There are several contenders for the title of “most extreme left-wing profession in Ireland”. Any list would have to include, near the top, the academics. Obviously, NGO worker has a fair claim to the title, but is undermined by the fact that I suppose we’d have to include the Irish Country Women’s Association, and they’d have little time for the aul’ socialism as a general rule. Trade Union Rep would be very near the top, but the Government generally has been able to buy those lads off – they’re more politburo than purist.
Which leaves, once you go through the list, only one set of winners: The Sports Journos.
We’ll get to the Irish Football Team in a moment, but that story is not, actually, exhibit A for the prosecution. This piece in today’s Irish Times is.
If you’re not familiar with the story, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently purchased a home in Waterford, decided to give €50,000 each to his three neighbouring hurling clubs. It is fair to say this is not a massive chunk of Zuckerberg’s wealth. It is also fair to say that €50,000 is a massive chunk of change for most clubs. And those clubs are grateful. Which Ciarán Murphy in the Irish Times just can’t get past:
“The three clubs came out and said their piece this week, and they are thankful. The sum of €50,000 is still a lot of money on the mean streets of Knockanore. They are delighted and didn’t really abase themselves too grievously while they were thanking their new neighbours for their largesse (although talk of commemorative jerseys made me dry-heave a little). But let’s not the rest of us get fooled here. This is not even back-of-the-sofa money to Zuckerberg.
He has been a malign influence on the world. He has eroded democracies and poisoned the minds of young people around the globe. Like the rest of the tech barons milling around Donald Trump’s White House, he presents an existential threat to the future of the planet”
You read that right: 1,000 or so words to say that Zuckerberg is cheap and evil, in a column officially about sports but really, as so often with the sports journos, about the writer’s own political obsessions.
Which brings me to the single biggest obsession of the Irish Sports Journo: The Irish Football Team, and its damnable refusal to obey the commands of Sports Journo Inc.
Nobody who has read an Irish newspaper in 2026 could be left in much doubt about what Sports Journo Inc wants. Deciding to abide by the FAI’s own internal vote on whether to play a game against the You-Know-Who’s (credit: La Perrins) has been variously described by sports reporters as “a black day”, “a stain”, “extraordinary”, and, of course, because Irish reporters are rarely original, “GUBU”.
For disobeying the Sports Journos and playing football with the You-Know-Whos, the FAI have been subject to an extraordinary campaign which now includes coverage that bears little resemblance to the hearing I watched. The Irish Examiner, for example, claims today that the FAI were “battered and bruised and unable to counterpunch” against politicians at the Oireachtas yesterday.
There are two explanations for that headline: Either the Sports Journo who wrote the piece wrote it before the hearing; or he is living in a fantasy cocoon where he saw an entirely different hearing than I did.
The Irish Times branch of Sports Journo Inc, meanwhile, is essentially encouraging protesters to believe that a sufficiently hostile reception for the Irish Team tonight might “make players think again” about Sunday’s match against the You-Know-Who’s.
I was talking, earlier this week, to a seasoned hack in one of the major papers, who wouldn’t always be the biggest fan of what I have to say. But even he was taken aback by the ferocity of it, the only explanation he could offer being that “it’s the first time any of these guys ever had a bit of influence and it’s gone to their heads”.
I’m not sure that’s right. I think most of it has to do with incentives, and cowardice.
Simply put: This time next year Sports Journo Inc will be writing about something other than the You-Know-Who’s and the rest of us will probably still read their takes on the next Man Utd Manager, or what Mayo lads will talk about now the curse is over. Once they’ve done their time as hysterics, the annoyance will fade, because lads still want to read about sports. You and I, dear reader, are not going to boycott them and make their lives a misery.
But the other lads will.
The best way to stay onside with the likes of the Bohemians fans and People Before Profit, simply put, is to bow to them on this one. Because unlike the rest of us, those people hold a grudge obsessively.
On one level, that’s sort of understandable. But on another, the implications are enormous. Because it’s the You-Know-Who’s this time. God only knows who or what it will be next time.
The sports journos, I submit, provide us with a useful preview of what happens when political conformity becomes the price of being left alone: people are hectored, abused, shouted at and bullied into compliance. Protested if they do not obey. Endlessly denounced in the media.
A press corps willing to go to the lengths that the Sports Journos have here is showing you something about itself.
What we’ve seen this week from the Sports Journos has a name: McCarthyism. Not, obviously, in the precise historical sense of congressional investigations and Communist blacklists, but in the broader sense that survived the man himself: the endless hounding, investigation and denunciation of people for supposed ideological heresy.
It may have begun with the footballers and the You-Know-Who’s, but it won’t end with them.
Not McCarthy. Mao. Struggle sessions.
They’ve lost the plot for sure, campaigners not journalists