History Research Collection

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Browsing History Research Collection by Type "Working Paper"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    Germany before 1914: social reform and British emulation
    (University College Dublin. School of History and Archives, 2014)
    Mulvagh, Conor 
    Casting an eye over social policy blurs the lines of Anglo-German relations before the First World War: Britain's commemoration of the First World War must avoid depicting Imperial Germany as a simplified, demonised, or monolithic enemy. To do so brings with it the danger of distorting modern perceptions of Germany as well as misrepresenting Britain's role in the Europe of a century ago.The drives for social reform in pre-war Britain and Germany underline a similarity between the two former empires that, although well serviced by scholarly literature, is being forgotten in public memory.Fears of shifts in voter sentiment are driving the British government to appear cool on the idea of Europe. The memory of the First World War is now in danger of being used in a campaign to bolster an idea of outmoded Britishness and reactionary Euro scepticism.Any attempt to advance a 'just war' hypothesis must address Britain's own imperial and colonial problems both before and after 1918.
      38
  • Publication
    The Impact of Pay-TV on Sport
    (History Hub, 2012)
    Rouse, Paul 
    On Saturday, 19 May 2012 Leinster play Ulster in the final of the Heineken Cup. Many Irish people will be unable to watch the match live on television. In 2005 Sky Sports secured exclusive rights for the live broadcast of Heineken Cup rugby matches in Ireland. These matches – involving Irish provinces competing in the European Cup rugby competition – had previously been broadcast live on RTE and had drawn large and increasing audiences. At the same time, a similar deal was concluded in England for the sale of the rights to show live cricket in that country. This paper examines what happens when sports organisations sell their broadcasting rights to pay-tv companies. It looks, in particular, at what happened to the audience viewing figures for Leinster and Munster rugby matches when the rights to show those matches moved from RTE to Sky Sports. Comparisons are then drawn with what happened when the rights to show live cricket in England were also sold to Sky. The evidence which emerges is clear: when a sport moves from free-to-air television to pay-tv there is a significant decline in viewership from all sections of the community, but especially from people from rural areas, from pensioners, from working class families, and from farmers. Essentially, pay-tv places live sports beyond the reach of certain (often disadvantaged) sections of society.
      173
  • Publication
    Sports Rights Commercialization Revisited: Sky and the GAA
    (History Hub, 2015-04-02)
    Rouse, Paul 
    On 1 April 2014 the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) announced a new 3-year broadcasting rights deal, which involved the sale of exclusive rights to certain championship matches for the first time to Sky Sports. For the week that followed a minor media storm raged around the decision. This debate was characterized – in the margins at least and depending on where you stood – as, on the one hand, the product of an hysterical over-reaction from RTÉ which deliberately generated a controversy around a run-of-the-mill decision of the sort that sporting organizations make all the time, or, on the other, an abject failure of the GAA to set out a coherent, sustainable logic to its decision to do what it had always said it would never do. As usual on these matters, the majority of people held a position somewhere in the middle, probably enjoying the spectacle until they were bored by it.
      140