February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
That the Under-19 Ladies’ side from St. Louis Convent in Monaghan still had little difficulty defeating their counterparts from Presentation College in Tuam shouldn’t really surprise us because we are talking about a bunch of fairly serious competitors here.
Six of them had watched their older sisters win the same title back in 2000, and before their All-Ireland semifinal victory over Kerry’s Colaiste Na Sceilge, Armagh coach Joe Kernan had even been brought in to give them a training session and a motivational chat. Sure, the only patch of green available to them at their school is too small to host a proper game, but that was merely a hurdle to be jumped. What is most relevant to point out is that, four years into the new millennium, a group of young women actually need to overcome the handicap of poor facilities in order to play their chosen sport.
This fact needs to be labored in order to back up the recent assertion that the lopsided make-up of the Irish Olympic team may have contributed to its poor performance. Of the 50 athletes who went to Athens, just 15 were women and five of those were competing in the mixed equestrian events. Effectively, 10 Irish women were in Greece measuring themselves exclusively against the best women from every other country on the planet. That’s not an awful lot, is it? Especially given that, overall, 44 percent of the athletes at the games were women.
Maybe, just maybe, Ireland punching its weight at Olympic level because it is failing to utilize the talents of half the population that is available. This is truly remarkable since, in track and field alone, the top three performers of the last decade have all been women. From Sonia O’Sullivan lighting up the track to Catherina McKiernan’s performances at the world cross-country and Gillian O’Sullivan’s walking heroics, this trio have mixed it at the highest level in a way that has proved beyond their male peers. Shouldn’t it follow that Ireland should be pouring resources into discovering/creating their successors?
Despite the huge strides made by ladies’ Gaelic football, soccer, hockey and camogie the last few years, there is an enormous amount of work still to be done in terms of promoting women’s sports properly. In the U.S., there was concern last week because a report came out showing that the participation of girls in high school sports hadn’t increased since 2000. There was no decline, yet that the concern about a lack of growth shows how seriously Americans take female sports.
Not that we need any reminding. Among other baubles, the American women’s teams took gold in basketball, softball and soccer in Athens. OK, since softball is a version of baseball, they might have enjoyed a natural advantage in that one. That doesn’t take away from their achievements in the other codes and, of course, that success will breed success down the line. Young girls all over the U.S. who watched these games will be prompted to try their luck on the field or the court.
This is the way sport works. Everybody starts off playing by pretending to be their heroes. The problem is that with McKiernan fading, and Sonia obviously moving toward retirement sometime soon, who will be there for impressionable young Irish girls to look up to on the world track and field stage in the next few years?
A few weeks back, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Women in Sport published its fifth report. Among the recommendations were the establishment of a Commission for Physical Education, the setting up of an annual Women in Sport awards program, and the adoption of the Brighton Principles. These tenets aspire to equity and equality in sport and formally acknowledge that women should have an equal right and opportunity to participate in sports as men. Hardly a revolutionary thought in this day and age?
“National and international research reveals a lower participation level and a higher dropout rate from sport and other recreational activities by females,” said Jimmy Deenihan, the TD in charge of delivering the report. “Figures from the Irish Sports Council for overall levels of participation in sport are 32.7 percent for females and 62.3 percent for males. In 2002, under the International Carding Scheme for elite athletes, 30 percent of the grants went to females and 70 percent to males. Physical education can play a vital role in reversing this trend.”
Whether any of their findings are acted upon remains to be seen. In the meantime, there’s an amount of work to be done. That much was brought home to me earlier this summer at the U.S. Women’s Open golf in South Hadley, Mass., where I came across a sheet outlining the nationalities of the players involved.
Twenty-five different countries had sent competitors. After scrolling down through a list that included India, South Korea, China, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Switzerland, the Phillipines, Sweden, Thailand, Chinese Taipei, Venezuela, England, Scotland and Wales, we saw that just one nation with a golfing heritage was conspicuous by its absence.
How could it be that not a single Irish woman golfer was competing for the $560,000 first prize? Does anybody else think this odd? There were girls in that field as young as 14 years old and women in their 50s, yet an island with somewhere closing in on 300 golf courses couldn’t produce a single individual capable of qualifying and mixing it at this level. And this is one instance where the lack of facilities couldn’t even be trotted out as an excuse.
What was that slogan Bertie Ahern was so fond of last year? “A lot done, more to do.” Nowhere more so than regarding women in sport.