Keith Duggan: Time to start paying more than lip-service to Irish women’s sport

RTÉ television have built a Saturday extravaganza of sport around two of the headline women’s sports events of the year: the FAI Cup final, between Peamount United and Cork City and the All-Ireland senior camogie final, between Galway and Kilkenny.

The seven-hour billing has been well promoted and will be broadcast with in-depth preview time and pitch-side coverage – the bells and whistles that are taken for granted before all major men’s events.

It feels like a statement of intent and stands in stark contrast to the bleak shambles of last Sunday afternoon which effectively ruined the All-Ireland football semi-final for the Galway women’s team and spoiled the day for the team who defeated them, Cork.

The basic details of the disastrous run of events which derailed that occasion have been well covered. But they are mind-boggling. The semi-final was fixed for Parnell Park but the pitch there was frozen and unplayable after a morning inspection.

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The GAA received a request from the LGFA to move the game to Croke Park at 10.40, which was quickly okayed. But it meant the game would now have to start half an hour earlier than the scheduled time of 1.30pm.

Because TG4 had set up in Parnell Park, the game could not be televised live as planned. RTÉ and Sky had television crews in Croke Park for the men’s All-Ireland football semi-final but it wasn’t possible to avail of those services.

Galway were en route that morning, travelling up a foggy motorway, when they were informed of the switch. Fortunately for the Cork team, they had travelled to Dublin the night before so were able to deal with the switch.

It all shone on a light on the hardscrabble realities for women playing sport in Ireland – and on the media coverage of those athletes

Worse, this was the second time the teams had been forced to change venues. The game had originally been fixed for Limerick but was moved because it clashed with a scheduled training time for the senior hurlers. But when the game started, Galway had a grand total of seven minutes to warm up. They lost the game. Both the LGFA and the GAA got it between the teeth in the days afterwards. The outrage was general – and fleeting.

Think about that sequence of events and imagine that happening before a men’s intercounty football game. It’s impossible, of course. Because it simply wouldn’t happen. If Croke Park is frozen solid on Sunday morning, the All-Ireland hurling final will be postponed. This is what should have happened a week ago.

It all shone on a light on the hardscrabble realities for women playing sport in Ireland – and on the media coverage of those athletes. Because if a team playing in a senior All-Ireland semi-final can be treated like this, then what can life be like for the teams at the bottom of the rung?

True spectatorship

There are, of course, obvious questions to be asked. How, for instance, was the game originally fixed for probably the only damn GAA stadium in the entire west of Ireland that would be needed in December? And why wasn’t the semi-final originally fixed for Croke Park? Wouldn’t it make sense to pair it with the men’s game? And to give the winning team an opportunity to get a game in there ahead of the final?

And the big, obvious question: why, in the year 2020, must the administration and organisation of men’s and women’s Gaelic games operate under separate groups? If both parties are serious about promoting the games, then surely it is time to merge and advance.

Imagine if women’s national football league and championship games were regularly fixed before men’s games? Or better still, after the men’s games so supporters who are there there to see the men’s game might decide to hang about because they want to see a game of football and find that they become engrossed. That’s how you grow a true spectatorship.

It is maybe then that girls look up and suddenly discover that Irish society doesn't give a toss about their efforts or their talent or their time

As anyone who coaches kids in sport is bound to notice, gender doesn’t matter at the start. Kids are kids and possess differing levels of athleticism and aptitude that have nothing to do with gender. Ask anyone who coaches anything; the best athlete in any group of nine- or ten-year-olds will as often as not be a girl.

The only striking difference is that boys are so blitzed with role models and influences – both local and global – that they often have a head full of images of how they are supposed to perform and behave before they have had a chance to learn their game.

Girls’ teams, generally speaking, don’t have that clutter. They just play the game. And kids are kids; they just want to be with friends, get involved and belong. They don’t think about the broader reference points – the game outside their game – until they are slightly older. It is maybe then that girls look up and suddenly discover that Irish society doesn’t give a toss about their efforts or their talent or their time. It’s then they realise that the whole system and culture is rigged to favour the boys while they make do and play . . . wherever.

If you look at the conspicuous examples of glittering successes in Irish women’s sport – Sonia O’Sullivan, Katie Taylor, the Irish hockey team – there is one common denominator: the backdrop. O’Sullivan and Taylor’s career-defining performances occurred at Olympic Games, the most glossy and expensive sports theatre in the world.

Media coverage of women's games and events needs to become habitual rather than tokenistic and more critical in tone

It’s easy for the casual fan – and the wide-eyed child – to become mesmerised by those feats. It is a lot more difficult to capture the imagination of youngsters with games or events played in dreary, empty grounds and a lone disenchanted camera-operator trying to cover the entire show.

What happened to those Galway footballers was a terrible dereliction of care. They were shamefully treated. And depressingly, women’s football is one of the better established sports. But it may inadvertently have helped to shine the spotlight on the loudening question of what sort of future Ireland can give girls who are right now starting out in their chosen sports.

The shadows

Erasing the gender conspicuity across the traditionally male oriented cultures of Gaelic games and rugby and soccer is vital. Media coverage of women’s games and events needs to become habitual rather than tokenistic and more critical in tone; just as in men’s sport, there are plenty of dull and hapless women’s games and they need to be called as so.

And there needs to be more thought, too, into what is meant by the profile of women’s sport. Do we merely mean Gaelic games and soccer and rugby and golf – the mainstream behemoths that govern the landscape of men’s sports? Or is there an opportunity to show more imagination in the elevation and profile of Ireland’s women athletes.

For it’s not just women’s sports which toil in obscurity in Ireland. If you’re a swimmer, male or female, or a boxer; if you’re chasing an Olympic spot in any of the fringe sports; if you’re a runner, then you are mostly operating in the shadows irrespective of whether you are male or female.

Again, the most exciting ball player – any sport, either gender – this country has produced in recent years is a Belfast basketball player named CJ Fulton. Just ask Kieran Donaghy. But he has never once been given the kind of platform or attention mainstream sports stars take for granted.

So today’s unbroken run of coverage on television is a rare and welcome opportunity for everyone to sit down and watch athletes that don’t get that opportunity very often either. And maybe, after an hour or so, to forget about gender and just enjoy . . . watching sport.