Sport Ireland Women In Sport

The challenges facing women and girls in sport have a long history and many interventions to address these challenges have occurred over the years. It is well documented that these challenges no longer simply apply to female’s active participation in sport and physical activity but through all aspects of the sporting landscape, i.e. coaching, officiating, leadership, governance and visibility. Though time has seen improvements naturally, Sport Ireland financial support and dedicated women in sport programmes developed as a result have had positive impacts which are explored in this paper.Using information gathered through the work of Sport Ireland, its databases, commissioned reports, dedicated policies and via reports from National Governing Bodies and Local Sports Partnerships, this paper provides a more detailed insight into the history of the Sport Ireland Women in Sport programme as well as other areas that impact women and girls in sport. It tracks the evolution of the programme since the inception of funding in 2005 to how it is managed today, as well as outlining some of Sport Ireland’s current Women in Sport (WiS) projects. In order to give a full overview, information is also contained on the history of funding allocated to female High Performance athletes in Ireland. Since the establishment of funding in 2005, the WiS programme set out to, and has successfully, reduced the gap in sports participation levels between men and women. It has now grown to much more than a participation programme with the launch of a policy providing strategic direction to ensure women have equal opportunity across all areas of sport. Now the same attention and commitment is shifting to coaching, officiating, leadership, governance and visibility. The availability of funding for women in sport is an important feature of the Sport Ireland Women in Sport programme. With over €22m awarded to date, NGBs, LSPs and women and girls in society will continue to benefit from monetary grants received. While it is acknowledged that there is a lot more to do to ensure parity amongst males and females in the sporting landscape, it is the view that the work of Sport Ireland through its WiS programme continues to benefit society and is making grounds in areas where inequality, might still occur.

Challenging the nice girl

Louise Nealon is a writer from county Kildare. She plays corner back for her local camogie club, Cappagh GAA. This piece based on a presentation given at a conference entitled, Sidelines, Touchlines and Hemlines: Irish Women in Sport, in Dundalk County Museum on February 2020.

Irish Gymnasts on Tour: The Women’s League and Women’s Exercise in 1940s Ireland

In 1949 the Irish branch of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty travelled to Stockholm, Sweden to take part in the second annual Lingiad Festival. Created the previous decade to celebrate the gymnastic system of Per Henrik Ling established in the early nineteenth-century, the Festival was a multisporting cultural event open to groups from around the world. One such group was the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. Founded in London in 1930 by the Irish-born Mary Bagot Stack, the League marked the decade’s most expansive form of exercise for women. Owing to the League’s Irish connection, the first League branch came to Belfast in 1930 and was followed by a Dublin branch some years later. Open to women across the life cycle, the League was targeted at both the working woman and the stay-at-home mother. Where previous studies have examined the creation of the League in Ireland, this piece focuses on the League’s appearance at the 1949 Lingiad. Despite numerous appeals for government funding, the League was forced to raise its own funds for the trip, a point which rankled many journalists both before and after the tournament. There was an inherent tension in the League’s involvement. On the one hand, it offered new opportunities for female exercise and provided a fillip for further engagement. That withstanding, the ongoing difficulties experienced by the League in actually making it to Lingiad highlighted the secondary, and often forgotten, nature of women’s exercise in Ireland at this time. Using memoirs, film and newspaper articles, the piece positions the League’s Lingiad trip as symbolic of both the advances and restrictions inherent in women’s exercise in mid twentieth-century Ireland.

Female Surfers Riding the Crest of a ‘New Wave’ of Irish National Identity

With surfing debuting at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics (postponed from summer 2020 due to the COVID 19 global pandemic) it is timely to consider surfing and the national identifications women in Ireland may have with this sport. As Lee Bush states, ‘with so little scholarship on surfing women, descriptive studies are needed as a foundation for launching future interpretive and critical studies.’[1] Twelve women who surf in Ireland spoke about the links their surfing may or may not have with their national identity. Previous academic inquiry on links between national identity and sport on the island of Ireland has almost exclusively focused on men’s experiences of team sports and issues of ‘Irishness’.[2] ‘Irishness’ is globally recognised and stereotypically linked to traditional and indigenous Irish sports such as Gaelic football and a range of other cultural activities. Research into women’s sport participation has largely been restricted to the study of soccer in the Republic of Ireland,[3] and gendered evaluations of various lifestyle and health surveys.[4] Katie Liston, a key researcher in sport and gender relations in Ireland, highlights that ‘there seems to be an increasing diversity in the kinds of activities in which people participate in’,[5] and that there is a shift towards ‘lifestyle’ activities for adults as diversity increases in young people’s participation in sports and leisure activities. Against the backdrop of Liston’s work, this article delves deeper into data collected as part of a wider research project, discussing whether or not women who surf in Ireland do so as part of a process designed to construct and reflect their national identities related to this arguably ‘postmodern’[6] ‘lifestyle sport’,[7] in which Ireland will be represented on the Olympic stage for the first time in 2021. [1] Lee Bush, ‘Creating Our Own Lineup: Identities and Shared Cultural Norms of Surfing Women in a U.S. East Coast Community’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 45, no. 3 (2016): 290–318. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0891241614556346, 262. [2] See the work of Alan Bairner, John Sugden, David Hassan and Mike Cronin for a broad range of work in this area. [3] See for example Katie Liston, ‘Women's Soccer in the Republic of Ireland: Some Preliminary Sociological Comments’, Soccer & Society 7, no. 2 (2006b): 364 – 384. Also see Ann Bourke, ‘Women’s Soccer in the Republic of Ireland: Past Events and Future Prospects’, in Soccer, Women, Sexual Liberation: Kicking Off a New Era ed. Fan Hong and J.A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 2004): 162–82. [4] Katie Liston, ‘A Question of Sport’ in Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map ed. Sara O'Sullivan (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), 159-180. [5] Liston, ‘A Question of Sport’, 161. [6] The idea of lifestyle sport as postmodern sport is discussed in Belinda Wheaton, ed., Understanding Lifestyle Sports: Consumption, Identity and Difference (London: Routledge, 2004). Also see: Lincoln Allison, Amateurism in Sport: An Analysis and a Defence (London: Frank Cass, 2001); R. Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving Sport: Alternatives to Formal Sport’ in Handbook of Sports Studies ed. Jay Coakley and Eric Dunning (London: Sage, 2000), 504-519. [7] The term is used by two leading researchers in the field. See Wheaton, Understanding Lifestyle; Rinehart, ‘Emerging Arriving’.

Íde Bean Uí Shé, Cork Camogie’s Feminist Influencer

This study examines the contribution made by Íde Bean Uí Shé to the game of camogie, particularly in her native county of Cork. Camogie is a team game, devised by female members of the Gaelic League in 1904 who wished to participate in fields sports in a manner similar to their male associates. They devised a game that was comparable to the ancient male game of hurling. Íde Bean Uí Shé became an officer of the Cork County Camogie Board in 1940, and chairperson of the Board in 1943. She was frustrated by the number of players who ceased their involvement with camogie when they married. She was also of the opinion that the involvement of males as administrators of camogie affairs, was a barrier to the continued involvement of females after they retired from playing. As chairperson, Íde Bean Uí Shé insisted that the officership of the Cork County Camogie Board should be all female. She withdrew the Cork team from competing in the All-Ireland Camogie Championship on the principle that there should be no male camogie administrators at the national level. She held Cork out of the competition for eight years. During that time, she re-organised Cork camogie competitions, helped the Board to develop its finances, encouraged the development of second-level schools’ competitions and oversaw rapid growth in the number of affiliated clubs. She stepped down as chairperson in 1950 and was made Board President for life. Soon after she stepped down as chairperson, Cork inevitably returned to intercounty camogie competition. While some of her more ambitious aims, such as a dedicated venue for playing camogie, were not achieved during her lifetime, Íde Bean Uí Shé remained a committed supporter of the role of women in camogie and, by extension, society, until her death in 1986. This study draws on the published histories of the National Camogie Association and the Cork County Camogie Board as well as the coverage of camogie affairs in newspapers of the time. A number of interviews were also conducted with individuals who worked in camogie administration with Íde Bean Uí Shé. The study reveals the tale of a woman who believed in, and campaigned for, the rights of women to participate in sport, in this case, camogie, on the playing field and in the boardroom.

Honour and Shame in Women’s Sports

This piece, first delivered as a keynote address, examines the role of honour and shame in understanding the many stories of women's involvement in sport in Ireland from the eighteenth century onwards, and especially in the modern era. While women's sporting involvement was regarded as shameful, especially in those sports imbued with traditional associated masculine norms, the prospect for women's sports is different today than in the past. Yet the struggle for honour is ongoing, seen in topical debates concerning gender quotas and the recommendations made by the Citizens Assembly on gender equality. Bringing the analysis up to date, the piece outlines ad hoc policy initiatives around gender equality in sport from the mid-2000s (in which the author was centrally involved) to the publication of the first formal statutory policy on women in sport, in 2019. Here it is argued that the guilt and shame of previous generations has influenced the public debate on gender quotas and it is as if, in the desire for perceived equality, the current generation of sportswomen do not wish to be associated with quotas. In this way, honour is conflated with merit. The piece concludes by suggesting that merit is honourable, personally, but equally, quotas are by no means shameful in public struggles.

Inclusion through football: The case of Diverse City FC

In this piece we document how a football club has proved to be an important mechanism of integration for young Muslim women in Ireland. As has been evidenced elsewhere,[1] and discussed in this piece, Islamophobia is a reality in Irish society, whether as proximal lived experiences of hostility and discrimination, or as structural elements that deploy anti-Muslim tropes. In the face of such exclusion, young Muslim individuals, supported by local civil society actors, have taken it upon themselves to develop a platform, namely the Hijabs and Hat-tricks project, that not only enables inclusion, and develops meaningful integration, but also challenges head-on those tropes that cast them and their communities as ‘other’. Football, in the form of Diverse City FC, forms the focal point of this platform. Based on the experiences of these young Irish Muslims, we argue that football, and indeed sport more broadly, can act as an incredibly effective mechanism for meaningful societal integration. Finally, we argue for the importance of not only understanding the experiences of marginalised groups, such as the Diverse City players, but of the importance of drawing from these experiences to design future strategies for inclusion in Irish society. [1] James Carr, Experiences of Islamophobia: Living with racism in the neoliberal era (London: Routledge, 2016).

‘We … galloped hard and straight over some big stone gaps’: Freedom of the Hunt for Elite Women in Ireland, 1860-1914

Hunting was an elite social pastime accessible to both men and women, of the correct social class, throughout the period 1860-1914. Female involvement in this sport preceded their widespread involvement in other sports and pastimes such as tennis and cycling. This article explores the contradictions inherent in women’s involvement in this masculine sport. The sport demanded that participants display contemporary masculine characteristics of bravery, strength, and independence, and yet it was open to both married and unmarried women of the gentry and ascendancy class in Ireland. The sport was a dangerous one, and considerable skill was demanded of all participants. However, daughters of hunting families were not persuaded against joining the hunt, and were instead encouraged to display the necessary skill and competitiveness to ride a horse side-saddle cross-country at speed; jumping stone walls and banks along the way. It was the norm for women to wear adapted dress modelled on masculine hunting attire, however this dress did not diminish their perceived femininity, and was perceived by some in hunting circles as the most alluring form of female dress. The article explores the numbers of women involved in the sport during the period utilising both contemporary fiction and directories. It also provides a case study of one woman’s experience as she partook of the hunt while also battling long term ill health; challenging the contemporary notion of women as inherently weak and unable for rigorous physical activity.

Part of the Game: The First Fifty Years of Women’s Football in Ireland and the International Context

Women’s football in Ireland started in 1895 when the British Ladies’ Football Club (BLFC) visited Belfast for the first time and was followed by a tour the next year, which included some matches labelled ‘Ireland vs. England’. After two decades of silence, World War I saw the restart of women’s football, thanks to Mrs Walter Scott, and this time it was played seriously. Right from the start, the focus was not only on local exhibition matches but also on international selective matches. On Boxing Day in 1917, women’s football history was written, with the first international match of two selected teams in Belfast. After the war, Ireland became part of the international women’s football boom, played several international matches and had close ties to the French Federation. After some years of decline, the 1930s saw the most flourishing years in Irish women’s football before World War II, culminating in the first Irish full international in France, against France, in 1936. After the war, Irish women’s football was back on the international scene again. In this piece, I will show that Ireland—like France, Belgium, Austria and England—was one of the key international players in women’s football history up to the early 1950s. As soon as serious football was played by women, starting in World War I, the Irish ladies were part of the international movement and played international selective matches. This distinguished them from other nations in the 20s and 30s, where women’s football was seen as a show-act and not as a serious sport.