This week, Mary McAleese walked away from the steering committee tasked with integrating the GAA, Camogie Association and the Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA), amid anger and recriminations on both sides.
She described the management committee as “less than impressive” and “lacking in vision”; the GAA president Jarlath Burns asked her to reflect on her remarks, which he described as “offensive”.
After four years of herding the three organisations towards integration into a single body in her role as chairwoman, McAleese’s resignation has thrown the cat among the pigeons. Her presidency was defined by “building bridges”: bringing people together to facilitate rather than force agreement. And therein lies the problem. The GAA clearly will not jump into integration; it will have to be pushed.
As members of these three organisations up and down the country shared their views of this latest publicity fiasco on the airwaves, it is hard not to be struck by how invested so many people are in Gaelic games generally, and the GAA specifically.
For a psychologist like me, the GAA offers a heady mix. It is a means through which people can define themselves in terms of club, county and country; friends, place and nation. The GAA isn’t just an organisation: for some of us it is part of who we are.
This is a really important detail. Because of this strong identification with the GAA, commentary on an issue relating to the GAA can be taken very personally. A few years ago I wrote a piece for The Irish Times about the institutional misogyny that lay at the core of the GAA. I soon discovered just how personally that criticism can be taken. My charge against the organisation was interpreted by some men as a personal charge of their own misogyny. They are what is referred to in psychological terms as “highly identified”.
But institutional misogyny is, by definition, not a personal accusation. It isn’t about individuals; it is about what is baked into the fabric of the organisation’s governance, leadership and operational structures. It is the systemic discrimination against women that is built into the rules, daily habits and culture of an organisation or society.
The development of the GAA into a cultural powerhouse was built on the work of both men and women. But it catered only for men’s sports, while happily welcoming the labour of women in non-sporting roles. Just like the invisible work women so often undertake, responsibility for feeding, washing and organising clubs and players; corralling teams and driving to matches up and down the country often falls to women. Today, though women are involved in many roles across the organisation, power – and all of the most important committee positions – remains with men. And the means of making money remains with the GAA.
The visceral loyalty to the GAA, together with the powerful position it has occupied in Irish life, results in serious blind spots. This is often how it works: powerful groups in any society tend to be oblivious to their privilege. They rarely have capture on how their privilege impacts less powerful groups.
By contrast, built on a foreshortened history and reflective of the less powerful position of women in sport, and in Ireland over much of the lifetime of the GAA, the Camogie Association and LGFA come to the integration table as the junior partners, with fewer resources.
For this reason, successful integration requires redistribution of resources. The less advantaged groups require over-investment to bring them up to the level of the more powerful group. Despite how the term has been used and misused by the GAA over the last two days, this is what is actually meant by equity.
It is a recipe for disaster to require the smaller, less resourced parties to fund their own levelling up. It simply will not happen. LGFA and the Camogie Association are historically disadvantaged when it comes to generating resources. To expect that they fund themselves – as Jarlath Burns suggested on Wednesday – is not integration; it is just another way of shirking responsibility for women’s sports.
There’s no doubt that a deep connection and commitment to the Gaelic games and the GAA will be driving the behaviour of those tasked with integration. The integrity of the game, sporting clubs and the organisation will always be their main priority. But protecting the interests of the GAA is orienting the leadership to the financial security of the organisation. Because of their privileged position, they seem unaware of how this orientation is recreating the status quo: a culture that prioritises the participation of men and boys in Gaelic games.
While the Government seeks to minimise the resignation of McAleese, it is clear that GAA is marching to the rhythm of its own drum. It unilaterally changed the timeline and conditions for planned integration. This typifies the mindlessness of those who are powerful in society. And those who hold power rarely cede it voluntarily.
Crucially, the impasse here is about resources. For all the talk of finance, facilities and fixtures, money is by far the most important and has trumped the integration agenda. Women’s and girls’ participation in Gaelic games is being sidelined in favour of the GAA business model. But stalling integration isn’t just damaging to girls’ and women’s ability to participate in Gaelic games, it undermines the GAA’s reputation as an inclusive community organisation.
This will be a hard one for many people, women and men, to swallow. It will ultimately undermine their allegiance to an organisation that they have held dear. This debacle isn’t about the integration of Gaelic games; it is about the heart and soul of the GAA.
Orla Muldoon holds a joint appointment as professor of psychology at Queen’s University Belfast and University of Limerick