As a beauty contest, it is no competition. In the virtuous corner, we have that much loved species the Irish soccer fan, who sings through the night, drinks till dawn, fortifies himself with few rashers, eggs and sausages and lashings of tea, and is soon entertaining mobs of foreigners in their own city with his wit, his gaiety and irrepressible ebullience.
And in the enemy-of-the-people corner, we have the Dirty Digger, Rupert Murdoch, the Mike Tyson of the media world, boo-hiss, a pantomime villain who will stop at nothing to get his way, and who, whether or not he succeeds, will probably bite your ear off anyway.
Stuck between these two corners, in the centre of the ring, is a melee of officials, sparring partners, coaches and trainers called the European Commission, the Government of Ireland, RTÉ, the IRFU, the GAA and last, but by Christ Almighty not least, the FA bloody I. But they're not the real players in this contest - they're representatives of either tax-supported statism or of semi-bumbling amateurism, and unlike the two gentlemen in their respective corners, neither puts his hand in his pocket.
Caricatures
They are the ones who count. Because no matter how much people like caricatures, this issue isn't one of Darby O'Gill versus Beelzebub. Football is expensive. The fans who travel round the world know that. So too does Rupert Murdoch. Each Sky premiership match, for example, costs over £1 million to televise, never mind the astronomic cost of the rights.
Now, first things first: the European Commission. For when I see the European Commission taking sides on anything, I embrace the opposite. No sooner does the Commission declare that Stalin was a bad man than I am commissioning a statue of Uncle Joe from my local sculptor: and if it denounces Hitler, why, I pin up maps of Poland in my study and start practising goosesteps on my lawn.
The European Commission governs a curious world in which it seems to think that the ordinary laws of commerce, of profit and loss, of buying and selling in the marketplace, can be waived by royal decree. By the use of comparable plenipotentiary laws, Malawi plans to abolish gravity and put a man in space, and Chad intends to something serious about the Sahara.
It is this simple. The laws of commerce cannot be suspended without consequence for the commercial activities concerned. However, certain people who have lived outside the laws of commerce and who are used to monopoly powers - like the Commission, the Government, RTÉ - do not understand that. They think that you can re-label something that is in essence hugely commercial as a cultural event and thereby remove it from the realm of market forces, making it free to the consumer at the point of supply.
Naturally, there's a huge market demand for this kind of re-labelling; but then there will always be a market demand for something which is being distributed free of charge, as any publican can simply discover with those magic words, "Drinks on the house".
Market value
So who gets the cheap or even free service? RTÉ 1? Network 2? TV3? Or TV4? In law, there is no basis for the Government to direct that a State-backed broadcasting organisation should be allowed a monopoly over major sporting events below their market value. For RTÉ to be guaranteed coverage of Irish soccer internationals is to give it unfair trading advantages over the competition - which does not just mean TV3 and Sky, but also BBC, UTV and Channel Four, which all compete in the same media marketplace.
The State broadcaster has had a monopoly over most major Irish sports for years; and if you want to see an IRFU or GAA or FAI official turn purple, swell up and go pop!, whisper three little letters into their ears. A clue: those letters are not IRA or ICI or SAE or UAE.
For monopolists always behave badly. That's what monopolies do. And because this monopoly was the tool of another monopoly, one we call the Government of Ireland, it was subject to another set of influences unrelated to capital assets, entrepreneurial or artistic skills. This is called political whim.
Political whim turned one tax-supported television channel which provided a poor service into two-tax supported television channels which provided a poorer service into three tax-supported television channels which provided an even poorer service still.
So wretched is this organisation that, even when given the golden opportunity by the European Commission to get the Government to designate Irish sporting events as non-commercial sporting ones, immune to the laws of the marketplace, and thereby to protect them from the laws of the marketplace, this dismal monopoly failed to act. This was heroic ineptitude, not devotion to the laws of the marketplace; but these remain notwithstanding, and are always enforceable in European courts.
Conflicting laws
So we have two conflicting sets of law: those European laws which forbid unfair trading, and the others which designate certain events as "cultural" and therefore immune to those other laws. And indeed, some events - state and religious occasions - are clearly cultural. But football, one of the major industries in the world, with an annual turnover of many billions, is, equally clearly, not.
Do I want to see Ireland play, free of charge, on my television at home? Of course I do. But we no longer live in that simple, lovely place, where we get what we want from our monopoly supplier. The marketplace is nowadays beamed into our living-room by satellite, and its rules are protected by the courts. Welcome to the world.