British scrum in an Irish market

Nothing gets the media going like a good old-fashioned grudge match between two rival teams. But this was taken to new heights recently when the Irish rugby team played England in Croke Park, a stadium in Dublin built and owned by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the organisation which promotes Irish games such as hurling and Gaelic football.

What really got the media excited was that never before had an English rugby or soccer team played in Croke Park because of the GAA’s ban on "foreign" games, now lifted following a vote by the GAA in response to renovations at the arena where these games are usually played.

History, politics and culture clashed with sport, driving sober newspaper columnists to devote acres of pages to the issue.

What had most of them fervently tapping away was the prospect of the British national anthem being played in Croke Park, the scene of an incident some 87 years previously when British soldiers entered the stadium during a Gaelic football match and opened fire, killing 14 civilians, including a young footballer.

In the end the Ireland-England rugby clash passed off peacefully and was hailed afterwards as a defining moment, as one columnist put it, "the English sang lustily to their Ma’am. The Irish stayed perfectly silent. Like rural electrification, sex and getting rich, we applauded ourselves on getting it over with."

But the episode which saw the media place troubled Irish history and a modern sporting occasion together masked the penetration of large sections of British newspapers and television stations into the Irish market.

British titles such as the Sun, the Mirror, the Sunday Times, the News of the World and the Star (jointly owned by Irish and British media groups) are well-established in the Irish market and have circulation figures which are likely to keep them there. The Mail last year began daily and Sunday editions in Ireland.

But just like for the rugby match, British titles are careful to alter their coverage when it comes to issues sensitive to an Irish audience. Gone are the days when the Mail could print articles like those in 1997 calling for sanctions to be imposed on Irish people following IRA disruption to the transport system in England. The Irish editions of British papers are especially careful to tone down their anti-European tendencies. When the Sun in 2003 hit out at French President Jacques Chirac for not supporting the war in Iraq and placed a rather unflattering picture of the French president’s head on a worm on its front page it changed the content for the Irish audience. Treatment of Northern Ireland and immigration must also be picked over to ensure Irish editions do not carry overtly British slants.

It could be argued that the British titles have entered the tabloid section of the Irish newspaper market where gaps existed and where coverage of football and television translates easily between the two countries. To a large, circumstances will probably keep British titles out of the broadsheet market for the time being. The Irish Times (daily circulation 116,100) is owned by a trust and cannot be sold while the largest selling daily, the Irish Independent (163,700) is owned by Independent News and Media, an Irish media empire which in the last few years has itself been moving into the British media market by buying the Independent and the Belfast Telegraph. The Irish Examiner (56,400) is also run by an Irish-owned media group, Thomas Crosbie Holdings, and is unlikely to sell any time soon.

But the Sunday Times is a case in point: despite a faltering start it now sells 107,000 copies and has proven that it is possible to penetrate an Irish market at the top end using a mixture of British and Irish content. The Irish Daily Mail could possibly be the paper to watch in the coming years as it has stated its intention to attract readers from the Irish Independent (which has responded by producing a tabloid edition), though at the moment seems instead to be encroaching on the Irish Sun’s market. Perhaps with a little more time, a bit more studying of the Irish market and history, it can gain a foothold further up the newspaper food chain.

In the television market, the major British channels have always been popular in Ireland but more importantly BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster owned by Rupert Murdock, now provides almost half of Irish homes with subscription television service. This gives the company enormous power to push its British channels, such as Sky One and Sky News, and could spell disaster for the domestic Irish channels, should BSkyB decide to move them from the top slots in its television listing.

Nothing gets the media going like a good old-fashioned grudge match between two rival teams. But this was taken to new heights recently when the Irish rugby team played England in Croke Park, a stadium in Dublin built and owned by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the organisation which promotes Irish games such as hurling and Gaelic football.