Last week I got a text message from a friend of mine currently engaged in a frantic 80-hour week of taxiing his kids from one sport to the next to the next. He’s by no means a GAA person, and in fact had never actually engaged with a GAA club until his eldest boy started playing.
He was trying to explain to me why his kid’s Gaelic football training just seemed more fun than the soccer, the rugby, even the cricket (when it’s not being rained off), and he said to me that after much thought, he reckoned – “the secret is that the GAA encourage women and mums to coach, manage, and just get involved”.
That’s his experience on Dublin’s northside, and of course there are women involved in soccer and rugby clubs across the country. But the fact that GAA clubs simply don’t run without women is a truth universally accepted but not often acknowledged. Their presence on executives, on organising committees, and in key roles, just makes GAA clubs better.
I’ve been thinking all week about the press conference that representatives of 24 camogie and women’s football teams held on Monday, and where it stands in relation to a few other press conferences held over the course of the last 25 years in Irish sport.
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The easiest comparison to make is with the Irish women’s soccer team, who went on strike in 2017, won much-needed concessions, and repaid that faith with a level of on-field performance that will see them playing in their first World Cup finals next month.
But my mind went all the way back to the start of the GPA. They were louder, brasher, more willing to cause disruption – but they were asking for the exact same things that our female GAA players are asking for now.
It comes down to the same issues – mileage expenses, medical services, and playing gear. Access to pitches is a more commonly-faced problem in women’s sport, but was also part of the GPA’s opening gambit. They’re still both talking about training facilities that are not up to scratch.
There are issues in politics that blindside public officials – issues that come out of nowhere and catch even seasoned Ministers unawares. And then there are the issues that people know to be wrong, and are just left alone because no one seems to be too bothered about it . . . until they start getting bothered by it. The issues raised on Monday fall decisively into that second category.
Everyone knows that players shouldn’t be paying thousands of euro just to be able to represent their county, as the GPA revealed in their State Of Play report, released earlier this year.
As reported in this paper at the time – only 9.5 per cent of women players receive travel expenses from their county board, with six per cent of those getting less than 20 cent per mile. Male intercounty players receive 70 cent per mile.
A total of 79 per cent of players do not have regular access to a team doctor and 36 per cent do not have full access to a physio. Almost 50 per cent of female intercounty players have paid to visit a physio. Just over half (53 per cent) don’t have full access to a gym, while 71 per cent of respondents said they don’t have full access to suitable pitches.
We all know this is what happens. We all also know what a high-performance environment looks like, even in the unique amateur-but-professional GAA landscape. What’s more, female players couldn’t be more aware of how their male counterparts are treated – they are often their brothers, or their cousins, or their clubmates.
So this press conference on Monday was different from those early GPA press conferences in one key respect. The GPA back then had to fight to establish these basics as a given for GAA players. In the late 1990s, there would have been many people who would have looked at physios in place at every training session, free gym-membership, or mileage expenses, and asked if they were necessary.
We’ve already established that they are. We’ve already established what a GAA high-performance environment looks like. The women in front of the press last Monday know that too.
When the GPA was set up, it was unashamedly elitist, of course. It was the country’s best players outlining how they felt they should be treated by their county boards. They may have bristled at the elitist tag, but it was the reality. They felt they had to get ahead of the curve.
The players speaking on Monday are actually behind public sentiment, in a lot of ways. The GAA already knows how much they benefit from female participation across the entirety of the organisation. Gender equality is something that is a lived experience for many women involved in committees and club executives.
Forget about making spurious points regarding male players bringing in greater revenue, thereby justifying why they should be more handsomely remunerated via expenses. The money that female players are asking for has already been made back through the frankly priceless level of commitment that rank-and-file women GAA members already provide. That’s the hard part.
This is the easy part. The money is there. We know what they want. We know how to provide it. These players can’t sit around waiting for the integration of the LGFA and the Camogie Association to happen. And the GAA shouldn’t either.
