George 
Could somebody with a subscription do the copy & paste honours?
George may not be everyone’s cup of tea but he’s still pretty decent & better than what they have. If RTÉ were to review the lead commentators across all sports they broadcast, I’d find it hard to think that the football commentator was the one that stood out & needed replacing. George has been hard done by here.
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Bloody hell, he’s 74.
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George Hamilton leaving RTÉ Sport: ‘I didn’t want to stop doing commentary, because I enjoy it still, and I still think I have a contribution to make’
As he signs off from a 40-year career at RTÉ Sport, the nation’s best-known commentator talks about his move to Premier Sports, his regrets about not working at this year’s Olympics and the future of Irish football
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George Hamilton speaking about his sporting memories
Chrissie Russell
Today at 11:57
George Hamilton is reliving his most infamous moment in football commentary, and it’s impossible not to wonder how many of the tables around us in the bustling coffee shop where we meet are covertly tuning in, familiar with both the unmistakeable voice and the scene described.
The Belfast-born commentator’s brogue is so distinctive, you’re instantly transported to that spine-tingling moment in 1990 that saw Ireland heading for the World Cup quarter-finals.
“David O’Leary steps forward and puts the ball on the spot, it’s a close up of David O’Leary and I say, ‘This kick can decide it all,’ then I shut up, and then, when the picture changes, it’s a wide shot, goal keeper waiting.”
Then he drops a bombshell. After 40 years as the voice of football on the national broadcaster, it transpires that Hamilton’s time with RTÉ Sport has come to an end.
George Hamilton. Photo: Frank McGrath
“My contract with RTÉ Sport has expired and my involvement with RTÉ now is with Lyric FM,” says Hamilton. “I was in Germany for Euro 2024 and that was my last involvement for RTÉ Sport.”
He’s not retiring. A new job is already secured with Premier Sports, his first commentating duties already allocated, covering the Manchester United Uefa Europa League fixture against Dutch side Twente on September 25.
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“I’m a bit like the footballer; the contract runs out and then you go and you get something else, and I’m very happy to have a new chapter in the whole scheme of things,” says Hamilton.
“I didn’t want to stop doing commentary, because I enjoy it still, and I still think I have a contribution to make, and I’m delighted that Premier Sports think so too.
“My involvement with RTÉ Sport hadn’t been as extensive as it once was, things had changed considerably at RTÉ Sport, and the time came to look around and see what else is there, and that’s what I’ve done.
George Hamilton with colleague Jimmy Magee
George Hamilton during the FIFA World Cup 2022 qualifiers. Photo: Ben McShane/Sportsfile
The veteran reporter revealed he hadn’t anticipated making a transfer to a new sporting channel at this stage of his career.
“I suppose when you’ve been in the one place so long, you think you’re going to be there forever, but nothing does last forever and the reality is time marches on.”
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And what a time. For 50 years, Hamilton has had a front-row seat at some of the biggest moments in sport. It was inevitable that one memoir, The Nation Holds Its Breath, released in 2021, was never going to contain the full back catalogue, so now a second volume, The Hamilton Notes, has been released.
Where The Nation Holds Its Breath focused primarily on the Jack Charlton years — and that golden moment in sports commentary — The Hamilton Notes takes the reader on a fascinating journey through not only more of those iconic moments but also lesser-known, often humorous, occasions, like the time Hamilton was drafted in last-minute to cover synchronised diving at the Greek Olympics. There’s a tantalising sense of being brought behind the scenes on what life really looked like beyond the mic — the good, the bad, and the often less than glamorous travel arrangements.
“I felt there was a lot more to tell,” says Hamilton. “And I was very lucky in that I’ve never thrown out a diary, so I’ve all these diaries that tell me where I was at any given time.”
Which is just as well, because the sheer volume of travel makes for dizzying reading; the crazy connections for a cost-effective route from Dublin to South Korea for the Olympics in 1988, navigating language barriers with taxi drivers in Bosnia and beyond, and the night flash floods that nearly carried his car away in Mexico.
There are anecdotes of trips traversing hundreds of miles every weekend to cover football and rugby fixtures the length and breadth of the UK, cancelled flights, unlikely layovers and lost luggage.
There’s also plenty that makes for envy-inducing reading — in particular some of the dining enjoyed — but it quickly becomes clear that this was a job that was all-consuming, with some seriously antisocial hours.
George Hamilton. Photo: Frank McGrath
Hamilton doesn’t tend to talk publicly about his private life but he admits that, in those early years especially, it was challenging to balance home with away. He has two daughters with his first wife, Siobhan — Ciara, born in 1985, and Emma, born in 1982, both of whom were very young when Hamilton’s international commentating career was starting to take off.
“It was a juggle,” he says. “I missed stuff, from the very beginning, like the Mexico World Cup in 1986, I was away for six weeks, and my younger daughter was not yet two. When I appeared in Dublin Airport, she made strange and cried,” he says. “It was very hard. Her elder sister was saying, ‘This is daddy! This is who you’ve been missing all the time!’ But she wasn’t yet two so she couldn’t make any sense of it.
“There was that and then, right down to the play-offs in Copenhagen, there was a significant birthday for another [family] member, and I had to miss that and do Facetime from the stadium in Copenhagen when they were all in the house having a great time.”
His face lights up when he talks about being ‘grandpa George’, both to his wife Linda’s two grandsons and his daughters’ three children — the book is dedicated to the grandkids — but Hamilton doesn’t seem given to wallowing in the negatives of any situation and what he might have missed.
“I would never say I didn’t enjoy what I was doing, or that I pined for release,” he says. “But having said that, I can’t deny I got a lot more out of the Olympics this summer watching it, rather than the intensity of actually working at it.”
His absence from this year’s Olympic commentary was something that many noticed and commented upon online, with the 74-year-old present in Paris only in a personal capacity to receive a prestigious award from the International Sports Press Association, honouring journalists who’ve covered 10 or more Olympics — Hamilton has covered 11.
He praised the RTÉ Sports team for their coverage of the event, and that brings us onto the topic of how, with both the Olympics and football, there’s frustration that many homes in the North of Ireland can’t access RTÉ Sports coverage.
“It’s money driven and all to do with rights and there’s nothing RTÉ can do about it,” he says. “But I would like to have thought that, politically, there was some kind of way that, given the special circumstances of the island of Ireland, that there could be something built into the negotiations that allowed for freedom of choice.”
Hamilton is an open and engaging interviewee, but there’s no denying that he deftly sidesteps some questions — particularly on RTÉ. He’s still at the helm of his much-loved RTÉ radio show, The Hamilton Scores, now running for 21 years, and so when asked if the door is closed on a return to RTÉ Sport, his reply is a chuckle and, “Never say never.”
George Hamilton behind the mic at RTÉ
George Hamilton in the Sportsound studio circa 1975 with deputy head of sport Joy Williams and the programme presenter Ira Milligan
It’s often remarked upon that broadcast media can be a hostile place for older women, but do men feel that same sense of being edged out past a certain age?
“There’s an element of truth in that,” says Hamilton. “But it doesn’t apply everywhere. It’s dependent on who is in charge and what their philosophy is. There are some who value experience and others…”
He talks warmly about “rounding off his involvement with the Irish national teams” with his recent stint commentating for RTÉ Sport on Irish women’s football, and the fact that there’s nothing that still niggles as an unfulfilled commentating goal.
“I’m very lucky that I don’t think there is,” he says. “I’ve been at this one way or another for 50 years, I’ve done the Ireland rugby in Paris when Brian O’Driscoll did the hat-trick, I had the great moments with the Irish football team, the Olympic gold medal with the rowers — I can’t think of anything.
“I might have said it would have been great to be at the Olympics when the Irish team was doing so well, but you don’t cry over split milk, and I ended up in Paris anyway for the award.”
Hamilton grew up on Belfast’s Cregagh Road — close to the family home of George Best, who he knew well — studying first at Methodist College and then gaining a degree in modern languages at Queen’s University Belfast, his fluency in German and French later standing him in good stead for numerous European football fixtures, and, as he tells in the book, securing him several journalistic scoops.
He’s still a familiar face in the Cregagh area today, now as a season ticket holder to watch Ulster Rugby play at Ravenhill. Fans regularly approach him, though, more often than not, it’s to ask his opinions on the round ball, not the oval.
“Generally, it’s to talk football and what do I think of the current Irish team.” And what does he say? “You want to be optimistic,” he says. “But it’s kind of hard to be optimistic, because the way the international game has developed, there are few enough opportunities for countries at our level to actually rise up, once the seeding goes down.”
He feels the money in football now has changed the spirit of the game at top level. “I foresaw, not that it took any great foresight, that once the mega money came in, everything was going to go the way of American sport and it would become entertainment,” says Hamilton.
“The League of Ireland has a renaissance going on at the moment and the view is that it’s because it’s more honest, it isn’t full of prima donnas, they’re actually people you can relate to, they haven’t got €300,000 a week, mansions here and there and six cars in the garage.”
Transport and technology might have made it far easier for sports commentary to happen today but there’s something that has been lost in the process, those friendships forged in football tunnels, the camaraderie of travelling in packs, meeting officials in airport queues and players in hotels. Those days are gone and there’s often a wistfulness to the reminisces in The Hamilton Notes. Wifi may have solved a thousand technical issues that raised their heads over the years, but progress has come at a cost.
Hamilton laughs incredulously when I ask if he’s on TikTok and, while he is on X (with a healthy 23k following), there’s no denying that his storytelling style is at odds with the confines of short-form social media.
In speech and in print, his memories meander tangentially where, one moment, he might be discussing the topography of Rome before recalling a delicious plate of bucatini all’amatriciana pasta enjoyed in one of the city’s restaurants, and the fact that it was that particular dish he ordered the night he, an RTÉ producer and the then-Ireland manager Eoin Hand drank the restaurant out of beer. It turned out Hand had been booked into a hotel in a less-than salubrious area, so he kipped in with them and, the next day, a plot was hatched to sneak Hand into a commentary booth to make his broadcast debut… the tales weave and flow like music.
The other thing people always want to ask him about is how to become a football commentator. “And it’s not something that you can say ‘do this’, because I started with a few chance encounters,” says Hamilton.
“I got opportunities that opened a series of doors for me in the 1970s, then there was the fact that I came back from London to Dublin just before Jack Charlton was appointed. If they hadn’t appointed Charlton, if they hadn’t qualified for anything, this might never have taken off. It was that synchronicity of events. I couldn’t have manufactured it. So all I ever say is, ‘Make yourself as ready as you can be and wait for the opportunity.’”
Not that he believes his own trajectory could be repeated. “Those of us who are at the stage of their careers that I’m at are often to be heard saying, ‘We saw the best of it and we had the best of it,’ because the access was there and it isn’t the same now,” says Hamilton.
“I was very fortunate to be the principal voice on football, so any time the team would have seen or heard highlights, that was me. They don’t seem to go any more for the principle commentator.”
Since there are precious few who do reach such a stage in their careers, those who do inevitably earn monikers like ‘legendary’, ‘veteran’ and even ‘national treasure’.
“National treasure, oh God, I’ve never really thought of that,” says Hamilton, draining the last of his long-gone-cold Americano. “I obviously know the impact of certain things that I’ve done, but I never get away from the fact that I’m very lucky to have been in that place.
“And it’s something I still enjoy immensely,” he says. “Which is the reason I’m carrying on doing it.”
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At least. Sure he was at the BBC in the early 80’s
Here’s George with a preview report of the 1977 Ulster Final between Armagh and Derry.
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74, You’d think the hungry cunt would have enough and let someone else have a go.
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Fierce entitlement off that lot
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Once you’ve suckled at the RTE teat, it’s very hard to let go
He came across very well on the second captains podcast
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Fact
Should never have let Jimmy magee commentate on the Italia 90 quarter final.
What were George’s biggest moments?
O Leary pen
Bonner save
Houghton header
Houghton Italy
Alan McLoughlin
Houghton v Italy
Mcateer Holland
Robbie keane Germany
Sheedy england
Quinn Holland
Robbie Brady lille
Cascarino up v england
And Ireland have gone 142 minutes in this tournament without conceding a goal.
Ohhh, Danger Here
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Yes. I did my Wumming YTS course on there.
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I loved the picture he painted of Lansdowne Road in the moments before kick off of the 2017 Play Off against the Danes.
‘The Havelock Square End a sea of red, the rest is all green’.
Iconic.
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George used to piss me off royally the way he overdid the pronunciation of Italian player names. He sounded like a fucking Dolmio ad. ANDERAYAH PIIRRLOO! FRANCHCHESCO TAUTTI!
Fuck off you cunt. You’re from Belfast.
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Was it George who started calling Danish players Mulboo, Lerboo, etc
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Martin Vathketh for Spain. I thought of was part of his charm. He was a pretentious enough little cunt. George Hamilton III. (the third) was on the credits of know your sport
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He said last night he has a linguistics degree and took great pride in establishing the correct pronunciation of names.