Joe Brolly takes aim at current GAA pundits and All-Ireland TV coverage
Joe Brolly launched an attack on current GAA pundits as he took aim at RTE and GAA+ over their coverage of this year's All-Ireland Senior Football Championship.
The All-Ireland winner spoke on the homogenous nature of GAA punditry at present after his departure from RTÉ's suite of pundits in 2019.
"One of the features of the modern GAA pundit is that they all dress like boyband members now," he said on the latest episode of his Free State Podcast.
"Before the Kerry game, Paddy Andrews, the famous Dublin footballer, Cillian O'Connor from Mayo, and Marc Ó Sé, Kerry, they looked like a Take That tribute band.
"They don't make pundits like they used to, everyone agreeing with everybody else and talking about statistics."
The conversation then moved on to RTÉ's soccer coverage and pundits, and when asked on their credentials by Free State co-host Dion Fanning, Brolly replied: "Those boys they have now are catatonically boring... personality is outlawed now."
He lamented what he deemed to be an obsession with timings degrading the entertainment value of the show, wondering "Can you imagine Muhammad Ali now coming into RTÉ?
"A runner would come in and say 'Muhammad Ali's outside here', 'lock the door, Jesus, we're on a schedule here, we have to ask Cora Staunton about this clip of Mayo scoring a free in the second half, and whether or not the free should have been given, there's a very important issue here, whether X could have got a black card.'
"This sugary, cold banality, there's no resemblance to the GAA people."
Brolly left RTÉ after the 2019 All-Ireland football final after 20 years in the Sunday Game studio.
He was cut off on air during a 2021 episode of the Claire Byrne Show where Irish unification was being discussed.
He claimed that RTÉ had "censored" him during the broadcast, saying: "I was taken off air on RTE for very mild comments that I made during a discussion about the potential for Irish unity.
"I was talking about the importance of honestly assessing the past, honestly assessing for example on that occasion Gregory Campbell of the DUP and that essential honesty that was key to the peace process.
"I was actually taken off air and to the best of our knowledge, we checked this, my legal team checked all of this, no one had ever been taken off air."
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