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.

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.

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.

This article looks at the early development of women’s football in Ireland, examining the cultural impact of the first women’s matches, and how this early heritage has laid foundations for future developments. Women took to playing association football not long after it was first established as a male bastion during the latter half of the nineteenth century. These early matches attracted large crowds, public and press criticism, and in some instances social disorder. The article first examines how the Irish press presented this sporting innovation and the first exposure to actual matches when the British Ladies Club arrived to play in Belfast in early June 1895. Beyond the expected disapproval, there is evidence that debate took place on women’s general role in society, and in particular how females could engage in sport. Also examined is the way British Ladies Club presented themselves as upper-middle-class, and how this contrasted with the way they were portrayed in the press. New research is presented, which casts doubt on the club’s middle-class image and shows how friction between the club and its main sponsor arose when a true picture of the players’ backgrounds came to light. In conclusion, the author contrasts the Irish response to the British Ladies Football Club with the women’s sides that played during World War I and the post-war period. It is shown that the early matches of the 1890s paved the way for a more appreciative and accepting audience.

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.

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.

In 1967 a county Cork farmer wrote to the Sunday Independent (Dublin) to express his hope that the Gaelic Athletic Association (G.A.A.) would ban women from attending the upcoming All-Ireland finals. The G.A.A is a male-only organisation, he argued, and the presence of women at Croke Park would take up ‘valuable space’. His letter generated many outraged responses from both men and women, all arguing against his opinion and illustrating that women played a vital role within the sporting community—whether as supporters, sandwich-makers or jersey-washers. The responses highlighted how people in Ireland were reconsidering the role of women in the public sphere more generally in the late 1960s. The emergence of ladies’ Gaelic football as a ‘serious’ sport for women in the 1970s is reflective of this changing society. Current Irish sports historiography is considerably lacking in its examination of the space women occupied in modern sport in Ireland. This piece will draw on newspapers and archival material to examine the emergence of what came to be known as ladies’ Gaelic football in the late 1960s and early 1970s and to analyse the debates about the changing position of women in sport and society at this time. In so doing, this piece will aim to bring the historiography of women in Irish society in conversation with the growing historiography on sport in Ireland.

Were this an introduction to a journal, magazine or a combined collection of a different kind, we, as editors, might well feel more emboldened to begin differently: by citing the many populist commentators, in Ireland and the UK, who argue that sport is distinctive or even 'special' in some way; a phenomenon that can bring many diverse peoples together in a relatively short lived but significant shared sense of joy and passion.But, being respectful of this journal's readership and of the diverse scholarship underpinning this special issue, we are bound by a different equally relevant set of criteria.This journal takes as its main objective the facilitation of a challenging intellectual platform for a diverse range and lively mix of critical analysis and informed opinion.Thus we are compelled to observe that sports, and sporting participants, are not created equally.Not all participants in all sports have the same experiences that influence their development in the same way.Indeed sport is a social construction whose modern codified form emerged in a set of specific socio-historical, political and economic conditions and fuelled by an enduring belief.Sociologists have deconstructed this belief of the great sport myth 1 : an idea that has existed for more than a century which, put simply, states that sports are inherently pure or good and that these values or qualities are therefore transmitted, automatically and unproblematically, through participation in sport.What principally matters here is the general point that arises from academic work of this kind: that sports and sporting events defined as importanton and off the sports fields, basketball courts, gymnasia and so onare far more complex than they are frequently rendered.There are two reasons, then, for taking a more judicious stance towards sports and leisure activities.One, sport reflects wider societal values, attitudes, beliefs and patterns and is mutually reflective and reinforcing of these broader processes and, two, sport is also worthy of analysis in and of itself given the relatively autonomous dynamics that play out within this social field (no pun intended).

This piece reflects on my professional and personal involvement in sport, as editor of a national newspaper and coach of a girls' youth team at my local GAA club. In so doing, it highlights some of the prejudices I saw first-hand while coaching teams which, in turn, opened my eyes to my own failures in my role as sports editor. The first camogie supplement in a Sunday newspaper sports section broke this glass ceiling. Arguably, the responsibility on native media outlets to include more coverage of women's sports is increasing as mainly UK broadcasters enter the Irish media scape.

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.