Sledging has long since been part of the Gaelic football landscape. But the details can still stop you in your tracks.
A large part of the focus of Tyrone football star Conor Meyler’s PhD is inequality in gender in the GAA, and the battle for full integration of ladies football and camogie. Think that would hardly be ammunition for the sledgers? You’d be wrong.
“I got abused a few times when playing with Tyrone over this. Players making a jibe about it, questioning my sexuality and giving me homophobic abuse,” said the Omagh man and 2021 All-Ireland winner who sat out the entire 2024 season through injury.
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“Then there’d be fellas going ‘what are you doing here, you should be playing for Tyrone ladies’. Just stupid stuff like that. Then there are fellas who don’t want to stand with ‘United for Equality’ banners, saying it’s a distraction. What are you being distracted from? Be for real here.
“If you look at the votes in favour of integration, it’s huge. When it comes to surveys, there’s loads of male allies but, see, when it comes to actually doing something about it, men won’t speak up.”
Which begs an obvious question – why?
“Fear. In the GAA world, there’s still this thing about keeping your head down and saying nothing about anything. Go back to the role model thing. How can you keep your head down and say nothing when you have a moral compass that doesn’t align with that?
“I do feel a moral pull to do the right thing, and the right thing is having a system where women are given the same opportunity as men. Look at the drop-out rate in women’s sport. Look at the medical care, we talked earlier about the problems with it in the men’s game but it’s a lot worse for women.
“I’m not trying to be some kind of angelic figure here. I didn’t do anything about gender equality for 25 years. I was so focused on my own game that it wasn’t a priority for me.
“Your gift can become your curse. It’s our greatest strength that we have the amateur ethos and the sense of community and connection but it’s also a weakness because it means we’re slow to make change and move.
“The GAA is our biggest sporting organisation and there’s still far more men than women in positions of power. That says you value men more than women – to me, it’s a big red flag.”
Tyrone’s Conor Meyler celebrates with the Sam Maguire in 2021
(Image: ©INPHO/Ryan Byrne)
Meyler’s eyes were opened when he took a deep dive into the subject. It was clear that women were decades behind the men, in terms of the way they were treated.
“I wanted to do a PhD but didn’t know what in, I had a conversation with Dr Aoife Lane and an opportunity came up. Aoife and the other PhD advisors are phenomenal academics but even better people. Only for them, I don’t know if I’d have been able to stick out the PhD,” he said.
“I started to do the research and realised ‘holy shit, this is a shambles how unequal it is’. Then you kind of felt a moral obligation to do something because nobody else was. I wasn’t hearing much from other men, standing up to say ‘this isn’t right’. Number one is because we’re selfish and so concerned about our own game. And, number two, people would actually…they’d question your motives as a male. They’d question your sexuality, presuming you’re gay, or they’d think you had some other ulterior motive.
“We get looked after to a fair extent but female players are treated shockingly. If we’re to get integration, it’s not that men lose out but that everyone benefits. My thing with equality is to give equal opportunity.
“At the minute, it’s actually on the decline. We’ve lost 35 to 40 of our best female footballers (to Aussie Rules). If you took Con O’Callaghan, David Clifford, Darragh Canavan etc out of the men’s game, the standard would drop hugely.
“There is a thing in the GAA that ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. That we’ve always done it that way. But that way was at the expense of women. That doesn’t make it right.”
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