An excellent article. Well reasoned, intelligent and incisive.

Excellent article

An expected Television audience of 800,000 but not on BBC or UTV who manage to get tickets for their competition hotline ( I wonder how much revenue that brought in?) while supporters have to pay up to £5000 on e-bay.

Any one know the story on the BBC/UTV thing. In the meantime, I'll do some digging of my own

I think the GAA are to blame here rather than BBC NI or UTV. Earlier this year the GAA tendered rights to show their games to the highest bidder. AFAIK Setanta and RTE ponied up the necessary euro and the northern broadcasters were left out in the cold. They also withdrew their rights to "magazine" programmes and End-to-End on UTV was binned as a result.

Try again...

I think the GAA are to blame here rather than BBC NI or UTV. Earlier this year the GAA tendered rights to show their games to the highest bidder. AFAIK Setanta and RTE ponied up the necessary euro and the northern broadcasters were left out in the cold. They also withdrew their rights to "magazine" programmes and End-to-End on UTV was binned as a result.

RTE is available across most of the north via cable and aeriels, and all of the north via Satellite. They bought the NI rights for the GAA, bar the Ulster championship. There was no big conspiracy.

The accent changes are a definite by-product of the shutting of the border in many areas between the early 70s and the mid 90s for example, in places like North Leitrim and West Fermanangh where there was a lot of cross border interaction pre-troubles, all roads were cut off and communities were sundered (there were no points where you could drive across the border along the 20 mile Leitrim border with NI) with the result that the North Leitrim accent has become flatter and the West Fermanagh accent more 'northern'.

Can you remember where you saw the article about accent change, Mick?