TG4’s Laochra Gael (TG4, Thursday) has quietly become one of the best documentary series on Irish television. Each week, it tells the story of a high-profile GAA athlete – chronicling the highs and lows of their life on and off the pitch. In the case of Cork football star Bríd Stack, those peaks and troughs are especially dramatic.
Rated as one of the greatest ladies’ footballers ever, she was a star of the Cork team which racked up 11 All-Ireland wins – their success credited with helping popularise a sport too long regarded as a lesser version of the man’s game. They also overcame a historic schism within ladies’ GAA in Cork, where clubs were often prioritised over the county.
“People were favouring their clubs over Cork matches,” Stack remembers. “That was the way it was. There wasn’t the bond. There seemed players in and out the whole time. We never saw past Munster.”
Later, a move to Australia and the women’s AFL league almost ended in tragedy when she broke her neck in her very first match – an incident that could have resulted in paralysis. “This surge of pain shot up my head, down my back. I remember falling to the floor and just screaming,” she says.
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A lesser athlete would have walked away. Stack, however, refused to do so. She underwent emergency surgery and returned to play for Adelaide before moving home to Cork with her husband and son.
Sadly, her bad luck did not end there. Back in Ireland, there was further heartache when she had a miscarriage. “There’s always that little bit of.. did I play sport too long?” she says as she recalls her state of mind.
Ladies’ football has historically attracted large crowds to its big games – a respectable 30,000 attended last year’s All-Ireland. However, away from Croke Park’s bright lights, it has not always been backed by the public, and Stack and her team-mates recall how their support base was often just their families.
“The biggest thing is to get females to back females,” says her Cork team-mate Angela Walsh. “It was generally just our families, our partners, who would go to the games. It has improved. There is more to do.”
Stack is not quite a household name outside of GAA circles, though she deserves to be, and this moving documentary is a worthwhile tribute to an elite athlete and to women’s sports in Ireland. It is a reminder of the value of TG4, a channel that brings audiences the Irish stories other broadcasters lack the wherewithal or the ambition to tell.
