Nemeton TV celebrates 30 years of Gaelic games innovation

By John Harrington

Last week Nemeton TV celebrated its 30^th year of broadcasting.

Based in the Gaeltacht area of An Rinn in Waterford, they’re an independent production company that has done Gaelic games some great service.

Founded in 1994 by Irial Mac Murchú, the dream was to bring live Gaelic games broadcasting to an Irish audience and it’s one they’ve realised in some style.

Through a very fruitful partnership with TG4, they were the first to bring live national football and hurling league games, club championships, and ladies football to television.

They’re also responsible for producing TG4’s iconic Laochra Gael documentary series which has captured for posterity the playing careers and background stories of some of the GAA’s greatest players.

What started as one man in a small temporary office with a microphone and one computer 30 years ago is now a thriving company that employs almost 50 full-time staff and transmits high-quality programming to audiences around the world.

GAA.ie caught up with Nemeton TV founder, Irial Mac Murchú, to chat about an incredible success story that has revolutionised Gaelic games broadcasting.

GAA.ie: Irial, when you set up Nemeton in 1994 did you dream big and hope the company would travel the jourhey it has in the 30 years since>

Irial Mac Murchú: Not at all! Anybody who tells you that they have a plan for the next 30 years is codding you! For us it was always about doing what we loved doing. We're all up to our eyes in the GAA. We've all played, managed, have children and even grandchildren now playing.

My background is as a GAA journalist and I was working for newspapers and radio and all of that and then TG4 was coming along and the RTE Independent Productions Unit was coming along and TV3 was coming along and there was no GAA worth talking about on television at all at the time.

In the early 1990s it was just the provincial finals and the All-Ireland Finals, something like that, roughly speaking, was all that was on television.

We said, 'What do we love doing?', so let's get in to sports production, and it's really from there that it all started.

GAA.ie: The nuts of bolts of setting up a sports television production company...how easy or difficult was that to do?

IM: It was pretty complex. You have to remember in the early days that TG4 didn't have any GAA rights whatsoever. There was no League, there was no Club championships, there was nothing at all on television. We had this idea and we brought it to TG4 to try to convince them there was an audience there for national league hurling and football and for ladies gaelic and camogie. We also felt there was an audience for club championship matches because the previous week there had been 13,000 at a club game in Wicklow.

So, the first job was to convince TG4 that there was an audience for it and the next step then was having a lot of conversations in the background before there was official comunication between Croke Park and TG4 themselves. My good friend, long deceased now, Joe McDonagh, was really instrumental in getting an arrangement going. I remember phone-calls between me and him at midnight and all of this kind of over and back.

Once the GAA sat down formally with TG4 the first iteration was there. We didn't have live rights at the time, it was deferred games and a Monday night highlights show.

There was a lot of resistence, believe it or not, initially. There were people looking down their noses at us and saying things like, 'who's going to watch national hurling league in the middle of winter', and 'who's going to watch club GAA action?'.

Then I remember one night in particular, it was a highlights show was all we had in the early days, and we had Ballygunner and, I think, Sixmilebridge and it was cracker, there was six or seven goals in the game. This was highlights on a Monday night and the viewing figures popped for TG4 and they were delighted.

The next thing was to move it on. When we got an opportunity to pitch for a new contract, I think it was in 1999, we had this thing, 'If you're not live, you're dead'. We felt we had to go live with these matches and TG4 were open to that.

So, in the winter/spring of '99/2000, we started broadcasting national football and hurling league games and the new era of GAA on television in Ireland was born.

GAA.ie: Nemeton weren't just innovative in terms of the idea of producing live GAA broadcasts, you've also been consistently innovative in terms of how you have packaged it.

IM: We're very proud of that in our own quiet way. We're not good at pushing ourselves out there because we do like to stay in the background. It's TG4's channel and it's their funding. It's the same with the GAA, we've been their production partners since 2011 in terms of producing the content for the big screen in Croke Park and we did the clips on GAANow for many, many years, and we've produced so much other content for the GAA such as content for the musuem. But we do stay in the background because we can't be in competition for publicity with our our clients, our funders.

But, yes, over the years...I'm not saying none of these innovations wouldn't have happened anyway, but we were the first to do a full production on the sideline when broadcasters wouldn't dream of going outside of their studios. Now it's imitated by everybody.

We were the first to use super-slomo cameras. We were told at the time you couldn't have them for GAA matches because there wouldn't be time between puck-outs. We were the first to use virtual grapics. The first to have a referee cam and the first to have a ref mic. We were the first to use the different approach of having picture in picture so as not to lose the puck-out or the replay. So, yes, there have been a lot of innovations and that's something we're proud of because it marriages the technology with production skills and the love of what we do as well.

GAA.ie: One of the jewels in the crown has surely been the production of the Laochra Gael series which has made a huge contribution to the canon of great Irish documentaries.

IM: The commissioning editor who commissioned the first series in 2001, when I went back to them in 2002 I said it would be good for another series, look what is done for the channel in terms of audience. He said, yes, but are there enough others to do a second series?

Little did he think that 23 years later we would still be there with an hour long format and higher viewing numbers than ever before and even getting nominated for a Celtic Media festival and winning an RTS award for our Laochra Gael with Sambo McNaughton.

Laochra Gael really is a social history of the GAA and some day there is a body of work to be done there. Every single interview we ever did around the series, we kept the original rushes, the parts that didn't make it into the programme. I think we have since lost 12 or 13 of the people we featured over the years.

Greats like John Wilson, Mattie McDonagh, Dermot Earley, Con Murphy, Frankie Walsh...the list goes on and on. At Frankie's funeral the person giving the graveside oration said he was honoured to have been featured in Laochra Gael, so to us that's something that says to us we are now a feature of the GAA landscape and I think that's very important.

GAA.ie: Is it a source of personal satisfaction that you have always been a local enterprise very much plugged in to your community? You were probably told you were mad to try to set up a television production company in An Rinn and yet 30 years on I'd imagine there have been generations of the same families that have worked for Nemeton?

IM: We had 150 people in a marquee for our 30th anniversary celebration last Thursday night and in that 150 there were five families and their adult children now work in the business together and I think that's something to be proud of. Again, we always have contributed so much to the local club. We are of the club. I'm a former chairperson, a former manager of the hurling team, a former selector with the football team, and so on. Tomás Mac Craith, my colleague, is the current manager of the local hurling team. There's a local joke that when you apply for a job in Nemeton you have to do a fitness test!

About two-thirds of the staff are from the local community. We are just steeped in it. The club is the most important part of the language landscape here as well because in the local club there are hundreds of players from small children right up to senior football level taking part in training sessions every week all of which are done in Irish. So there's a perfect triangle between our business, the language, and the games which is almost replicated nationally. Never has there been a better partnership between television, the language, and sport as there is between TG4, the Irish language, and the GAA because it has been a win-win for everybody.

It has been great for TG4 in terms of audience numbers, it's been great for the language, there's a whole generation now of people who are touching 40 who have never known anything but these games in Irish on television. I think the GAA is very grateful to the turning point of putting the League, the LGFA, and the club championships live on television. I think it gained a whole new audience and a whole new presence on our screens for the GAA.

GAA.ie: As you look to the future, I presume you hope Nemeton will continue to being an innovative force when it comes to broadcasting Gaelic games?

IM: Undoubtedly. Technology and production are coming closer and closer together all the time. On the technology side we're looking at how to link up different venues and different games to produce multiple games from the one venue on sunday afternoons. Or doing more remote productions of games where you might have a single camera at a League game of consequence on a Sunday, such as the last day of the League, and then trying to join them up to one viewing experience.

It's all about the connectivity. Connectivity is so expensive, and we're all the time trying to find cheaper and cheaper ways to do it because the cheaper it becomes to link all the venues then the viewer can see and the more afforable it becomes for whoever we're working with, whether that's TG4, GAAGO, RTE, or whoever.

I'm not privy to rights negotiations that go on in the background but, according to the newspapers, TG4 and the GAA are in negotiations about championship rights for next summer. Wow, wouldn't that be the pinnacle!

GAA.ie: Speaking personally for yourself, Irial, when you look where Nemeton has come from an idea 30 years ago to where it is now as both a successful enterprise and a big part of your local community, you must take a lot of pride from the journey you've travelled from there to here?

IM: I'm delighted. Ask me what the highlight of this whole thing is, and that is it. It's the community, it's the families, the people working here. There's a fantastic team here. It's not all about me. We had six people last Thursday night who have given more than 20 years unbroken service to the company.

That is absolutely tremendous. There are very few firms in this day and age who can boast that six of their senior people have spent more than 20 years with the company. Many of those people, believe it or not, are those who have adult children working in the business as well.

I'll put it to you this way, from my own point of view if I could sit down and design my ideal job that brings together the GAA coverage, business, creativity, technology, people, I couldn't write a better job description. 30 years on I still love getting up on a Monday morning.