Everything changes. In a few weeks, it will be 100 years since the first radio commentary of a hurling match, which was also the first live radio broadcast of a field sport anywhere in Europe. It was an All-Ireland semi-final between Galway and Kilkenny, facing off in Croke Park on August 29th, 1926. The broadcaster was 2RN, then a fledgling wireless operation, later to morph into RTÉ.
A hundred years. When we all file into Jones’s Road on Sunday, the media coverage of the All-Ireland hurling final will be a paint explosion. Live television from not one but two national broadcasters, RTÉ and the BBC. Local radio, national radio, internet radio. Newspapers, websites, podcasts. Socials, videos, shorts. Content from here to eternity.
Mark Forde will be on site from early morning. A 21-year-old videographer from Offaly, he works for the GAA’s communications department. If you consume your Gaelic games online you almost certainly know his work, whether you know you know it or not.
Forde was responsible for the jaw-dropping footage of Kerry player Keith Evans changing direction in midstream to block Tyrone’s Michael McKernan. The aerial view of Darragh McCarthy’s penalty in last year’s final was his too, almost a million views and counting. He glued himself to Kobe McDonald and Jordan Flynn as they hugged their mother after Mayo’s win over Louth last weekend and it has passed the 1.5 million views mark already. A new day.
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“My first big game was the 2024 All-Ireland between Clare and Cork,” Forde says. “And I didn’t know Tony Kelly scored a goal the way he did, flicking it up on the hurl, until the morning after when I was looking through footage. I was going through it and realised I’m after getting this lad scoring a wonder goal.
“You nearly forget about things that are happening. Your mind gets caught up in it all. Last Sunday, I was down where David Clifford scored his goal on the rebound from the penalty. But I had no idea what he had done, whether it was a goal or a point or what it was. I was just following him and making sure I got him celebrating into the Hill.”
In that, at least, we can say that some things stay the same. “I remember very little about the first game,” wrote PD Mehigan of that first radio broadcast in August 1926. “But the records say that Kilkenny won by 6 goals and 2 points to 5 goals and 1 point.”
Mehigan was the commentator that day as hurling stepped into its brave new world. He was one of the most famous journalists in Ireland at the time, and certainly the best known GAA observer. He had hurled to a high level – he remains one of the only players ever to feature in All-Ireland finals for two different counties, for London in 1902 and his native Cork in 1905. He was a national champion in the hop, step and jump as well as being a top-class high-jumper, sprinter, road-bowler and step-dancer.
But in time, he became known far and wide under the pseudonyms Carbery and Pat O. As Carbery, he wrote about sport in the Cork Weekly Examiner. As Pat O, he covered Gaelic games and coursing in The Irish Times.
When he was press-ganged into doing this radio gig, Mehigan didn’t really have the first idea what it was going to involve. He was prevailed upon to do it by the minister for posts and telegraphs of the time, PS O’Hegarty. The novelty appealed to him, the idea of being a pioneer in the field even more so.
“I was at Croke Park half an hour before the match when the day came,” Mehigan later wrote. “I was introduced to the engineer-in-chief. I inspected all the contraptions and wires and earphones in the office underneath the Hogan Stand. A cable led up to a corner of the press stand.
“Then a big square mahogany box with wires and screws and gadgets galore was set out and, when the time came, I was asked to sit beside the box. A leather contraption was put around my neck with a yellow brass tube in front into which I was told to speak. It was all new to me; I had no voice test whatsoever. I just had my teams on a slip of paper in my hand.
“The mysterious signal came that I was ‘on the air’ and the engineer nodded at me to ‘fire away.’ Without more ado I ‘fired away’ and found that I could spout freely enough, particularly as soon as the game, which I was so familiar with, started … I got a great kick out of it, and was glad to help spread the light about the loved game of my boyhood.”
True then, true now. Forde was a Junior Cert student during Covid, as bored and directionless as any 15-year-old in the land. For something to be at, he started tricking about with soccer and basketball highlights, sticking a soundtrack behind them and setting up a TikTok account. Out of nowhere, he started getting views upwards of 60,000 for them.
Before he was out of secondary school, Forde had already started diving headlong into seeing what could be done on the GAA front. He went to Offaly v Cavan in the 2023 National League and took some footage. Went to a few more and took some more. Eventually the Offaly county board asked him to get some clips at the Leinster Championship opener that summer. The footage did well online and he was away.
Much like Mehigan in 1926, Forde didn’t really have much of a roadmap to follow. There has always been a vague presumption that an audience exists out there in the ether for good GAA videos; finding that audience often feels like a roulette spin. What makes a hit? How do you cut through the relentless internet babel?
Partly it’s luck, partly it’s timing. Forde happened to get into it at exactly the time that a crowd of young Offaly hurlers were starting to surf their own viral wave. He would go to games on the weekend and make videos that had gathered such a following that his teachers would put them up on the whiteboard on Monday morning.
“I didn’t go to the All-Ireland under-20 final in 2023 because I had English Paper One the following Wednesday. I knew that if I had gone to it, I would have spent the whole of Monday refreshing Twitter to see how many likes my videos had got. But in 2024, I went to all their games and they obviously won the final in Nowlan Park and I got great footage. The Leinster Council got on to me that year to do some stuff with them and it went from there.”
The years fall down, the games endure. A century ago, it was a big mahogany box with a brass horn and cables; today, it’s a top-of-the-line camera slowing the action down to 10 per cent speed. After landing into the GAA on an internship, Forde and his videos are finding new audiences, new platforms, new places. The GAA has never been so well covered, nor its history as deeply chronicled, as it is today.
But that was true in 1926 too. WhenMehigan was dragooned into doing that first commentary, he was a civil servant who did a bit of sport on the weekends. He gave it all up to become a full-time journalist in 1934 and, writing as Pat O, he was the first Gaelic games correspondent The Irish Times ever had. Mehigan did the job until the 1960s, when he was succeeded in the role by another west Cork man, Paddy Downey.
In 1994 Downey was, in turn, followed into the role by Seán Moran. This weekend will be Seán’s last time working at an All-Ireland hurling final before his retirement after the football next Sunday. A chain linking back a century, a wheel that keeps turning through the decades.
All the time finding new ways to spread the light about the loved game of our boyhoods.
