Paul Rouse: A chance to to pull camogie stories out of boxes and place them centre stage

In many respects, the minute books and letters and accounts which fill these boxes record the aspect of sport that is usually hidden and generally disregarded, but without which modern sport could not exist.

Anyone who has ever served on the sporting committee of a local club knows just how thankless the task is. There is no mileage allowance, no meat-pack, no holiday fund, no government grant.

At best, there is a sort of grudging respect – but even that melts away when there are controversies or hard decisions which force people to take positions that do not please any or all.

And yet, without the volunteers who sustain every sports club by serving as officers, there can be no sport.

It is usually such officials who preserve the history of a sport. It is true that modern media documents the actual playing of games and much that flows from it. But the story of what goes on beneath the bonnet is often neglected.

A raw truth is that when such officials pass away or lose interest, the material they have recorded often disappears. There are many skips that have been filled with the records of club officials.

The result is a record that is grossly incomplete.

A prime example of this is camogie. For generations, a relatively small number of people laboured enormously to provide games for girls and women who would otherwise have had none. They did so in the teeth of discrimination and neglect.

Their words and their deeds deserve to be collected and remembered.

In this respect, the GAA Library and Archive has launched an initiative to expand its collections of material relating to camogie, as part of the Camogie Association’s Newman Fellowship Project at University College Dublin.

The fellowship project on the history of camogie was launched to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the founding of camogie and will document the unique place of the game in Irish life since the beginning of the 20th century.

Since its establishment in 2007, the GAA Library and Archive has been collecting the publications, records and archives of the GAA, the Camogie Association and the LGFA.

The material collected by the GAA Library and Archive includes administrative records (minute books and convention reports in particular), publications (books and articles), magazines, annuals, photographs, posters and flyers, GAA newspapers and match programmes.

The camogie material will be held at the GAA Library and Archive, based in the GAA Museum at Croke Park, where there is a dedicated and fully-supervised reading room, and a professional archivist, fully trained in all aspects of cataloguing, preserving and administering access to records.

If individuals or clubs have camogie material that they believe is suitable for inclusion, and may inform the Newman Scholarship research, or would like more information, they should contact the GAA Archivist, Adam Staunton (gaamuseum@crokepark.ie / (01) 8192350).

The history of camogie is a fascinating one. When the GAA was established in 1884, its founders pledged to open its doors to men of all classes. It never seems to have occurred to them that women, too, might wish to play.

In time, boundaries began to shift. By 1900, women were appearing in far greater numbers in secondary schools, in teacher training colleges, in universities and in the civil service. Independent women sought their own place in the world and sport played a significant part in shifting the perceptions of what a woman was capable of doing.

Far from waiting for the men to receive them into the GAA, women moved to form their own clubs to allow them play hurling.

The initiative was framed by the involvement of women in the Gaelic League which had been founded by Douglas Hyde in 1893. As well as its primary endeavour of promoting the Irish language, it was also charged with the promotion of all aspects of Irish culture.

In 1898, members of the Gaelic League in Navan, Co. Meath established a ladies’ hurling team. The immediate inspiration was the playing of an exhibition match among themselves as part of a local commemoration of the 1798 rebellion. The game was played at the Hill of Tara, a site resonant with historical allusions.

No further advances were made until 1903, and again a branch of the Gaelic League was involved. In Dublin, the Keating Branch had fine hurling and football teams for its male members. In 1903 a group of women members, including many who had travelled from various parts of Ireland to work in Dublin, determined to play the game of hurling.

Led by Máire Ní Chinnéide, a graduate of the Royal University (a forerunner of the National University of Ireland), the group devised a code of rules that was based on hurling.

Both hurleys and sliotars were to be smaller and lighter than those used by the men, and the pitch was shortened so that its dimensions were to stand between 60 and 100 yards in length and between 40 and 60 yards in width.

The number of players per team was 12 and among the rules was one which cited as a foul the deliberate stopping of the ball with the long flowing skirts then fashionable among early players. The game which carried these rules was renamed ‘camogie’.

In that summer of 1903, the women of the Keating Branch began their practices, firstly in Drumcondra Park, and later in the Phoenix Park. Many of the women hid their hurleys under their coats as they travelled on trams in an attempt to deflect ridicule from the wider populace.

A second camogie club, Cúchulainns, was founded in Dublin in early 1904. This allowed for the staging of the first recorded camogie match, which was played at the Meath Agricultural Society Grounds (later redeveloped as Páirc Tailteann) in July 1904.

By the end of 1904 there were five teams playing in an organised league in the city. There was also a club active in Co. Down, and the game was even played in Glasgow.

The progress was sufficient to allow for the formal establishment of An Cumann Camógaíochta, with Máire Ní Chinnéide as president, at 8 North Frederick Street in Dublin on February 25th 1905.

The impetus that followed saw more clubs established around Dublin. The game spread tentatively to the south with the foundation of a club in Cork, and spread north with Louth, Monaghan, Fermanagh and Antrim becoming involved.

That the game was played in areas where hurling was not well-established emphasises the importance of the Gaelic League to its development.

Progress was slow and the organisation stagnated. In 1911, led by Sean O’Duffy of the Crokes club, An Cumann Camógaíochta, was relaunched in Dublin. Eleanor, Dowager Countess of Fingal, was appointed President at a meeting attended by 13 Dublin clubs.

This time a determined effort was made to establish the game on a nationwide basis and by the middle of 1912 there were camogie matches regularly played in each of the four provinces.

The first official inter-county game was played in 1912 when Dublin defeated Louth at Jones’s Road.

In the 1915-16 season, the oldest camogie competition, the Ashbourne Cup, was established as an inter-varsity championship.

Well-received matches played at the Tailteann Games in the 1920s – footage of which was shown in cinemas across Ireland and overseas – helped boost support.

Camogie was not helped by a series of internal disputes. Such were the divisions that, while some clubs played under camogie rules, others insisted on playing by the hurling rules used by the men.

Once again, it became necessary to relaunch. Cumann Camógaíochta na nGael was reborn at a special convention in the Gresham Hotel in Dublin on 25 April 1932. It was then that camogie began to truly establish itself as a national sport and the first All-Ireland championship was started, though the final was not played until the summer of 1933.

By 1935, camogie was being played by 10,000 players on 423 teams in 28 counties.

Almost immediately, the association again tore itself asunder. A proposal to lift the ban on hockey players playing camogie led to a bitter split. Only in the early 1950s was unity restored. This unity proved enduring and allowed for the long-term development of camogie.

By the 1960s the association had a formidable structure in place, with club, county and inter-collegiate competitions well-established.

Camogie progressed steadily through the 1970s and 1980s, driven by a passionate few dedicated to providing women with sporting opportunities.

In a new millennium, women playing sport received a new status, even if the mould shaped by the Victorian world was never properly been broken – overt discrimination may have disappeared, but its remnants lived on.

Nonetheless, camogie – now played by teams of 15-a-side on a pitch the same size as that used by men – could boast a record 530 affiliated clubs with more than 100,000 members. The game by 2024 was thriving as never before.

This project is an opportunity to pull local stories out of boxes and place them centre stage.

*Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin