Those of us in the GAA media do plenty of moaning about the lack of access we get to the country’s best players, so when five of the most successful teams in camogie open their dressingroom doors to one of Ireland’s best documentary makers, it’s an event worth marking.
Camogie: Inside The Championship is a two-part series starting tonight at 10.15pm on RTÉ 1, directed by Ross Whitaker. Whitaker made Katie, the definitive take on Katie Taylor’s career which left Netflix at the end of last month, only to be replaced on the global streamer by Whitaker’s most recent feature documentary Beat The Lotto. And he is well used to telling Irish sporting stories; from the Irish men’s rugby team, to the Ireland women’s football team to Rachael Blackmore.
The programme was made with the support of the Camogie Association, and it was obviously a hell of a year to be thus embedded, given the row over skorts that emerged as the championship was about to begin.
Taken across the entire media spectrum, sporting and otherwise, the deliberations of the FRC must have been the most commented-upon issue in the GAA this year - but skorts would be very much in contention for second place. It was a major, major story that hit home both here and abroad.
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It’s important to stress that we all learned a few things along the way during that debate. For instance, how many of us learned for the first time after the initial protest organised by the players of Dublin and Kilkenny, that the Leinster championship has no impact whatsoever on the make-up of the All-Ireland camogie championship?
If you were stopped on the street in the weeks after the skorts issue first blew up and were asked to name even one intercounty camogie player, would you have been able to give the name of Aisling Maher, who led the Dublin response to the protest so well, or Katie Power, the Kilkenny captain?
Would you have been able to name anyone from the Waterford or Cork teams, who were treated so shabbily in the run-up to their Munster final? You may recall that they said they wouldn’t play if wearing shorts wasn’t an option, and the provincial final was eventually postponed with 16 hours’ notice in the shoddiest moment of the entire episode.
People whose opinions on camogie I respect were very quick to tell anyone who’d listen that the skorts issue absolutely was a problem ... but that there were other problems bubbling along just as noisily and persistently in players’ heads that were not getting anything like that level of attention.
Part one of the documentary outlines that quite plainly. Maher was one of the central characters in the episode and we absolutely see the toll the controversy took on her during those weeks.
But we also saw, in detail every bit as stark, the impact that injury had on her, the impact of defeat, of watching on from the sideline, of elimination ... as well as the impact of the housing crisis, which was mirrored in the experience of a couple of other players as well. Whether that was living at home with parents, or living in a ‘granny flat’, these were the battles that players were fighting as well as the stuff making all the headlines.
The skorts issue looked, from the inside, a lot like passing the driving test. It is an absolutely mammoth moment in your life that matters a huge amount ... until you solve it. And then you never have to think about it ever again. That was the frustrating thing about it.
Special Congress was held, the decision was taken, shorts were allowed ... and whatever public interest was out there faded back into the background. That’s why the documentary is so timely. The Camogie Association should be credited with the idea of going out and supporting a programme of this kind. But I had to ask the camogie fans in my circle about that Munster final which was postponed so disastrously and hastily in May.
I first had to admit that I didn’t know when it was eventually played, and I then had to be told that it was in fact never refixed. The year will end without a Munster champion. Cork and Waterford even played each other in an All-Ireland semi-final, which could obviously have doubled up as a Munster final, but for whatever reason the opportunity to do that was not taken. That is an organisational disaster.
Three-in-a-row chasing Cork did not participate in the documentary, which in a way emphasises the risk that the five counties who did open their doors took - Galway, Tipperary, Waterford, Kilkenny and Dublin. It can always be perceived a certain way.
But shows like this are incredibly important in showing the real lived experiences of these athletes. For a sport like camogie, which is the poor relation even among the GAA’s female sports despite its 120 years of history, it’s absolutely vital.
The integration issue continues to bubble along under the surface. As much as people would like to try and put a cost on providing equality of opportunity in GAA clubs, the size of the task is not a financial one, but one of will. The players who took us into their world have shown us they are well capable of imposing that will.
Ciarán Murphy’s second book “Old Parish – Notes on Hurling” (Penguin Sandycove) is out now
[ Kilkenny captain Katie Power reveals overwhelming toll of skorts protestOpens in new window ]
