Matchday shots of referees and captains have been a staple of sports photography for generations. Once upon a time, those photographs had a certain currency, like a ribbon-cutting ceremony, or communion pictures with the bishop. Newspapers were suckers for ceremony. Those kinds of photographs are rarely published now.
Nick Bradshaw’s picture from the Kilkenny v Dublin camogie match eight days ago, though, discarded the usual protocols. Absent were the plastic smiles and the prompted handshake between the captains. Instead, the image was arresting and lucid.
Bradshaw took the shot from a distance and from behind the referee’s back. Nobody is posing for the camera or pretending. You can tell from the expression on the captains’ faces and from the referee’s hand gesture that their conversation has gone beyond small talk.
At the heart of the image, though, the story was stripped back to its absurd essence: a person wearing shorts is telling two other people that they cannot wear shorts. On whose authority? The person in the middle, wearing shorts, enforcing rules dictated by the Camogie Association.
Inside Gaelic Games: The weekly GAA newsletter from The Irish Times
Provincial championships clearly matter, but their link to the All-Ireland remains a problem
‘It is absolutely ludicrous’: Ireland manager Carla Ward shocked by skorts controversy
Louth win more than just the Delaney Cup - what we learned from the GAA weekend
The hand-me-down photographs of the referee and the captains through the decades never had anything to say, but this one screamed.
The picture was a portal into a mixed-up world. What the events of the last week have exposed, yet again, is a dysfunctional relationship between the officer class of the Camogie Association and its elite players. The delegates who voted a year ago to exclude shorts as an option wilfully ignored the wishes of their players, just as they might do again at the emergency Special Congress in a week‘s time.
But this is not an isolated occurrence. It belongs to a pattern. Four years ago, the Camogie Association tried to ram through a fixture schedule against the wishes of its intercounty players. The association’s proposal was that the intercounty season would be split in two, with the leagues run off in the spring and the championship staged in the autumn and early winter.
It was approved by Central Council and rejected by the players. In a snap poll of its members by the Gaelic Players Association (GPA), 84 per cent voted to boycott the National Leagues if the proposed fixture schedule was adopted. Eight days after the outcome of that poll was communicated to the Camogie Association, its president Hilda Breslin gave an interview to the Irish News. In it, she extolled the virtues of the original proposal. City Hall had no mind to back down.
Ultimately, the issue was decided by a referendum of the clubs, which, by a narrow margin, supported the intercounty players.
But why should the players have been forced into conflict?
At the end of the previous year, 2020, the Women’s Gaelic Players Association (WGPA) merged with the GPA. Until that point, however, the Camogie Association had very little truck with the players’ representative body and effectively only dealt with them in relation to state funding.
At the time, grants from Sport Ireland required a memorandum of understanding to be signed each year by the Camogie Association, the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) and the WGPA. That was the only context in which the Camogie Association was prepared to do business with the WGPA – when they had no choice.
How did that make their players feel? Valued? Heard?
No?
Two years later, the Camogie Association flew into turbulence with its elite players again, alongside the LGFA. Neither federation had a player charter in place to meet the kind of basic welfare provisions that their male counterparts were guaranteed.
Pre-match, sit-down protests started in mid-June. They continued, with incremental escalations, until mid-July. At that point, the Camogie Association and LGFA relented to the pressure. The players charter that was agreed in 2024 is far from ideal, but it was a start.
But why should the players have been forced into conflict? Why was there resistance from the officer class? Should they not have wanted the best for their players?
The Munster final was postponed on Friday evening, with less than a day’s notice. On Saturday afternoon, the Cork and Waterford players issued a joint statement expressing their anger at how the situation was handled.
“As a united group we want to express our bitter disappointment,” it read. “It shows scant regard for the preparation of players both mentally and physically to be ready for a provincial showpiece to make this decision just 16 hours before the scheduled throw-in … We feel completely let down.”
Between camogie’s elite players and the game’s officer class, the breakdown in trust is absolute. The responsibility for that lies with the game’s leadership.
In Gaelic games, this is the era of player power. If a manager has “lost the dressingroom”, county boards or club executives won’t close their eyes and ears and hope it goes away. A change will be made. If they have a new manager in mind, senior players will be discreetly consulted. That is accepted as best practice now.
On Thursday night, members of the Cork county board executive tried to persuade their players to back down
The management of the Waterford camogie team changed in recent weeks. The players influenced that turn of events.
Now, intercounty players expect to enter partnership arrangements with intercounty managers and county boards. They expect leadership groups within squads and open channels for dialogue. They’re not afraid to ask for whatever they feel they need. The days of autocratic rule are gone.
Since the fixtures stand-off in 2021, intercounty camogie players have found their voices. It is strange, perhaps, that it took a year from when Congress rejected two motions on shorts for the kind of uprising that we have witnessed in the last week. But there is no turning back now.
On Thursday night, members of the Cork county board executive tried to persuade their players to back down and wear skorts in the Munster final. The players refused to buckle.
If delegates at Special Congress vote once again to reject shorts as an option, all the indications are that the players will simply not accept it. This is not a battle that the Camogie Association and its officer class can win. It is not a battle that the players can afford to lose.
The bolshiness will prevail. It must.
