A few minutes into LGFA@50, a documentary charting the extraordinary growth of Ladies’ Gaelic football which will be shown on TG4 this afternoon, author Hayley Kilgallon references an infamous letter that appeared in a national Sunday newspaper in August 1967.
Apparently penned by an anonymous farmer from Co Cork, he called on the GAA to bar women from attending All-Ireland finals as it takes up valuable space.
‘To me, there is nothing more revolting or unnatural than to see a pleasure-bent woman up in the city for fun and enjoyment, instead of being satisfied with her lot at home,’ he wrote. ‘The GAA is a men’s organisation – for men only!’
Perhaps, the farmer was just causing a bit of mischief and the following Sunday, the paper printed a full page of outraged replies, but it did touch upon an underlying attitude towards women at the time, that sport – especially Gaelic sport – wasn’t for them.
‘There were all these myths associated with women playing sport,’ says Kilgallon, who this year released Un-ladylike, a history of the game. ‘Women didn’t have the energy to play sport and if the ball hit them in the chest, it could give them breast cancer.’
In many ways, the story of how women’s Gaelic football has developed and grown over the past half-century is the story of Irish society.
In the 1960s, around the time that farmer from Cork put pen to paper, the game was seen as a novelty act.
There were women’s matches in festivals and carnivals around the country, but it was viewed as a bit of a joke, not to be taken seriously.
By the early 1970s, the absurd marriage ban was lifted in the civil service while a more outward-looking nation joined the EEC.
The country was changing by the time Tipperary and Offaly contested the first Ladies Football All-Ireland final in Durrow, Co Laois, in October 1974, just a few months after the Ladies Gaelic Football Association had been founded in Hayes Hotel in Thurles.
‘Some of the lads might come along for a bit of a laugh at the girls but I think most of them now realise that we can play good football,’ declared Biddy Ryan who captained Tipp to that first All-Ireland. But in a sign of where the game has come from, there is no video footage of that first final and the documentary depends on black and white photos and the memories of some of the Tipperary players.
And the lack of film from the early years of the sport is indictive of where it stood in Irish life. The documentary-makers did manage to dig up an appearance of some county teams on The Late Late Show in 1987 when Gay Byrne’s patronising tone in talking to the players characterised the wider attitude.
At the time, the great Kerry team were going for six-in-4a-row, but not too many knew.
By that stage, the LGFA had managed to bring their finals to Croke Park. But public interest was still non-existent as Helen O’Rourke, the CEO of LGFA, concedes during the documentary. ‘Our first All-Ireland final in Croke Park was in 1986 and there was about 3,000 people there, if that. So, there were very small crowds,’ O’Rourke remembers. ‘It was very hard to get publicity, you were depending on newspapers at the time and there was very little space for female sports.’
Irish society was changing in the 1980s, though, and the LGFA lay the foundations for what would be its future growth by creating more clubs and county boards. And while the great Kerry team – with the likes of Margaret Lawlor who talks in the documentary about mimicking her game on John Egan and Mikey Sheehy because there were no female role models – were the first dominant force of the game, the rise of Monaghan in the 1990s drove public interest – and attendances – up.
Breda McAnespie, mother to current Monaghan player Ryan, takes a trip down memory lane in the documentary and recalls how the whole county got behind the team as they set out for All-Ireland glory, with even club men’s game postponed when they played in Croke Park – a big statement at the time.
‘That team of the nineties inspired so many clubs around the county to start ladies’ football teams, and the crowds that went to Croke Park in the mid-90s, nearly the whole county of Monaghan would have went, they were postponing men’s games when we played, everything would have closed down when we were playing in Croke Park, so we probably kickstarted the crowds coming for Ladies football,’ McAnespie recalls.
Their rivalry with Waterford – and some of the thrilling finals they played – also helped, with footage shown of the late Eugene McGee providing analysis on RTE, saying the forwards on show compared very favourably to the men’s final between Kerry and Mayo that had been played a couple of weeks previously.
Aidan McAnespie, Breda’s brother-in-law, was shot and killed by security forces in 1988 when he was on his way to a Gaelic football match, a sad reminder of how The Troubles impacted Gaelic Games and one of the more interesting aspects of the documentary is how the conflict hindered the development of Ladies football in the North.
‘There is no Gaelic football in Ulster really, at a county level or affiliated to the LGFA until the 1990s. There are accounts of Ladies football matches being interrupted because of security concerns,’ Kilgallon points out.
With the peace process, the game blossomed and by the end of the 1990s, the game was in every county in the province after there had been a real push by the LGFA to set foundations in the North. And that can be seen now by the strength of counties like Armagh and Tyrone.
The advent of TG4 as the anchor broadcaster in the early 2000s brought a spike in public interest and exposure. And it is somewhat apt that a documentary charting the growth of the game is on this station because the Irish language broadcaster has probably been the main catalyst for its success story.
As the game goes from strength to strength, there are issues. The recruitment drive by the AFLW as it develops its fully professional league has affected most counties, although nobody wants to stand in the way of someone becoming a pro sportswoman.
Mayo legend Cora Staunton, who went on to have a similar status in the AFL, contributes and while she admits it was wonderful to play sport full-time, she also insists: ‘Nothing beats winning a club All-Ireland or a county All-Ireland.’
And while the game might not be going through the same existential crisis as men’s football, it has become more defensive in recent years.
One of the more interesting parts of the show is when current Kerry star Louise Ní Mhuircheartaigh is chatting with Margaret Lawlor and they are complaining about how defensive the game has got.
Perhaps, that is just a consequence of age, given that the sport has celebrated a milestone of half-century this year. And this fine hour of television encapsulates much of the highs and lows.
*LGFA@50 is on TG4 this afternoon at 4pm.
