Sarah Keane is the President of the Olympic Federation of Ireland and CEO of Swim Ireland. She has been the highest-profile woman in sports administration in Ireland for more than a decade and has been ever-present on this list through its eleven years of publication.

In the past twelve months, she has overseen the hosting of the World U23 Swimming Championships at the Sport Ireland Campus and the strongest pipeline of young swimmers that Ireland has ever seen.

She is pushing hard for the funding and implementation of a national swimming strategy and representing Ireland as an elected member of the World Aquatics Bureau, the International Governing Body for Aquatic Sports.

And that is just the day job.

In her ‘spare’ time she is the President of the Olympic Federation of Ireland going into a centenary year for that organisation and the Paris Games that will see Ireland’s largest-ever team competing. And for good measure, she is on the Commission of the Central Bank of Ireland.

She was a key player in saving the reputation of the Olympic ideal in Ireland after the trauma of scandal and repercussions arising out of Rio in 2016, and of swimming as it faced its own dark days of abuse scandals before that.

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This is the 11th edition of our Sport for Business listing of 50 Women of Influence in Irish Sport.

Read more about the list and nominate who you think should be a part of it in 2023.

We are proud to publish the list in partnership with AIG, an organisation that has pledged its commitment to equality in its partnerships with Gaelic Games, Tennis, Golf and more, for whom “Effort is Equal” and with whom we have ambitious plans to extend the reach of this annual celebration of the Women who are making a difference.

This year’s list will be drawn as before from the worlds of leadership, partnership, storytelling, and performance.

We began this journey in 2013 when challenged that we would never be able to produce a list of twenty Influential Women in Irish Sport. The 20 stretched to 30, then 40 and 50 and it still does not do justice to the talent that is out there.

This year once more, to keep things fresh we will step up again, raising the number of new entrants to at least 40 percent of fresh names from last year.

It will be the hardest part to have some names replaced but if it was too easy it would be of less value.

The list we will build over the coming weeks is a snapshot of those women who are making a mark on how sport is played, consumed, grown, and delivered.

They are part of making the role of women in sport unexceptional by being exceptional in what they do.