Good Sports

“Do you want to puck around?”

Where I grew up, in County Tipperary, an invitation to puck around or “go for a few pucks” was a welcome, frequent occurrence among friends. You’d grab your hurleys, find a sliotar (if unavailable, a tennis ball would do in a pinch) and seek out the nearest open grassy space. Pucks was our version of catch, shooting hoops, a kickabout. If you didn’t have a buddy on hand, you could puck by yourself, striking your ball with your stick against the largest, most windowless wall you could find.

In rural Ireland, particularly the hurling strongholds of Galway, Clare, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny and Tipperary, especially at the height of summer, you will likely see children carrying hurleys and helmets. You may even see the pastoral pucking around that I remember from my ‘90s childhood in the parks, playing pitches and gardens. You will see streets lined with bunting and flags in club or county colors. The pubs you drink in will have framed yellowing photographs of vintage hurling teams and signed jerseys on the walls. If you find yourself seated at the bar next to a local on a summer Sunday, you need only ask, “What did you make of the hurling?” to wind them up and watch them go.

The Gaelic Athletic Association, or GAA, is personal and deeply localized. The tagline of the All-Ireland Club Championships is “One life, one club,” underlining the cradle-to-grave nature of club loyalty. This, in turn, lends itself to fierce club rivalry. In my native club of Moneygall, our nearest neighbors and dearest foes were Toomevara, a similarly sized village a mere five-minute drive away.

I grew up in a small rural village where the GAA and the Catholic Church were central to the social and cultural life of the community. My lunch times were spent on the school pitch, boys and girls playing casual matches together. At night, I was at training or alone in the backyard, pucking against the gable end over and over and over. It was what we all did. In Irish summers, it’s light until 10 p.m.—why would we come in any sooner?

In the tiny midlands village where I lived, most of us—regardless of gender—owned hurleys and went for pucks constantly. There weren’t a lot of activities for young people, and the GAA provided a much-needed outlet for youthful energy.

Hurling, in its crudest description, is a mix of lacrosse and field hockey—though perhaps it’s closer to ice hockey in its physicality. On first watch, many comment on the speed, ferocity, and apparent lawlessness of the sport, though repeated viewings reveal its subtlety and dynamite skill levels. “It’s a joyful game,” former Tipperary player and manager Eamon O’Shea says in the documentary series The Game, broadcast on the national TV station RTÉ. “It’s a game of expression.”

Camogie is the female version of the sport. For much of the twentieth century, it existed as a tamer, subsidiary version of hurling, using a smaller pitch, a lighter ball, fewer players, and a much more stringent rulebook—particularly when it came to physical contact. In 1999, however, camogie rules were brought more or less in line with hurling, and twenty-first century camogie has become a spectacle in its own right.

It’s hard to exaggerate the influence of the GAA in Irish life, especially in rural areas. Part of this is due to the mythology surrounding the game. In primary school, children learn that not only is hurling the fastest field game in the world (the ball travels at speeds of more than 100 mph), but also the oldest (references to the sport have been found in laws dating back to the fifth century). The sport is interwoven into our myths and legends; the hero Cúchulainn, who appears in The Táin and other stories of the Ulster Cycle, once slew a vicious hound by hitting a sliotar down its throat.

When foreign dignitaries visit Ireland, there are two essential photo-ops: drinking a pint of Guinness and brandishing a hurley (though preferably not at the same time). In 2011, both President Obama and Queen Elizabeth II were brought to Croke Park, the administrative headquarters of the GAA and also its finest stadium. It’s our way of showing off a bit of Irish exceptionalism: look at this magnificent facility, look at these unique indigenous games. The GAA has always jealously guarded Croke Park, the largest-capacity stadium in Ireland, and only since 2007 have rugby and soccer been permitted to be played there.

This sense of Irish exceptionalism has been part of the GAA since the start. It was founded in 1884 in a tide of cultural nationalism, when multiple organizations were set up to protect the Irish language, sports and traditions, as a sort of bulwark against British colonialism. In subsequent years, the GAA was used as a recruitment ground for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the revolutionary society that was instrumental in Ireland’s War of Independence. Even today, the Irish tricolor flies at every stadium, the national anthem plays before every intercounty game, and the players’ names appear in both English and Irish in match programs.

In its mission statement, the GAA’s Official Guide describes the organization as “a means of consolidating our Irish identity,” its function being “to create a disciplined, self-reliant, national-minded manhood.” For decades, the GAA showed a strict adherence to these principles; GAA players were banned from playing “foreign” games such as soccer and rugby until as recently as 1971. These other sports were seen not just as an existential threat to the GAA but a malign influence. In the words of early GAA patron Archbishop Thomas Croke (after whom Croke Park is named), such sports were “effeminate follies” played by the “degenerate dandies” of the British Empire.

While the GAA has, thankfully, largely moved away from these exclusionary attitudes, the spirit of Irish exceptionalism is very much intact in hurling. Despite its relatively small audience compared to said “foreign” games and even within the GAA itself (Gaelic football boasts far greater participation nationwide), the game’s media commentary often begins from the assertion that hurling is the greatest sport in the world. As Irish Times journalist Keith Duggan once put it, “hurling specializes in evangelists.”

Just read this pre-match spiel from Marty Morrissey, one of the GAA’s most colorful commentators, before the All-Ireland hurling final in 2016: “There is no venue in the world right now that has 82,000 people gathered in what is undoubtedly one of the greatest stadiums in the world. Can you hear their voices? … Listen to the noise! Listen to the heartbeat of the people of Ireland!”

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When I was a kid, I played on the boys’ hurling team—a common experience for camogie players who came of age in the ‘90s. There was, as yet, no local camogie club, and I was used to playing on mixed teams at school, so two or three other girls and I were deemed good enough to win a starting place on the boys’ under-12 and under-14 teams.

While our male teammates were nearly always supportive, the boys on opposing teams were unsettled by the presence of girls on their pitch. You would see it in their gait as they came over to mark you, noticing the ponytail sticking out from under your helmet. First they’d be defensive and try to laugh it off, calling to their teammates: Can you believe I’m marking a girl? Once the game began and they realized you could play, their alarm would grow. I realized that for these boys, to be bested by a girl was the worst thing that could happen to them on the pitch.

The idea that a girl could be just as good or just as aggressive as them wasn’t in their frame of reference. And why should it? The GAA was founded as a fraternal organization—and it remains one. Camogie and ladies’ football are run as separate sister organizations. There’s a great deal of cooperation and goodwill between the groups, particularly at a grassroots club level, but until camogie and ladies’ football are folded into the GAA umbrella—until the women’s codes have the power and influence of Croke Park behind them—camogie players and ladies’ footballers will remain second-class citizens in the Irish sporting landscape. This is perhaps the biggest problem with mythologizing the GAA as being central to Irish life: women still aren’t full participants in the organization.

As GAA historian Paul Rouse remarked in a 2018 interview with the Irish Examiner, “Women are still discriminated against in GAA, and the argument that they’re not doesn’t hold water. There should be ladies’ football and camogie in every club. What they’ll add to a club is way more than any problems it will cause. How can the GAA talk about community and not properly involve the female membership?”

Since sport is a huge part of how people engage in public life, what message does the absence of women from the GAA send? The wider cultural context is, of course, relevant here. There has never been a female Taoiseach (prime minister) in Ireland. (There have been two female presidents, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, although that role is largely ceremonial.) Though a record 35 women were elected in the 2016 general election, women make up just 22 percent of the Dáil, Ireland’s parliament.

The Irish Constitution still contains a clause about its female citizens that reads as follows: “the state recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The state shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.” This clause has had a very real impact; until 1973, the “marriage bar” prevented married women from remaining in employment. In recent years, plans have been floated for a referendum to remove this clause from the Constitution, but nothing concrete has happened yet.

Since the country’s foundation, women’s bodies have been rigorously policed by church and state. The Catholic Church-run Magdalene Laundries, the last of which closed in 1996, essentially imprisoned unmarried mothers (or “fallen women”), requiring them to work long hours for no pay, and often trafficking their babies to adoption agencies abroad. Though run by religious institutions, the Irish state and society were complicit in this hiding away of single mothers. This complicity was acknowledged by the state when it officially apologized for the Laundries in 2013 and began paying out compensation of more than €25 million to survivors. (The Catholic Church has made no contribution to the compensation fund.)

More was to come. In 1983, the Eighth Amendment—stringently campaigned for by the Catholic Church—was passed, which enshrined in the Constitution “the equal right to life of the mother and the unborn.” In practice, this endangered pregnant women; even when the mother’s life was in peril, doctors could not legally terminate the pregnancy.

“This is a Catholic country,” a midwife told Savita Halappanavar in 2012, explaining why her request for an abortion could not be granted. Halappanavar had suffered an incomplete miscarriage and eventually died from related complications. It took her tragic death to galvanize the political will to address the Eighth Amendment—until finally, in May of 2018 via referendum, the Eighth was repealed by a majority vote of 67 percent.

If women’s bodies throughout the Western world are routinely policed—too fat, too thin, too dowdy, asking for it, too loud, too quiet, taking up too much space—in Ireland in 2018, women’s bodies were constantly up for debate. The victory of the referendum result was offset by the dehumanizing discussions that preceded it, in which RTÉ’s insistence on “balance” meant that Catholic activists debated medical doctors and lawyers on women’s rights.

Since the referendum, I hold camogie even dearer to my heart. In many ways, it’s my best expression of bodily autonomy, a chance to demonstrate my power, physical courage, and skills honed over long years of practice. It’s a chance to stretch and challenge myself, to inflict and suffer hurts within the safety of the playing field, the way men are encouraged to do from an early age. It is a way of being visible.

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When, at age 15, I had to give up hurling with the boys to play exclusively with girls’ teams, I remember feeling crushed. As part of the boys’ squad, I had essentially been a mini-jock and loved the attention and status that being a hurler conferred on me. The camogie games drew a fraction of the crowds the hurling matches did. Even then, I realized that as a female player, there would be no glamour, no social capital, no hero status.

Things are slowly getting better. While RTÉ typically broadcast almost all of the intercounty hurling championship matches, they screened camogie live only once a year, on All-Ireland Final day. In 2016, however, RTÉ widened its coverage to show the camogie semifinals as well. The following year, they went one better and showed the camogie quarterfinals—six games in all.

In Cork, the city where I live and play, camogie is phenomenally popular—due in no small part to Cork having won four out of the last five camogie All-Irelands. Graffiti of Cork camogie stars Rena Buckley and Ashling Thompson adorns the streets. When I go to training three times a week at the grounds of St. Finbarr’s Camogie Club, I see dozens of young girls playing with their friends, competing with each other and expressing themselves. They will grow up seeing camogie on television as a matter of course. They will see their heroines depicted on billboards and graffiti walls. They’ll think all this is perfectly normal. And that’s when we’ll start to see real change.

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The club is the basic building block of the GAA. Clubs are defined by the old Catholic parish boundaries and can draw their pool of players only from within those bounds. A young player will start playing for their parish team—their local club—and, if good enough, may one day be called up to the county panel. Success in hurling is largely dependent on an accident of birth. If a talented player has the good fortune to be born in Tipp or Kilkenny or Cork—the big three when it comes to All-Ireland titles—they stand a good chance of winning the highest honors in their career. If, on the other hand, they’re born in Antrim, Laois or Carlow—or even in a county with a strong tradition but few titles, such as Waterford or Wexford—their chance of ultimate success is much lower, no matter how talented they are. GAA players are not free agents, and within the organization, loyalty to the club and county of one’s birth is a virtue.

Another cornerstone virtue of the GAA is its amateurism; even at the highest levels, players are not paid. Intercounty players have their expenses covered, and big names in the sport might earn a kickback from endorsement deals or media opportunities. But most intercounty players return to a day job the Monday after the big game and have their evenings and weekends hoovered up by training, whether with club or county. As standards and expectations in the GAA become evermore professional, with players expected to give their time and commitment for free—essentially fulfilling two full-time roles—a work-life balance crisis is looming in the GAA.

“He’s a great servant to his county” is a phrase you’ll often hear about a long-serving, stalwart player. The irony being, of course, that servants get paid.

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Occasionally, hurling is brought overseas to impart Irish exceptionalism to the world—on All-Star tours, to the Fexco Asian Gaelic Games, and each November to the Fenway Hurling Classic. In Boston, perhaps to appeal to the Irish-American population, hurling is marketed as “Ireland’s warrior sport.” In the GAA, we are obsessed with militaristic language, though perhaps “militaristic” is wrong—this is not modern warfare we’re invoking, but something more ancient. Swords and spears, not guns and drones. Cúchulainn-type stuff.

Let’s return briefly to Marty Morrissey’s All-Ireland Final commentary in 2016: “Can you hear the Artane Band march across the green field at GAA headquarters with 30 warriors behind them? Shane Prendergast from Clara leads the men from Kilkenny, black and amber jerseys clinging to their muscular bodies. To their immediate left are 15 Tipperary soldiers, hurleys held firmly in their grasp, with captain Brendan Maher from Borrisoleigh leading them into yet another battle with Kilkenny.”

Warriors. Muscles. Soldiers. Battles. We can’t get enough of hurling as a hyper-masculine conflict. This does the sport—as well as the women who play it to a serious level—a disservice. Hurling is soft as well as hard, graceful as well as furious. It is as much dance as it is fight.