GAA's media rights announcement was protectionism, not promotion

Thanks to events across the Atlantic this autumn, “normalising” will go down as one of the words of the year. The man who promoted it, New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick, deserves praise for providing an essential tool in describing the GUBU US Presidential election.

For most watching from afar, the sheep-like way in which Donald Trump’s preposterous behaviour has been accepted, condoned or downright ignored has been a frightening spectacle.

It has been a monumental sleepwalk but normalisation has many forms, one of which was evident in the reaction to the GAA’s media rights announcement four days ago. The demotion of Newstalk may have bossed the news cycle but let there be no doubt five more years of Sky Sports was the bigger story. Indeed, in a manner of speaking the merited attention to Newstalk’s predicament in contrast to that given to the GAA’s continuing relations with Sky was normalising in its essence.