How sport can place girls and boys on the most literal level playing field

You begin to see the difference as soon as your little boy or your little girl starts school: the road in sport has already begun to fork in different directions when it comes to their sense of opportunity and self-expression and confidence.

Without a second thought, boys will commandeer teams and take ownership of the playground or the football field. It’s not done out of malice, it’s done out of the inherited belief that this is what boys do. They will play daily and play hard.

Many of the celebrated men’s ball players start out this way. The visual and audio cues are all directed at boys; on TV, on their phones or on those unforgettable days when they are brought to their first big sports occasion which, if experienced at the right age, is literally mind-blowing. A truly magical experience. For decades, sport has sold itself to the boys.

War minus the shooting, Orwell famously wrote of international sport. There is truth in that

The GAA is the biggest sporting body in the country. You don’t have to rewind too many years to the time when there was resistance, sometimes spoken, sometimes implicit, towards the idea of girls even playing Gaelic football. It took entire decades of women pioneers playing Gaelic football through abysmal conditions and casual sexism, through hostility and national indifference before things began to change.

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About 15 years ago, it became apparent that they had smashed through that glass ceiling. It was inevitable. It helped that men who were Gaelic football stars in the 1990s and 2000s became parents and many, of course, became parents to daughters. And, perhaps for the first time, they looked around and noticed the impoverishment of opportunity for their girls.

That their child had nothing like the same chance or stage or voice as their sons, that they were second class citizens. And so they began to get involved in greater numbers and those old barriers - the conservatism, the chauvinism, the resentment - disintegrated. The women's game still has light years to travel but the progression is accelerating. Last year, the best Gaelic football match of the year starred Meath and Dublin and it happened to be the women's All-Ireland final.

In an interview on these pages recently, the Ireland basketball player Claire Melia pointed out that although she is only 23 she had no sporting references growing up. Women's sport was never on television. We spoke for a while about how much it meant to the teenage girl basketball players around the country to see her Ireland women's basketball team playing live on television last year.

When Claire was growing up in Laois, she was one of three girls playing on what was notionally a boy’s team because they were a small club. As it happened, the girls were physically stronger and the best athletes and they played in the fullback, midfield and full forward positions.

Natural, unconscious equality

It was a perfect demonstration of natural, unconscious equality on the playing field. The coach had the confidence to play the girls in the star positions, the girls had the sense of belonging that made them comfortable and the boys with whom they played didn’t feel slighted.

Mixed sports experiences for children is a kind of blizzard of education because it places girls and boys on the most literal level playing field. And they soon discover that the fastest and strongest and toughest are as likely to be girls as boys and, once they become lost in the game and used to playing together, they forget about that stuff anyway.

It’s a tricky world to navigate for young people, deluged with digital distractions and uncertainties. You can read any number of papers on the crisis in modern masculinity or on how and why boys are falling behind in school. You can see any number of stories based on last year’s WHO finding that 30 per cent of women globally experience physical violence, sexual violence or both. And those statistics trickle down to our towns and villages.

You can read Ian Jack's shocking piece from 2011 on the hurtling statistics on domestic violence in Glasgow on the day of the Old Firm derby and wonder if absolutely anything has changed. You can quickly conclude that it is all a hopeless mess and not think about it.

Formative school experiences

Maybe it’s naive to believe that formative school experiences can make a difference to children when a few short years later those same boys and girls are hitting the clubs, beginning to make their way in the world and figuring out who they are.

But maybe some of those early experiences might just infiltrate the subconscious of the little boys who grow up into the men who feel compelled or entitled to become derogatory or abusive or violent to women - be it the women in their lives or women they come across on ‘random’ encounters.

War minus the shooting, Orwell famously wrote of international sport. There is truth in that. But sport is also a way to channel human aggression and competitiveness and it pushes people into the realm of mutual respect.

Speaking on Friday, after a harrowing and tragic few days in Irish society, the Taoiseach Micheál Martin said that national school teachers are the bedrock of Irish society. That’s always been the case, for better or for worse, since the foundation of the State.

Thankfully, early school has become a place of pleasure and learning. By and large, kids love going to school. And the influence of brilliant, committed primary school teachers on the boys and girls they shape is profound.

For years, many teachers have instinctively used sport as a way to educate their children on the fundamental rights of equality and respect. The importance of putting in place a formal, state-sponsored programme to use early-days sports to promote respect and equality between young boys and girls is obvious.

It might just show some young boys how to become better men - or men who know better. It won’t solve all problems and the cynical argument is that it will make no difference at all.

But the thing is, it can’t hurt.