WHEN I WAS 11 years old, I was part of a history-making team. For the first time ever, my home club of St Mary’s in Sligo fielded a girls team at the under-12 grade.
This historic moment is not one that is recorded on the club’s roll of honour that adorns the stairway up to the clubhouse, but it was history, nonetheless. The year was 2006 and ladies’ Gaelic football was going from strength to strength.
The membership of the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) had reached 100,000, big name brands like TG4, Suzuki, and VHI were backing the sport, and the association had just launched a three-year strategic plan to capitalise on the rising popularity of the game. And, for me, my interest in the story of ladies’ Gaelic football began.
On Thursday of this week, 18 July 2024, the LGFA celebrates a major milestone — its 50th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Unladylike is the first book to document the history of ladies’ Gaelic football.
I started carrying out research on the history of ladies’ Gaelic football as a MA student in UCD. With the freedom to write a dissertation on a topic of my own choosing, it struck me that, as a ladies’ Gaelic football player, I knew little about the history of the LGFA.
The LGFA’s website had some information on the early years of the association and the development of the game in various counties that helped me to get started. I found numerous books on the history of the GAA and men’s Gaelic football, and some of these had a small bit of information on ladies’ Gaelic football. Surely there is more to say about an association like the LGFA, I thought. And there is!
Ladies’ Gaelic football matches (and they were advertised as ladies’ matches rather than women’s matches) first began to appear as early as the 1920s. However, the game lacked support, both socially and organisationally, and it was not until the 1960s that ladies’ Gaelic football began to take off at local carnivals. Advertised alongside the likes of tug-o-war competitions, children’s races, and fancy-dress parades, ladies’ Gaelic football was considered a novelty act.
A few years later, the LGFA was founded in Hayes’ Hotel in Thurles, Co. Tipperary in 1974. The setting up of the LGFA, also known as Cumann Peil Gael na mBan, was significant as it meant that, for the first time ever, an association would actively manage and promote the playing of Gaelic football for women in Ireland.
The location of the inaugural meeting was significant, too – it was the same place the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) had met for the first time, 90 years earlier, in November 1884. However, at the founding meeting of the GAA, there had been no discussion about facilitating Gaelic games for women. Perhaps that is not surprising, considering that the social norms of the time laid down that sport, generally speaking, was for men only. Women were assumed to have a naturally weaker disposition, which made them unsuitable for strenuous activities; furthermore, the idea of breathless women chasing after a football was deemed quite ‘unladylike.’
Reporting on the game between Offaly and Kerry in O’Connor Park, Tullamore, in 1973 – styled as the first ladies’ All-Ireland football final in the absence of a governing body – the Irish Press stated, ‘that there is a future for this latest craze in the Irish sporting world.’
Indeed, a whole new future for women’s sport opened up in the decades to come. Since starting my PhD research over two years ago, I have built on my MA research and have drawn on newspaper archives, archival material, private collections, interviews, and more to piece together the history of ladies’ Gaelic football. From the feats of record-breaking teams to a headline-grabbing story of a footballing nun, writing the rule book and establishing game-changing partnerships, together these sources provide insight into the experience of ladies’ Gaelic football players, volunteers and administrators at both local and national level.
The emergence of women’s Gaelic football as a competitive sport was part of the wider ascent of women’s sport worldwide that began in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was not just in Gaelic football that Irish women broke new ground during and following this period, but also in soccer, rugby, athletics, swimming and boxing. Neither was it just on the field of play that women were afforded new opportunities, but also in sports administration and coaching. These efforts and achievements signalled that women were more than capable of practising sports and excelling at them. All of which reminds us that while the history of women’s Gaelic football is a story about sporting achievement, it is also a story about challenging the status quo.
Perhaps the status quo in Irish sports writing needs to be challenged, too. Until now, after all, no history had been written on women’s Gaelic football and the LGFA. In fact, the historical position of women’s sport has largely been ignored by Irish historiography.
So, this book aims to record the history of women’s Gaelic football and the LGFA over the last fifty years, documenting the key moments, developments, teams and figures that have contributed to the growth of ladies’ Gaelic football and, in doing so, have helped change the position of women’s sport, and women in society, in Ireland.
Hayley Kilgallon’s book, Unladylike – A History of Ladies Gaelic Football (New Island) will be available from 12 September.
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