The man who authorised the GAA's controversial broadcasting deal with Sky TV in 2014 admits he doesn't even have access to the pay-per-view platform.

Former GAA president Liam O'Neill was appearing on TV3's The Tonight Show last night when presenter Ivan Yates put it to him that "a lot of people are complaining that it's unfair to people who can't afford the monthly premium and that it should be on terrestrial free-to-air and that a lot of the arguments about the diaspora don't add up when you look at the viewing figures."

Co-presenter Matt Cooper then pointed out to O'Neill that he was the one who signed it, but the Laois man countered "I gave the okay for it. And I supported it because Paraic Duffy and I had a discussion the previous autumn and he said Sky were involved in the previous negotiations and he asked me a straight question 'are you going to say no also?',

"I said, 'Paraic, I'm not going to negotiate with them, you and Peter McKenna are going to do that because you have greater expertise than I have' and I left it to them. What I said was 'if the honest thing to do was to go with Sky and if it's better for broadcasting and if it's a better deal for the GAA ... Because in the context of the time we had difficulty with RTE, we weren't happy with the way the games were being presented.'

O'Neill's fellow guest Tom McGurk then asked him are Sky doing a better job than RTE are doing and the response was: "Sky are doing a different job. I actually don't have Sky, Tom. I don't watch Sky so I don't know." He then went on to say he doesn't have the time to watch much television.

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