Who’d be a referee? You run up and down the pitch for 70, 80 or 90 minutes and receive nothing but abuse. Once, at a League of Ireland tie in Athlone, a guy in front of me spent the entire match explaining the minutiae of the game to the linesman – when he wasn’t screaming “Oi, lino!” and aggressively tapping his watch or making a suggestive gesture with his hand. He never let up. I hadn’t encountered a monologue so dystopian since Rutger Hauer’s tears-in-rain speech at the end of Blade Runner.
For women officials the abuse is even worse – as the referees in More Than a Whistle (RTÉ2, Tuesday, 10pm) explain. “You’d hear the likes of, ‘Oh, you should be at home,’ ‘You should be at the sink,’ ‘You should be cooking the dinner,’” says the soccer referee Michelle O’Neill.
“If I didn’t referee at 100 per cent it would come back to the woman thing,” agrees Joy Neville, who took up refereeing after she retired as an Ireland rugby international. That pressure can prey on your mind, says the GAA ref Maggie Farrelly, the third woman to feature in this informative and enjoyably wholesome documentary. “It can be nerve-racking. It can be intimidating.”
There is often a feeling that the entire world is watching. At a crunch Six Nations match, the decision of whether to award a try was passed to Neville, the video referee for the game. Give it to England and they would almost certainly come away victorious. She correctly awarded the score – and, in the minutes afterwards, expletives from France supporters poured in on social media. She says she’s tough enough to take the criticism but wonders how such an onslaught might affect younger people.
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Back on the soccer pitch, O’Neill came up with a novel solution to the abuse she was receiving during League of Ireland games in Dublin. Training at home in Wexford, she put on headphones playing the roar of an aggressive crowd, then told herself to dismiss it as mere white noise. “All you hear is the shouting and screaming directed at you,” says O’Neill, who had decided, “I need to deal with this – I don’t need it to affect my game.”
Sport in Ireland – and globally – still has a long way to go in terms of accepting women. Anyone who has been to a man’s match in Ireland where a woman officiates in some capacity will be aware of the different standards by which female officials are judged.
More Than a Whistle won’t put an end to such issues, but it does humanise the three referees whom it profiles. At home with her wife, Simona Coppola, Neville talks frankly about the challenges of travelling overseas while raising a young daughter. In Cavan, Farrelly says she has had to give up a lot of family moments. “You miss out on weddings, you miss out on Christenings and days out like that.”
It’s a sacrifice they are willing to make. Neville recalls contacting a senior rugby figure in Ireland and asking whether she should give refereeing a shot. He said he couldn’t imagine a woman reffing a senior club game in his lifetime. A few years later she was doing just that – a large step for her and, surely, an equally significant one for women’s sport in Ireland.
