The days of the skort are numbered, will it even see out the 2025 season?
IN THE SCRAPBOOK at home, there were more than a few pictures of my mother’s heyday playing camogie.
Camogie featured heavily in their sporting diets. The Wifi wasn’t great.
No reference was too fleeting and all clippings were preserved like precious artifacts, even one detailing how an uncle, a former county footballer, was home from Birmingham on his holidays and spent an evening refereeing a game at short notice.
Back in the late ’60s and ’70s, the main thing you notice was the kit the players wore.
Pinafores, I believe. Boxy, stiff, restrictive, all-in-one garments that made the playing of sport less enjoyable.
Not so much your Speedo ‘Second Skin’ concept, as explained by Billy Connolly when he described the typical swimwear of the west of Scotland family on holiday, ‘but second cardigan.’
Onwards then to the ’80s and the introduction of jersey and a skort. Even the invention of a compound word to indicate that this garment wasn’t quite a skirt, wasn’t quite a pair of shorts, feels like a twisted joke that Éamon de Valera foisted on the nation before he shuffled off this mortal coil.
If memory serves, the offending garment was as heavy as some offcuts of tarpaulin, with pleats ironed in so sharp that it could have severed a limb.
Even armed with all these watery anecdotes, ‘Skorting Around The Issue’ was the column topic that was always there on the emergency list, bobbling around with others that you could, at any time, have knocked a handy 950 words from.
Only, you never did. Why is that? Because it was one of those topics that just seemed too obvious, too boring, too damn ridiculous.
Unless you played Devil’s Advocate and really went for it in a BorisJohnsonification effort where you dictated that, actually, it was perfectly fine to dictate to women what they should wear and that they bloody well should get on with it.
In a pre-Weinstein world, that might have even flown. Sepp Blatter suggested that women’s soccer would instantly become more popular by introducing tighter kits. In the past, some columnists have even gone as far as to suggest the same for women’s Gaelic games. You’d doubt they keep a copy preserved in their portfolio.
Only after the protest of Dublin and Kilkenny camogie players in the Leinster semi-final has it become an issue. If raising awareness is what they wanted, then they achieved that.
It was a timely protest in that a Gaelic Player’s Association survey published last week held that 70% of inter-county camogie players found the skort to be uncomfortable, while 83% felt the individual player should have a choice between shorts or the skort.
Concerns around skorts include testimony from players who have been exposed in social media from pictures taking while playing, while some have stated it impacts on their play in a negative way. Almost half said they experienced anxiety around their period showing.
That’s not good. In fact that’s awful.
At underage level, within my own hurling and camogie club, the coaches tell me that a lot of young girls absolutely hate the skort and every time they take the field there are at least a couple who try to wear shorts. It takes very little to put some young girls off playing sports. Why create this barrier?
We also learned that four separate motions brought to Camogie Congress in 2024 relating to playing gear were defeated. So administrators are taking the players for granted.
The Camogie Association have had their say. They are not for budging.
They might have to think again in the coming days and weeks. Many more protests are reputedly planned.
And the thing is, it will be easy to object now. The hard work has been done by the Kilkenny and Dublin camogs. The arguments by many but most especially by Ashling Maher has painted any opponents into a corner. There is no counter-argument. None whatsoever.
So here’s the solution.
The Camogie Association calls an Extraordinary General Meeting. All the delegates are directed by a vote taken among their intercounty squad. The motion is passed.
At club level, one club brings up a motion at the next county meeting, to apply to camogie within their county. Every club then takes their vote.
Sports administration has a habit of making out things are complicated. They really are not.
Because of all the things camogie players and camogie people could get het up about, this doesn’t deserve to be an issue.
There are huge issues with creating a calendar of fixtures with venues nailed down. Player welfare is still not perfect in many counties. Camogie needs a little help from the Hurling Development Committee in growing the game.
There’s also a deeper philosophical issue about the direction of camogie. For years, players have been crying out for a greater tolerance to contact, which has only recently been relaxed.
Given the choice, most would wish to play hurling, basically.
A couple of weekends back, Wexford’s Lee Chin went viral with a clip of him blocking down a Dublin player using his hands, having lost his hurl.
While it is undoubtedly an act of raw courage, anyone who had watched Cork camogie player Ashling Thompson’s episode of Laochra Gael would recall her in an insane pursuit of an opponent, sans hurl, with hands in the air trying to block a shot down.
This is the game as it is: athletic excellence, courage, mad amounts of skill. It’s a vision of Irish womanhood generations and worlds removed from the de Valera notion of comely maidens at the crossroads.
The days of the skort are numbered. It will do well to see out this season.
The 42
