The 42FM

The planned merger of the GAA, the Ladies Gaelic Football Association and the Camogie Association is back in the news. The next president of the GAA, newly elected, has less ambitious timelines for the project than are currently in place.

Sinéad is joined in studio by Senator Evanne Ní Chuilinn who is vice chair of the Oireachtas committee on sport and a GAA member. We talk to her about what any change to the proposed timeline could mean for the three organisations and wider society.

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RTÉ last week sold its 50% stake in GAA Plus née Go for €3 million. The news was met with a shrug, but Sinead's brow is furrowed.

With Gav on leave, she's joined by technology and media professional Steve Dempsey to dig into the deal. Was €3 million a fair price for half of a profitable, growing streaming business, or did the GAA just walk away with a goldmine?

Steve runs the numbers and builds a model showing what GAA Plus could become: a business generating €10 million in revenue and €6 million in profit within five years. They discuss why RTÉ may have been happy to trade away a headache for cash and political breathing room, and whether the GAA can now transform a broadcast app with a paywall into something closer to a super-app, folding in ticketing, merchandise and a direct line to the diaspora.

What happens to the journalism when the GAA is covering itself? And should we expect more games behind the paywall as the rights deal nears its end in 2027?

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Sinead and Gavin take a look at a new policy that seeks to enhance the country’s international reputation through sport - while the government argues that a football game against Israel should not be politicised.

Gav went along to the launch of the International Sports Diplomacy Framework on Tuesday to see what it was about, and to get answers on why the government seems to be speaking out of both sides of its mouth.

Also up for discussion is how this policy extends Ireland’s ambition to host big events, such as the Ryder Cup and NFL games, while modest local facilities in the shadow of Croke Park are under threat.

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Sinead and Gavin discuss in-depth the pressing issue of this week, and one that will likely make headlines all year.

The FAI have been placed in the unenviable position of having to navigate a path out of the crisis which began when Ireland were drawn to play Israel in the Nations League.

Some 93% of the FAI’s General Assembly have previously voted to suspend Israel from international football, yet the FAI are committed to fulfilling the fixtures.

Will the games go ahead? Where will they take place? What are the potential sanctions if Ireland boycott the fixtures?

Can Ireland call Uefa’s bluff? What is the worst they can do to Ireland, for making a moral stand against a country that has breached its own rules?

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Sinead O’Carroll dials in from northern Italy to tell Niall Kelly about all of the sporting and political action in Milano Cortina.

Several US athletes, including Amber Glenn and Hunter Hess, have spoken up against the Trump administration this week, which has led to an inevitable backlash from the US President and his Maga base. Sinead relays the atmosphere in Italy and assesses a week where Trump has been further angered at sporting occasions, his displeasure with the Bad Bunny half-time apparent to all with an internet connection. How does this bode for the rest of the Winter Olympics, and the World Cup in the summer?

Also, Irish competitors have been flying the flag with honour in Italy. But is there one winter sport in which Ireland could go from zero to powerhouse status? If so, what could it be?

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Sinead is off to northern Italy for the Winter Olympics this week. Today she tells Gav about her lifelong fascination with figure skating: how it started, how it developed and what she expects to see over the coming days in Milano Cortina.

Also, Sinead runs the rule over Ireland’s four Winter Olympians and rates their chances.

We delve into the reduced representation of 13 Russian athletes, who compete as neutrals. Is the ban fair to apolitical sportspeople from Russia - or would the presence of the Russian flag validate the Putin regime?

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French rugby player Thibaud Flament last week announced that he would not be available to play Ireland in the Six Nations owing to his and his wife’s fertility treatment. On this week’s show, Sinéad and Gavin discuss Flament’s story in the context of how the media covers matters of pregnancy, fertility and parenthood in elite sport.

They illustrate how things have moved on from the days a man would be expected to miss the birth of his child but ask if the conversation has evolved far enough, explaining how we still speak differently of fatherhood as opposed to motherhood and how this reinforces wider tropes.

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Cyclists have become a nightmare in Dublin, according to one headline-making judge last week.

And Judge James O’Donohoe is far from alone in Ireland in feeling comfortable criticising cyclists, despite the fact that 14 were killed in our roads last year, and 45 in the past five years.

This week Gav and Sinead discuss why so many people have such a negative view of cyclists, and cycling itself. Why are the misdemeanors of cyclists talked up while those of drivers in powerful vehicles are overlooked? Why was there a furore over the runaway costs of a bike shed at Leinster House, when the far more expensive car parking facilities are rarely discussed?

Is cycling seen in Ireland as an anachronism - more redolent of our rustic, poorer past and not in keeping with our modern view of ourselves? Or has cycling become part of the online battleground, with the seemingly neutral activity labelled as woke by some culture warriors?

How is the Irish attitude to cycling so different from other northern Europeans, in the Netherlands and Denmark for Scandinavia for example?

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Why is the purported biggest club in British football in such a perpetual state of chaos? Gavin and Sinead delve into the reasons United have failed to adapt to a post Alex Ferguson world, and come to the conclusion that the club needs a powerful figure to oversee the empire, even if that figure is not always reasonable.

We are living in a time of corporate committees running football clubs, with managers and head coaches relegated to the status of a replaceable cog in a wheel.

Yet Gavin argues that this approach is unsuitable to the world of football, where the most successful Premier League clubs in recent seasons still have one dominant, talented figure in charge: Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool and now Arsenal under Mikel Arteta.

United, he argues, are afraid of talent, and need to stop investing huge responsibility in head coaches, while not giving them the requisite authority to do their job - which is to lead and do what it takes for the club to thrive at the elite and of the game.

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In these uncertain times, getting even less certain by the hour, Sinead and Gavin take a look ahead to the summer’s World Cup in America and discuss how it will play out.

Most fundamentally, will it take place against a backdrop of military activity? US co-hosts Mexico and Canada have already felt the chill of Donald Trump’s threatening rhetoric, which can, as recent events show, turn to action.

Even if we are in times of peace by June, the World Cup could be beset by several issues. We discuss travel bans to fans of four competing nations and how these undermine the spirit of the competition.

Will Trump follow through on his threat to move games out of certain cities? Will ICE agents arrest fans gathering to watch games? And how will Trump seek to make the most of the global attention that will be available to him during the World Cup?

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