Ireland's Euro 2012 matches trap RTÉ's biggest audiences as Taylor final bout only seventh

RTE VIEWER FIGURES:Ireland's presence at last year's Euro 12 soccer championships overturned the GAA's dominance of the TV viewing ratings in 2012, according to figures released by RTÉ yesterday.

Twelve months ago Gaelic games accounted for the top three most-viewed sports programmes of 2011 but the new figures show the three European soccer championship matches featuring at number one, two and four in the five most watched televised sports events. The All-Ireland finals come in at three (football) and five (drawn hurling).

Ireland’s opening match of Euro 12, against Croatia, drew 1,236,000 viewers, RTÉ’s ’s biggest audience for a sports event since the 1994 World Cup.

Yesterday’s figures appear to be at odds with last week’s issue of RTÉ’s top 20 programmes overall, which omitted Ireland’s other soccer matches and the championship final between Spain and Italy as well as the All-Ireland hurling replay.

Most watched

This is explained on the basis that the overall top 20 includes only the most-watched episode of a series and Euro 12 was regarded as such, as was the Sunday Game live broadcasts, although football and hurling were regarded as separate series.

Other anomalies come from the Late Late Toy Show being deemed separate to other editions of the chat show and the talent competition Voice of Ireland similarly considered separately from its results programme.

The biggest audience for the Olympics in Ireland was Katie Taylor’s gold medal fight on August 9th, which features in seventh place with an audience of 754,000, which rose to over a million for the period of the actual fight.

The audience for the Donegal-Mayo football final at 975,000 was slightly down on 2011’s Dublin-Kerry decider, which broke a million, but the drawn Kilkenny-Galway hurling final – which at 67.08 per cent had the highest audience share of any sports broadcast – was slightly up on the previous year’s Kilkenny-Tipperary finale.