INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day takes place once a year. But this was not always so. The idea to mark the day was adopted in 1910 at an international conference of working women who demanded shorter working hours, better pay and voting rights.
One year later, it was celebrated in four European countries but it took another 64 years before it was adopted by the United Nations.
Today marks the 113th iteration and it is now an official holiday in many countries: even for women only in China. But the journey towards this symbolic day for women’s equality has not been smooth. The uneven history of women’s rights worldwide cautions us that these rights can regress just as much as they can be progressed.
In the 1900s, women’s rights movements expanded in the West. New organisations sprang up that claimed social space for women, in health, education, politics and sport. Ireland also experienced Gaelic and Anglo-Irish literary revivals. Together these social movements paved the way for the establishment of camogie or camoguidheacht.
Initially, middle class and urban-based, camogie expanded to rural areas and among emigrants in New York and London. The inaugural Camogie All-Ireland championship was played in 1932, the same year that Ireland won two Olympic gold medals in track and field.
Camogie’s team of the 20th century captured the spread of the sport, from Dublin, Kilkenny, Wexford and Tipperary to Cork and Antrim.
However, the GAA hierarchy did not embrace camogie in its early years. And it adopted the same patriarchal view some 70 years later, when women’s Gaelic football was formally codified in 1974. Both women’s organisations had to start from limited resources and little support. Camogie was overtaken by women’s Gaelic football, which became the largest participation sport for girls/women.
RTÉ’s former Head of Sport, Tim O’Connor, was said to have observed of the game that ‘the people of Ireland would have more interest in televised tiddlywinks’. But TG4 came on board with the LGFA in 2000 and RTÉ did in fact cover both sports. Sponsors followed for both sports, giving them crucial commercial leverage in a competitive marketplace.
Many men within the two organisations played a significant role in furthering the status of camogie and Gaelic football. Both associations proved themselves to be pathbreakers within the Gaelic games family such that, today, the three main Gaelic games associations are on a formal pathway towards integration. This year, the Steering Group on Integration (SGI) will focus on research and member engagement.
For too long, pioneers of women’s Gaelic games battled conservative social attitudes and structural inequalities. The first battle has been won; more or less, but over a long and protracted journey: from a recommendation by a GAA Commission in 1971 to examine co-operation, the affiliation of the Camogie Association with the GAA in 1995, and the establishment of an Integration Task Force between the three associations in 2002, through to the publication of an Inclusion and Integration Strategy in 2009.
The second struggle – structural inequalities – can only be addressed with a clear understanding of, and commitment to, changing the arrangements that govern Gaelic games. But policy inertia has hampered this.
Gender equality policies in sport have a chequered history. Typically, sports mergers have meant the larger, older (men’s) national governing bodies (NGB) acquired or incorporated the women’s NGB.
In these it was held that women needed to change: to become more confident, better equipped in terms of technical and tactical knowledge, and better able to cope with masculine norms in the culture of sport.
Gender quotas were dismissed erroneously as favouring unqualified women above qualified men, and positive or affirmative action was also wrongly blamed for funding decreases in men’s sport. In these contexts, practical and operational matters, such as revenue generation and access to facilities, were a poor proxy for equality. And where mergers were forced on men’s NGBs, for example through conditions attached to state funding for sport, endorsements for equality in the merged organisation were philosophically inconsistent. Why?
Because not everyone shares the same view of women’s unequal position in sport. Some see equality in terms of equal opportunity: they want girls/women to have access to the same or equivalent opportunities as boys/men, even if this means a low number of women in sports administration and coaching.
Others start from the position of compensatory equity in which the unequal – women – are treated favourably precisely because of prior disadvantage. Yet more claim not to differentiate between girls and boys in sport at all – they see only sport. We do not know with any certainty if a gendered predisposition inflects this purist view.
What does this mean for the Gaelic games merger?
Three themes are imminent for the SGI and members of the three associations. First is process. Whether a new entity is to be created, whether one of the existing associations absorbs the others, or if the outcome is more a blend or fusion of three, it is important to recognise that organisational change is neither the objective nor is it the endpoint. This merger is but a step in the gender equality process. Equality must be enacted, daily.
Second is culture. If due consideration is not given to this, a marriage of unequals is a likely outcome. Why? Because values, attitudes and beliefs are the crux upon which organisational change and any strategy lives or dies. If culture can eat concussion protocol for breakfast, then so too with equality in Gaelic games.
And third is valued-based leadership. Golf Ireland’s Transition Group were exemplary leaders with autonomy to deliver a mandate. They adopted a rule for board membership in a new entity, comprised of 30 per cent women, 30 per cent men and 40 per cent open. In this they recognised that women needed to be actively and intentionally included.
Equality will not be achieved in Gaelic games if there is a values gap. Leaders are those who, by their words, actions and daily example, practice equality in an authentic and transformational fashion.
On this IWD2023 I urge everyone in the Gaelic games family to grasp the opportunity and play an active role in bringing about equality.
* Dr Katie Liston is a senior researcher at Ulster University and expert in sport and gender. She has national and international sports honours in soccer, rugby and Gaelic football, and was a member of the LGFA’s Leadership Forum and the GAA’s Diversity and Gender sub-committee. She is currently reviewing the research on mergers in sport.
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