Ger Loughnane, Páidí Ó Sé and Brian Cody were all featured on the first edition of Laochra Gael. Inpho / Photo Joiner
Inpho / Photo Joiner / Photo Joiner
WHO IS THE GREATEST full-forward ever?
Or the best corner-forward?
Who would you put at midfield in your all-time Gaelic football and hurling teams?
These are the kind of unanswerable questions that can spark fiery and lengthy debates among GAA fans. They also inspired a television series that is now in its 18th year.
Documentaries about GAA icons was a simple yet revolutionary concept, and it took a small production company called Nemeton to identify a place for it in the market, and project it onto the small screen.
They were called the ‘Laochra Gael people.’ Grand welcomes awaited them wherever they went as they brought a fresh form of story-telling into our national sport.
Their first series dates back to 2001.
Nemeton CEO Irial Mac Murchú was there from the inception of this famous programme at a time when the Irish television landscape was a place full of possibilities for independent production companies.
“Back in those days, at the end of the century, there was very little GAA on television,” he recalls to The42.
“That might be hard to believe in this day and age but apart from championship coverage, there was no GAA. They had just started doing live coverage of the league and clubs for TG4 but we knew that we could delve deeper into the world of GAA.
“And in looking at that, we thought about ‘what is the essence of the GAA?’ It’s the players, the characters, the games and all of that. It’s a really simple concept; let’s do a series on GAA heroes.
“I remember at the time, the local pub down the road from me was a pub full of GAA experts.
“They talked about the day’s matches and what was going to happen for the rest of the year. But it nearly always ended up in a conversation about ‘who was the greatest full-forward’ ever or the ‘greatest corner-forward’?
And when you ask that question, all it takes is a small leap of imagination to say ‘well let’s do a half-hour documentary about Pat Spillane.’
Mac Murchú had never seen a TV programme like it before, in Ireland or beyond. They had no other examples to lean on for guidance with the format or structure.
“We had no satellite television,” he remembers. We had no Netflix, nothing like that. It was two or three-channel land at the time.”
But Mac Murchú and his Nemeton associates were dialed into the GAA conversation. They were fans.
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TG4, which was established in 1998, was still a new TV channel in Ireland. They needed sports content, and Mac Murchú pitched their Laochra Gael idea to the Irish language station.
For their pilot programme, Mac Murchú, who hails from Waterford, interviewed fellow Déise man Ned Power. Power was the goalkeeper on the Waterford team who captured the 1959 All-Ireland SHC title.
After that, TG4 gave them the green light for their first series which consisted of 10 episodes. That inaugural season featured a stellar cast of GAA legends including Ger Loughnane, Brian Cody and Páidí Ó Sé.
Laochra Gael was a television sensation from day one.
“People couldn’t get enough of it,” Mac Murchú recounts of its instant popularity.
We got so many letters. Everywhere we went, we were the Laochra Gael people. It was being put out there as an accolade at funerals that a Laochra Gael had been done on them.
“We thought at first that we’d get a year or two out of it. And then maybe five years, and here we are now 18 years later and it’s still going. And it’s evolved from a half-hour series to an hour-long series.
"Some fella wrote one time that I was the tenner Kerry kept finding in their arse pocket!" 🤣 @Kerry_Official 'Star' Kieran Donaghy!🙌
“Back in those days, the postman used to have a bag of letters coming. You won’t see that now. All the postman brings now is Amazon.”
When it was first established, Laochra Gael was a half-hour show. The focus of the episodes were very much centred on the player’s achievements, and the defining moments of their careers.
For the 2010 and 2011 seasons, they reinvented the wheel and used the episodes to look back on some historic rivalries across hurling and football. Subsequently, they reverted to the original format of dedicating each episode to one GAA figure.
By 2016, the length of the shows had been extended to one hour. The sporting aspect of their lives was still at the core of the Laochra Gael programme, but more human and personal elements were also introduced.
But throughout the 18 years of filming, building a relationship of trust with the subjects has always been paramount to their approach.
As it turned out, being Gaeilgeoirs enabled them to make their interviewees feel at ease in their company.
“What we found at the beginning was people were a little bit suspicious,” Mac Murchú explains.
“They had no experience of media other than the traditional journalists who rang you on a Sunday night and filed their copy for Monday morning.
“And even post-match interviews weren’t really a thing back in those days. So we had to build up that trust.
People trusted us more because we were Irish speakers. In some way, we weren’t perceived as belonging to the big bad world of media. I know that’s funny to say now because there’s so much Irish language media now. But back then, it certainly made a difference.
“People won’t expose themselves to you for a television documentary unless they really trust you. The more we go through the years and the more characters we get to talk to, and the more programmes we do with that integrity, the easier it becomes.”
At the outset of each series, Nemeton could have up to 100 potential candidates for a Laochra Gael before settling on a shortlist.
An interview with the star at the centre of the programme kickstarts their filming process, and helps them build the episode around it. Sourcing archive footage is another step towards the final product as well as speaking to the people who played an important role in their lives.
The film crew also visit the family home to get a sense of the player’s character away from the pitch.
Last year, they worked on the series from April to October before the episodes were broadcast ready.
“They’re all brilliant people,” says Mac Murchú.
The persona on the sideline, very rarely transforms into the persona at home. You’ll be fed and you’ll be entertained and welcomed. If you’ve got GAA in your blood, you’ll get it. And if you don’t, I’m not sure you ever will.
“There’s just a way that GAA people relate to each other.”
Kilkenny camogie legends Ann and Angela Downey. Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO
Lorraine O'Sullivan / INPHO / INPHO
Kilkenny’s legendary Downey sisters Ann and Angela were the first women to be featured on Laochra Gael. They featured as a combined subject in series four. Series 9 showed an episode which looked at the history of Ladies football between 2001 and 2010.
It wasn’t until 2013 that another woman was put under the Laochra Gael spotlight, when Cork legend Juliet Murphy was allocated a spot on the show.
The lack of female representation wasn’t down to an oversight on the part of Mac Murchú or his team. There simply wasn’t enough archive material available to them.
“In recent years, we’ve gone out of our way to ensure that we’ve included football and camogie players. We had difficulties in the early years because very few of the names were recognisable, and very few of the games were filmed so we literally had no archive [footage] to make programmes.
It was very difficult to get enough material together to produce a decent documentary. If you couldn’t do a decent job and do it on similar quality to the men’s programmes, are we being fair to the people we’re featuring?
“50% of our staff are female and our producer is Sarah McCoy. It’s not always at the forefront of our minds but it’s hard to imagine today that back a short 15 years ago, how difficult it was to have enough material to make a programme on leading Irish sportswomen.”
The 18th season of Laochra Gael has just started. Kerry icon Kieran Donaghy was in the hotseat this week in a fascinating programme which reviewed his incredible rise and fall and rise again in a Kerry jersey.
Former Wexford hurler Diarmuid Lyng is up next as the Laochra Gael wheel keeps turning.
As Mac Murchú is now the CEO of Nemeton, he doesn’t get the chance to get involved in the filming process anymore. He misses being at the coalface, of course, but can reflect on the instrumental role he played in creating and nurturing a beloved GAA programme.
“I was very involved in the first four or five series. [At different stages], I produced, directed, edited and interviewed. But it was a labour of love.
“I would often ask, ‘what would get you out of bed on a Monday morning and you never got paid for it?’ It’s just something we love doing. We’re all GAA mad in Nemeton.
GAA is such a central part of the Irish psyche. I once asked Ned Power did he find anything spiritual about hurling and he said, ‘yes, of course.’
“And he said ‘it speaks to a need we have in us as Irish people.’ That’s a profound thing to say.”
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'It was put out as an accolade at funerals that a Laochra Gael had been done on them'
WHO IS THE GREATEST full-forward ever?
Or the best corner-forward?
Who would you put at midfield in your all-time Gaelic football and hurling teams?
These are the kind of unanswerable questions that can spark fiery and lengthy debates among GAA fans. They also inspired a television series that is now in its 18th year.
Documentaries about GAA icons was a simple yet revolutionary concept, and it took a small production company called Nemeton to identify a place for it in the market, and project it onto the small screen.
They were called the ‘Laochra Gael people.’ Grand welcomes awaited them wherever they went as they brought a fresh form of story-telling into our national sport.
Their first series dates back to 2001.
Nemeton CEO Irial Mac Murchú was there from the inception of this famous programme at a time when the Irish television landscape was a place full of possibilities for independent production companies.
“Back in those days, at the end of the century, there was very little GAA on television,” he recalls to The42.
“That might be hard to believe in this day and age but apart from championship coverage, there was no GAA. They had just started doing live coverage of the league and clubs for TG4 but we knew that we could delve deeper into the world of GAA.
“And in looking at that, we thought about ‘what is the essence of the GAA?’ It’s the players, the characters, the games and all of that. It’s a really simple concept; let’s do a series on GAA heroes.
“I remember at the time, the local pub down the road from me was a pub full of GAA experts.
“They talked about the day’s matches and what was going to happen for the rest of the year. But it nearly always ended up in a conversation about ‘who was the greatest full-forward’ ever or the ‘greatest corner-forward’?
Mac Murchú had never seen a TV programme like it before, in Ireland or beyond. They had no other examples to lean on for guidance with the format or structure.
“We had no satellite television,” he remembers. We had no Netflix, nothing like that. It was two or three-channel land at the time.”
But Mac Murchú and his Nemeton associates were dialed into the GAA conversation. They were fans.
TG4, which was established in 1998, was still a new TV channel in Ireland. They needed sports content, and Mac Murchú pitched their Laochra Gael idea to the Irish language station.
For their pilot programme, Mac Murchú, who hails from Waterford, interviewed fellow Déise man Ned Power. Power was the goalkeeper on the Waterford team who captured the 1959 All-Ireland SHC title.
After that, TG4 gave them the green light for their first series which consisted of 10 episodes. That inaugural season featured a stellar cast of GAA legends including Ger Loughnane, Brian Cody and Páidí Ó Sé.
Laochra Gael was a television sensation from day one.
“People couldn’t get enough of it,” Mac Murchú recounts of its instant popularity.
“We thought at first that we’d get a year or two out of it. And then maybe five years, and here we are now 18 years later and it’s still going. And it’s evolved from a half-hour series to an hour-long series.
“Back in those days, the postman used to have a bag of letters coming. You won’t see that now. All the postman brings now is Amazon.”
When it was first established, Laochra Gael was a half-hour show. The focus of the episodes were very much centred on the player’s achievements, and the defining moments of their careers.
For the 2010 and 2011 seasons, they reinvented the wheel and used the episodes to look back on some historic rivalries across hurling and football. Subsequently, they reverted to the original format of dedicating each episode to one GAA figure.
By 2016, the length of the shows had been extended to one hour. The sporting aspect of their lives was still at the core of the Laochra Gael programme, but more human and personal elements were also introduced.
But throughout the 18 years of filming, building a relationship of trust with the subjects has always been paramount to their approach.
As it turned out, being Gaeilgeoirs enabled them to make their interviewees feel at ease in their company.
“What we found at the beginning was people were a little bit suspicious,” Mac Murchú explains.
“They had no experience of media other than the traditional journalists who rang you on a Sunday night and filed their copy for Monday morning.
“And even post-match interviews weren’t really a thing back in those days. So we had to build up that trust.
“People won’t expose themselves to you for a television documentary unless they really trust you. The more we go through the years and the more characters we get to talk to, and the more programmes we do with that integrity, the easier it becomes.”
At the outset of each series, Nemeton could have up to 100 potential candidates for a Laochra Gael before settling on a shortlist.
An interview with the star at the centre of the programme kickstarts their filming process, and helps them build the episode around it. Sourcing archive footage is another step towards the final product as well as speaking to the people who played an important role in their lives.
The film crew also visit the family home to get a sense of the player’s character away from the pitch.
Last year, they worked on the series from April to October before the episodes were broadcast ready.
“They’re all brilliant people,” says Mac Murchú.
“There’s just a way that GAA people relate to each other.”
Kilkenny’s legendary Downey sisters Ann and Angela were the first women to be featured on Laochra Gael. They featured as a combined subject in series four. Series 9 showed an episode which looked at the history of Ladies football between 2001 and 2010.
It wasn’t until 2013 that another woman was put under the Laochra Gael spotlight, when Cork legend Juliet Murphy was allocated a spot on the show.
The lack of female representation wasn’t down to an oversight on the part of Mac Murchú or his team. There simply wasn’t enough archive material available to them.
“In recent years, we’ve gone out of our way to ensure that we’ve included football and camogie players. We had difficulties in the early years because very few of the names were recognisable, and very few of the games were filmed so we literally had no archive [footage] to make programmes.
“50% of our staff are female and our producer is Sarah McCoy. It’s not always at the forefront of our minds but it’s hard to imagine today that back a short 15 years ago, how difficult it was to have enough material to make a programme on leading Irish sportswomen.”
The 18th season of Laochra Gael has just started. Kerry icon Kieran Donaghy was in the hotseat this week in a fascinating programme which reviewed his incredible rise and fall and rise again in a Kerry jersey.
Former Wexford hurler Diarmuid Lyng is up next as the Laochra Gael wheel keeps turning.
As Mac Murchú is now the CEO of Nemeton, he doesn’t get the chance to get involved in the filming process anymore. He misses being at the coalface, of course, but can reflect on the instrumental role he played in creating and nurturing a beloved GAA programme.
“I was very involved in the first four or five series. [At different stages], I produced, directed, edited and interviewed. But it was a labour of love.
“I would often ask, ‘what would get you out of bed on a Monday morning and you never got paid for it?’ It’s just something we love doing. We’re all GAA mad in Nemeton.
“And he said ‘it speaks to a need we have in us as Irish people.’ That’s a profound thing to say.”
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