HistoryHub
Connecting past and present
In his observations about the Irish situation in 2012, Olli Rehn said that the principle ‘pacta sunt servanda’ had a long legal and historical tradition behind it. In this paper Patrick Healy examines the tradition to see whether it supports the European Commission’s position about the legal obligations of the Irish State.
Although the GAA hierarchy has sought to portray the deal with Sky as a success and consider the reaction of people in Britain to be ‘a vindication’, the reality is, at best, much more complex – and one might legitimately arrive at entirely the opposite conclusion.
While the relationship has undoubtedly progressed since the 1970s, a closer examination of the early period of the ‘troubles’ highlights the extent to which Northern Ireland, and the legacies of the conflict, have the potential to cause dangerous diplomatic rifts in Anglo-Irish relations.
Paul Rouse’s 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.
The purpose of this series of papers is to offer a constructive dialogue between history – understood as both ‘the past’ and ‘the discipline’ – and policy.
