. An even smaller fraction take part in the Munster and Leinster championships and the Liam McCarthy, the only intercounty hurling tournaments broadcast by RTÉ. None of the other four championships, barring the final of the second tier Joe McDonagh Cup, are shown on television. This is despite the fact that 24 teams that play in them, making up the majority of intercounty hurling played in Ireland (and England).
I myself am not an intercounty player. I was briefly a member of the Derry senior hurling squad, but have spent the majority of my adult career playing exclusively for clubs. The advent of the split season has led to significant improvements in my life, replacing the chaos and uncertainty of the previous calendar with an organised and predictable routine. Prior to reform, club players might have a championship match “maybe in April, possibly two matches, but then it depended on how Kilkenny fared out in the intercounty championship when you played next,” said Kilkenny all-Ireland winner Tommy Walsh. “If you’re a club player… they’ve to train like demons in January, February, March for a game in April… then you’re told ‘listen lads, you might be playing in May, June, or July’.”
The split season has eliminated this uncertainty by setting the calendar in stone. Previously, club championships depended on a county's progress in the intercounty championship. Now, amateur players can plan their lives, book summer holidays without fear of unexpected games, and enjoy better playing conditions and a proper off-season. I have played club seasons that lasted from February to November, meaning hurling in miserable conditions with little break in between seasons. Important matches now align with better weather, and players get a three- to four-month break before pre-season. The club player can now experience “hurling’s greatest months” not as a passive viewer but as a participant.
Hurling as spectacle or activity
So what then is more likely to keep hurlers hurling? Is it the Liam McCarthy, played by only three percent of active players, or is it club hurling, which feeds players upwards to TV hurling, played by one hundred percent of hurlers? Is “oxygen” the broadening of opportunities to watch hurling on TV or the broadening of opportunities for people to actually play hurling?
The answer lies in how we conceive of the GAA itself, as it approaches a century-and-a-half of existence. For club players, who train and compete weekly, it is a lived experience. For journalists, who engage primarily through televised games, it is a content machine akin to the Premier League or NFL. TV hurling places the elite intercounty games as the “focal point of all vision and all consciousness” to borrow Guy Debord’s phrase. Hurling is no longer a living thing, but a “separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at”.
But the GAA is not a pseudo-world. It is an amateur, member-led organisation, answerable to a constituency that has a stake in the association – not just as consumers, but as active participants. Giving club hurlers their fair dues requires limiting the length of the TV hurling season. Nobody enjoys watching the elite level of hurling as much as current club players. But we are no longer willing to sacrifice our lives to facilitate its scheduling.
There are no equivalent concerns for professional sporting organisations such as the English Premier League, for which involvement in the local community only stretches as far as the operation of charitable foundations. The GAA, however, is the antithesis of professional sport. It is not a venue for profit-making, but a central component of our national culture. Our national broadcaster should also ideally be conceived of in the same way. In a perfect world, no GAA games should go behind paywalls. But if they have to – as has been accepted as an inevitability elsewhere – surely the most desirable outcome is the revenue raised going straight to the GAA rather than to Sky or another private broadcaster, as it now does in full since the GAA purchased RTÉ’s stake in GAAGO.
The reality is that journalists overestimate the importance of the media. As Paul Rouse has shown, the “exposure” gained by Sky airing games to the British public was negligible. Having myself helped establish a hurling club in a so-called weaker county, I have seen firsthand what it takes to grow the game. When early efforts to set up the club stalled, GAA HQ suggested sending local kids to existing clubs – each at least a 30 minute round trip away. But this arrangement, which operated intermittently since the 1960s, had produced a grand total of zero local hurlers. Dissatisfied with this solution, we founded a new club, which has grown steadily. Last year, we fielded a senior team for the first time. Initially dismissed by the GAA, we have now been held up as a success story.
While some of those who clamour for more televised hurling repeat the “can’t see, can’t be” mantra, the reality is that our area’s children could have watched every broadcasted game of intercounty hurling and still – were it not for the founding of the club – never have had the opportunity to play hurling. Mature trees provide oxygen, and it is from their seeds that new trees grow. New clubs make new hurlers, which eventually feeds up to intercounty hurling. The broadcasting of more games featuring Kilkenny or Cork does not create more clubs in Cavan or Leitrim. Only grassroots efforts can achieve that.
Sadly, grassroots efforts to grow the game lack any real support from those tasked with its stewardship. New clubs, like the one I helped establish, often emerge by chance—driven by individuals from hurling strongholds relocating to areas with little tradition of the sport. This is not a sustainable model. The GAA must instead fund dedicated officers, supported by government grants and membership fees, to ensure equal opportunity nationwide. If securing these funds means placing a few elite hurling matches behind paywalls, so be it.
A better model
To preserve the unique cultural legacy of Gaelic games, the focus must shift from profit-and-loss thinking to the promotion of national culture. GAA clubs are vital to Ireland’s social fabric, particularly in rural areas hit hard by economic and demographic shifts. Their impact – economic and beyond – is substantial, even if not immediately visible. Recent research carried out in British and Irish universities show that GAA investment yields a “social value return” of 16:1, a highly impressive quantity when compared to the average value of 4:1 for English sports associations. This is no isolated data point. A 2019 study found that Na Fianna CLG in Dublin generated a 15:1 return per euro invested, while a 2024 Sheffield Hallam study valued the GAA’s annual contribution to the Irish economy at nearly €3 billion.
The GAA’s solidaristic, volunteer-based model – totally at odds with the values of “TV hurling” – clearly yields huge benefits to the Irish social fabric. This raises the question of whether it should be entirely state-funded. Operating as a non-profit would enable nationwide expansion as a national-cultural priority, spreading its social value without the need for commercial viability. State-funding would prevent unsavoury, market-driven stunts such as the proposed renaming of Páirc Uí Chaoimh to SuperValu Páirc that had to be abandoned and later resurrected as SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Similarly, removing the profit motive from the national broadcaster – while ensuring proper state funding and regulation – would allow it to focus on cultural promotion, including of the GAA, eliminating the need to place major hurling games behind the GAA+ paywall.
The GAA faces two choices: surrender to what Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity,” prioritizing the fleeting gratification of TV hurling while grassroots hurling declines, or build on the progress of the split season by investing nationwide in the game. This means funding development officers in struggling counties, replicating Dublin’s successful model of the past 25 years.
The result, ironically, would be the production of better TV hurling, with traditionally weaker counties finally being able to compete seriously with the stronger ones. Newly enthused participants from the former hurling hinterlands would tune in to earlier stages, and lower levels, of the championship and league. This would be a sport truly worthy of UNESCO-protected status, an association worthy of Michael Cusack’s aisling, one built from the perspective of the dugout and not the TV studio. Only then would the national game be truly able to breathe.
Odrán de Bhaldraithe is an Irish writer, journalist, and political commentator who writes on colonialism, culture, and socialist republicanism in Ireland. His 2023 debut book, Neglect in the North of Ireland, offers a trenchant examination of how British rule has shaped systemic underinvestment in the North’s health, housing, and political infrastructure