Disappearance of Weeshie’s Terrace Talk website highlights GAA’s neglect of its history
WE did what we’ve done a hundreds if not thousands of times before. Opened the search engine, typed in a player’s name followed by the all-important suffix: Terrace Talk.
Only this time instead of finding what we were looking for, we met a dead-end. As of Wednesday morning of this week – and it may have been down for longer than that – the Terrace Talk website is no more.
It had been a treasure throve of information related to Kerry football, and it was all searchable. Every player who’s ever lined out in the green and gold at senior level, plenty more at minor, Under 20/21 and junior level, club by club, game by game, year by year.
The website had been the brainchild of the late, great Weeshie Fogarty, a natural evolution of his Radio Kerry show of the same name. A real labour of love for the Killarney man and those with whom he worked on the project with.
Few people better understood the importance of the game’s history than Weeshie, few people had a greater feel for it, an instinctive desire to catalogue it, to preserve it.
For this part of his legacy appears to have been lost – and one would hope something can be done to resurrect it sooner rather than later – is a great shame to anyone and everyone with an interest in Kerry football.
The fate of the Terrace Talk website – built, kept alive and updated by volunteers up until very recently – we think speaks to a bit of a blind-spot in the Association in that it sometimes has an almost caviller approach to its own history.
Want to know who Cork played in the 1983 All Ireland championship, don’t expect to find it on the GAA website. Instead, you’re better off logging on to Wikipedia, which again is presumably updated by volunteers much as Terrace Talk was.
We know the GAA is a built on volunteerism, but this is the sort of stuff the organisation really needs to cherish, that should be available within a few clicks on their website, that should have proper resource put into it.
As it stands we couldn’t even find a roll of honour for the All Ireland championships on the GAA’s website. There was, however, prominent lists of Presidents of the Association and of Secretaries General. Make of that what you will.
Then when we clicked on the GAA’s Centenary Archive we got a ‘404 - NOT FOUND’ message, which kind of just sums up what we’re talking about here. To be fair Croke Park have produced books down through the years with a lot of this information in it, but it really needs to be digitised.
It would be painstaking enough sort of work, and probably cost a few bob, but it’s really worth the investment. For an organisation that prides itself on its history, on its traditions, it gives scant enough regard to nuts and bolts of it.
Even at a county level, oftentimes there’s no easily accessible record of how individual competitions progressed. Who did Fossa play in the group stage in last year’s intermediate championship?
You won’t find it on the Kerry GAA website, which seems to treat every January 1 as year dot. We couldn’t even find a roll of honour for the various domestic competitions on there either. Basic stuff, but hey, there’s always Wikipedia.