Tyrone footballers to continue RTÉ boycott

Tyrone’s footballers will boycott RTÉ for the third Championship in succession this summer.

At last night’s Ulster SFC launch in Belfast, manager Mickey Harte confirmed there had been no change in the panel’s attitude to the national broadcaster.

Tyrone’s refusal to grant interviews to RTÉ stems back to a John Murray Show sketch in 2011, which the county set-up felt was insensitive to Harte and his family following the tragic death of his daughter Michaela.

RTÉ will broadcast Tyrone’s much-anticipated Ulster quarter-final clash with Donegal in Ballybofey’s MacCumhaill Park on May 26, but Harte said there had been no change in Tyrone’s stance.

Asked if their position remained the same, he said: “Yep, that’s right. No further answer required.”

Harte had called for the game in just over three weeks to be played in the bigger capacity stadium in Clones to accommodate the amount of people keen to attend it.

“I just said for the sake of the number of people who wanted to watch the game, Clones would have been the better venue but Donegal had the call on it, they were drawn out first so they had the right to look for it and obviously the Ulster Council awarded it to them.

“I’ve no complaints about that at all. I’m just saying it will be difficult for all those who want to get to the game in Ballybofey and that’s probably unfortunate but we can’t change that now.

“The idea that there is a limit on the people that can get in there makes more people want to go to it. It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?”

The Ulster Council yesterday sold 1,000 tickets for the game within 30 minutes with the game certain to be a sell-out.

Harte said he won’t use Donegal’s home advantage as an excuse should Tyrone lose but maintained the game would likely have been better served by being staged in St Tiernach’s Park.

He believes the approximate 35,000 capacity in Monaghan would have been filled by the derby.

“It’s going to have an atmosphere all of its own (in Ballybofey). It’ll be really intense and it’s good to see a ground full to the neck as they say.

“But I would like to have been in Clones with 33,000 instead of the 18,000 or whatever in Ballybofey.”