Mná na h-Éireann: Hidden Politics and Irish Sport

The women footballers of Ireland celebrating making the 2023 World Cup Finals has drawn flak all of us could have done without. Just as the Limerick hurlers sang Seán South of Garryowen, so also did these women stir a hornet’s nest by shouting support for the IRA and thereby giving a shot in the arm to the Wolfe Tones, that band of pensioners who haven’t got a musical note between the lot of them.

Although the women immediately apologised, IRA fellow travellers were quick to laud them, as was Kevin Myers and other informed critics to lambaste them. Carla Lockhart, a Tyrone woman and DUP MP, asked Birmingham FC to take action against any of its employees who might have been involved in the chanting, as Birmingham was infamously the site for one of the worst of PIRA’s many crimes. Lockhart’s action has, of course, led to the inevitable whataboutery reaction from PIRA ‘s supporters.

Personally, all I saw was a group of largely apolitical women winning a match and good on them, when they travel to New Zealand and Australia to either make up the numbers or to emulate England’s Three Lionesses UEFA champions and win it.

Even though the English women are currently riding high, they too had their critics who, quite frankly, seem to have fallen down on the job with respect to the “girls in green”. See, not only did neither team include any transgenders but they were not even ethnically diverse. As all players on both sides were native Gaels, the NGO armies were really remiss for not hauling the Irish team over the coals for that. Heaven forbid that Irish and English women might go out to enjoy themselves without being sufficiently reflective of our diverse, multiethnic, crime ridden communities. Unless these girls in green change their ways, the August 2023 final in Sydney will reflect badly on our commitment to diversity and ethnicide.

Further, if the huge crowds of female Irish nurses who pleaded at Sydney Opera House to return to Ireland to help stem Covid19 show up, that picture of a homogenous Ireland will be reinforced unless we send a few thousand of our New Irish to Botany Bay for a short, sponsored holiday to make up the numbers, thus freeing some hotel spaces here for the next lot and thereby helping keep our priorities on key.

Given the sponsorship that is lining up behind the Women’s Final, such quota stacking will be essential, if Coca Cola, Visa and the others decree it., once the inevitable NGO ponce pressure comes, which it will. Though it is great to see women, any women, play sports and enjoy themselves, Coca Cola, FIFA , Visa and similarly ethically challenged groups cannot tolerate that if it does not boost their bottom lines the way having the deep pocketed transgender “community” and their sponsors all around us does.

Not that that transgender lot are yet at the centre of this power play. Other forces, both domestic and foreign, are and that can be seen most clearly in the case of the wider GAA family who have had Mary McAleese imposed on them to broker a merger between the GAA, the Camogie Association and the Ladies Gaelic Football Association. The Camogie Association was founded in 1904 and has had very close ties with the GAA ever since. As has the LGFA, since its foundation in 1974. Given that the GAA has helped both of these bodies along to a degree that their FAI and IRFU rivals both rightly envy, where do you say, is the fly in the ointment?

Mary McAleese is that fly and, in my opinion at least, neither she nor Mary Robinson nor any other careerist politician should chair those “family” discussions as it is indicative of the intention of our government to control all sporting institutions through the various webs women like McAleese and Robinson work through.

Though the GAA was once a financially and politically independent body, now they are dependent on government funding and Garth Brooks concerts to keep their show on the road. That government lifeline is a fishhook that allows the government to bring the GAA to heel whenever they like. We have seen that in the Liam Miller charity match at Páirc Uí Chaoimh, so named after former GAA secretary general Pádraig Ó Caoimh, who was vehemently against playing “foreign games” in GAA grounds and who, had he been alive when the Miller match was first mooted, might well have asked why the various teams Miller played for could not have chipped in £100k each to Miller’s family and saved them all the media headaches that ensued.

Cruel though that might seem, it does take account of our changing political times. Whether it is the Irish women’s soccer team, the Limerick hurlers or anyone else, our political class, together with their Visa, Coca Cola and other sponsors, want all to be subservient to them by making them dependent on the funds they control. So, good luck to the girls in green, to the Three Lionesses and all other women, who will compete down under in 2023. Good luck because you will need it when your political commissars pull the financial leash in on you a little tighter to make you conform. Don’t say you weren’t warned.