Our ‘Most Influential Women In Irish Sport’ series has identified 50 Women working within or having an important influence over sport in Ireland in 2015. The list below is far from exhaustive. We could stretch to ten times this and still not find it hard to find women in what was once very much a man’s world that are making a massive contribution to how sport is played, how it is managed, how it is funded and how the next generations of boys and girls are being inspired to play and stay with sport for life.
This years list is in association with our Official Partners in Women’s Sport, Liberty Insurance.
We compiled the original list in 2014 in response to being told that it wasn’t possible.
In order to achieve parity of esteem for sport played by boys, girls, men and women we need to focus on it not as mens or women’s but as sport, in the same way we would health, or education. Equality is not an aspiration, it’s a right. Sport is still lagging behind where it should be but those who we will list below are working to ensure that does not last.
This list is borne of personal knowledge, advice and consultation with a wide circle, instinct, and a significant number of nominations. To those include we salute you. To those who have not made the list this year, keep working away and we will be back again in May 2016 with a new list for a new year, perhaps including some of the 35 more listed at the bottom who are making a mark in ways equal to those who we have had the space to feature over the last ten weeks.
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Debbie Byrne is Marketing Director of Lifestyle Sports, Ireland’s largest sports retailer. Consumer spending on sport is a significant part of the economy and one of the largest areas for that is in sportswear to play in and increasingly to wear in daily life.
Byrne has overseen the opening of the new flagship Lifestyle Sports store on Grafton Street and is a key player in how many people will be wearing replica shirts for the Rugby World Cup, the start of the Premier League and as they participate in ever increasing numbers.
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Suzanne Eade is a name that will be new to most but she will shortly be taking over as the Group Chief Financial Officer of Horse Racing Ireland, replacing Margaret Davin who is retiring. The role controls one of the largest expenditure accounts in Irish sport and is key to the liaison between the sport and its many stakeholders including Government through the Horse and Greyhound Racing Fund.
Eade joins HRI from Boots Retail Ireland where she was Finance Director. She has also held senior roles in the multinational sector including with Procter and Gamble.
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Annalise Murphy has flown the flag for sailing since coming agonisingly close to a medal at the London Olympics. Her intention after that was to keep improving with a view to setting the record straight in Rio. She has since become a European Champion and travelled the world in search of ranking points and titles.
She has not forgotten her roots though and played a major part in promoting the Dun Laoghaire Regatta in July of this year. The next twelve months will see her step up again in the intensity of the public gaze. She will be well up to that task and hopefully to the bigger one in Rio. Now that would influence her sport.
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Ellen Keane is a Paralympic triple World Championship medal winning swimmer who is an inspiring role model to young women regardless of ability or disability. Age 19 she has already competed at two Paralympics in Beijing and London and hopes to make it three in Rio next summer.
Keane did her Leaving Cert last year only weeks before competing in the European Championships and is now studying culinary entrepreneurship at DIT. Bright, sparky and willing to overcome every challenge thrown at her, Keane is a star in and out of the pool.
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Nuala Kroondijk is the Sponsorship Marketing Manager with AIB and returned from maternity leave at the bank to step straight into making the most of the brand becoming the latest partner of the GAA All Ireland Football Championship.
Stepping up from the long term partner of the All Ireland Club Championship could have been a real challenge but the blend of that into the promotion of the inter county game has been both overt and seamless. The first ads linking The Legion and Fingallians clubs as ‘suppliers’ of James O’Donoghue and Paul Flynn to Kerry and Dublin hit exactly the right note.
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Sinead Galvin is responsible for all marketing communications and sponsorship at Athletics Ireland. She delivered GloHealth’s national sponsorship of the sport in 2014 and has been a key player in developing the growth of major running events from the Great Ireland Run to the Grant Thornton Corporate 5K Challenge.
Galvin won the Presentation of the Year at the 2014 Sport for Business 20/20 event and has overseen the development of the Athletics Ireland web and online presence through great use of video and storytelling.
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Carol McMahon is Head of Business Marketing and Sponsorship at Ulster Bank. She manages the Bank’s association with the IRFU through its role as community partner and as the local activator of the RBS partnership with the Six Nations.
McMahon also oversaw the banks involvement with the GAA All Ireland Football Championship, and with Ulster Bank’s future now secured in Ireland and banking becoming more engaged again with partnership deals that will reach business and personal customers she will continue to play a key role in the sports sponsorship arena.
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Sarah Keane is the CEO of Swim Ireland and, since last August, one of only two women to sit on the Olympic Council of Ireland. It was her legal background that helped to bring swimming back to the mainstream after years of being more in the courts than the pool but now it has firmly established itself as Ireland’s most popular participation sport.
The Swim for a Mile challenge has been among the most successful mass promotions of exercise in recent years and with competitors sealing their places for the Rio Olympics and Paralympics in recent weeks the sport looks set to continue its rise under Keane’s stewardship.
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Mary Davis is Managing Director of Special Olympics Europe and Asia Chair of Special Olympics Ireland.
She is currently is preparing for the World Games taking place in Los Angeles later this month. She was a key player in hosting those same games here in Ireland in 2003 and retains strong influence within the corridors of power.
She was a founder of Social Entrepreneurs Ireland and has served on the Irish Sports Council, the National Sports Campus Development Authority and many other organisations that deliver in terms of sport, equality and opportunity in Ireland.
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Sinead Heraty is Chief Executive of the Irish Ladies Golf Union and in charge of managing an expected upswing in interest among young players brought about by the global success of Stephanie Meadows and Leona Maguire. The latter’s close second in the European Masters at the weekend and status as the number one amateur golfer in the world is testament to the structures put in place within the ILGU to increase active participation among young girls.
The partnership of the different ruling bodies in golf as part of the Confederation of Irish Golf has been a step forward in terms of equality but a major challenge remains in raising Irelands proportion of active women golfers closer to, and hopefully beyond, the international norm of 30%.
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Jackie Dunne is the Chair of Basketball Ireland and has overseen some rapid change for the better within the organisation during her term of office. A return to international action, a 3×3 team playing and winning at the European Olympics last month, a three year deal with TG4 bringing the domestic sport back onto free to air TV deals and recent sponsorship deals with Subway, Molten and others have left the organisation in strong shape.
Dunne has recently taken up a global role in financial services with Merrill Lynch but continues to play a leading role within the sport and supporting CEO Bernard O’Byrne.
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Megan Frazer is Captain of the Irish Hockey team and has to bounce back from the heartache of coming so close to qualification for next year’s Rio Olympics. They say that it is always better to judge character by how quickly you bounce back from defeat than how you celebrate victory and Frazer will need to take a lead role in ensuring that Hockey capitalises on coming so close.
As a role model with Ulster Elks in the new EY National Hockey League she will be leading from the front in a sport with huge potential.
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Helen O’Rourke is Chief Executive of the Ladies Gaelic Football Association. As such she leads the largest team based sports organisation for women in the country. With sponsorship deals from Tesco and TV coverage a regular feature on TG4 the sport has an important role to play in the rapid momentum developing around women’s sport as a participation and spectator experience.
25,000 fans went to Croke Park last year for the All Ireland Final between Cork and Dublin and the challenge now is for that support to filter through to matches on the road to the biggest day of the year.
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Beatrice Cosgrove is the Northern Europe Area Manager for Etihad Airways and a powerful influence on the airline’s long term and growing investment in partnership with the GAA. As sponsors of the All Ireland Hurling Championship they broadcast last year’s final live on their international aircraft and support for the GAA World Games and GAAGo has been instrumental in expanding the Association’s international ambitions.
Cosgrove joined Etihad ahead of its launch in Ireland in 2008 having previously worked with Continental and All Nippon Airlines.
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Linda Hoey is Host Union Services Manager for the Rugby World Cup at World Rugby. She is currently jetting between England 2015 and Japan 2019 as well as laying the groundwork for the bidding to host the tournament in 2023.
That has already begun with a new programme of knowledge transfer seeing potential hosts, including Ireland, seeing at close quarters what it takes to host a Rugby World Cup through sessions learning from the activity going into this autumn’s tournament in England.
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Jane McDaid is the founder and head of Thinkhouse the agency that works closely with Three and Heineken to promote some of the biggest commercial partnerships in Irish sport. Digital storytelling around the Irish soccer and rugby teams as well as through the Champions League and Champions’ Cup in both sports passes her eye before spreading out through social and mainstream channels to link the brands to the emotion of the sport.
It’s a big year ahead for both brands and on top of that Thinkhouse also looked after digital media PR around the Irish Open Golf, assisting in the tournament selling out at Royal County Down.
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Joan O’Flynn is CEO of the Camogie Association. In the year and a half since taking over the role she has pushed new channels of social media and engaged in a very meaningful way with the debate around Women in Sport. As a former President of the Association and a top public servant she has seen the sometimes twisted road that needs to be travelled to effect change and has obviously kept a map.
The biggest challenges will be to maintain momentum in terms of the growth of players and clubs but also to attract bigger attendances to the top games and especially to the final of the Liberty Insurance sponsored Camogie All Ireland Final in September.
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Sharon Walsh is Marketing Director at Heineken Ireland. Since joining the brand from Coca Cola in 2011 she has overseen the Irish management and activation of two of the biggest sponsorship deals in sport the Heineken Cup and the Champions’ League.
So succesful was the Heineken Ireland contribution to the partnership first with the Heineken Cup and then with the newly formed European Champions’ Cup that the Irish team have been given the lead role in managing the global activation of the brands association with this year’s Rugby World Cup.
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Sinead McNulty is Head of Sport at the Dublin Institute of Technology. DIT has begun the transition to its new campus at Grangegorman and is among the third level institutions most likely to drive sport as part of an overall education in the coming years.
Sport is very much at the heart of what has been the largest single capital building project in the history of Irish state education. McNulty’s role is to manage elite and participation programmes that will make the most of the new facilities. McNulty sits on the board of Student Sport Ireland and has experience of working across local authorities and in business with AIB.
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Sharon Hutchinson is the creator of Sportswomen.ie and a passionate and dedicated advocate of women in sport across the entire sporting spectrum. Having played as an international goalkeeper in hockey and lectured in Chemistry for a spell at Cork Institute of Technology it was a big leap to kick off an online service that consistently highlights the best of Women’s sport.
Alongside others though, including the Women’s Sports Journal, Hutchinson has shown that creating a space in the online world can be of value to sports that are finding it hard to break through to the world of mainstream media. The whole landscape of how we consume news and information is changing all the time and she is deserving of a place in this list for here efforts to harness that change.
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Lisa Comerford is Consumer Marketing Director at Eircom. Now into the 5th year of its sponsorship of the All Ireland Football Championship and the 30th year of a partnership with Special Olympics Lisa is an important voice in ensuring sport stays at the top table in the business.
With its mix of mobile, broadband and television eircom is a real player across all the channels through which sport is distributed and consumed. The standard it sets in a deep relationship, especially involving staff engagement, through Special Olympics is one for others to aim at and Comerford will retain responsibility for making sure that remains and is fully justified.
She comes from a psychology and research background and has worked in the past at Coca Cola.
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Fionnuala Britton has been the dominant performance athlete in athletics in Ireland over the last four years. She has taken on the mantle of Sonia O’Sullivan and performed to medal standard at European and Wolrd level. Two European Cross Country title have lifted her as a role model for the 9% of women who list running as their number one physical activity.
She has been involved in the promotion of events like the Spar Mile in Dublin and will be a headline member of the Irish team travelling to Rio for next Summer’s Olympic Games to compete in the Marathon. Every one of the 40,000 who competed in the VHI Women’s Marathon will be rooting for her to make it.
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Anne O’Leary, the Vodafone CEO in Ireland is an influence in many areas from business to technology but sport is an important part of her life and how she is seen. As a keen triathlete who values the benefits of exercise she has introduced a well-being area to the company’s Sandyford campus and sees physical fitness as an important element of running a business.
Vodafone has been a key partner of Triathlon Ireland and as workplace fitness takes on an increasingly important role within Corporate Ireland’s ways of thinking it is likely that O’Leary will continue to play a key influential role in how that is implemented.
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Meta Osborne is the highest serving official within the multi million Irish Horse racing industry. A qualified vet and former president of the Veterinary Council of Ireland she is currently a Director of Horse racing Ireland and Deputy Steward of the Turf Club.
If as expected she steps up to the senior role later this year it will be the first time a woman has held such a position. She combines these positions with a strong role as a veterinary practitioner and breeder and is chairing a task force established this year to look closely at drug testing in the sport.
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Lisa Clancy is Director of Communications at the GAA. It is a powerful position and one which had never been held at such a level by a woman. Clancy came well prepared having served in senior communications roles within the HSE and has developed a position as a trusted and effective leader within the sport and the media.
Clancy has brought the GAA into the digital age launching and managing the Association’s Facebook and twitter streams that have expanded its voice into areas that were never going to be simple for a traditional and very diverse organisation, but which have delivered in style.
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Frances Kavanagh is Director of Sport with Special Olympics Ireland and is preparing to send Ireland’s largest ever group of individual competitors to a World Tournament in Los Angeles this summer.
Kavanagh was re-appointed last year as a member of the Irish Sports Council and has also been President of the Federation of Irish Sports and Chair of the International Sports Rules Advisory Committee. She is a persuasive advocate for equality of opportunity and has been a strong influence for good over the Irish sporting arena since playing a key role in the 2003 Special Olympics World Games hosted here.
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Jillian Saunders has a strong position of sponsorship influence over not one but two major sports. SSE Airtricity’s Brand and Sponsorship Marketing Manager oversees the Dublin City Marathon in October as well as the SSE Airtricity partnership as naming rights sponsor for the domestic soccer league and official energy partner with the FAI.
Having stepped up to the role less than a year ago she has already made a mark with new fan engagement ideas around the clubs and activation of the Marathon externally through new app technology as well as internally through encouraging 50 staff members to run the race in 2014.
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Niamh O’Donoghue is one of only three women on the National Council of the FAI. As Chair of the Women’s Committee though she has overseen substantial progress in how the game is treated. The success of underage teams in recent years, as well as the influx of additional commercial support has been under her watch as voluntary Chair at a time when she has also held down the position of Secretary General in the Department of Social Protection.
Having such strong influence over two areas of public life is a measure of the energy she brings to the roles and qualification for a first major Championships starting in September would be a fine reward for the planning and effort that has gone in.
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Anna Geary‘s influence as Captain of the Cork Camogie team will be missed this year after her retirement from the inter county scene but that will free up time for her to expand her influence on a potentially wider stage. Among the most engaging stars within Gaelic Games she is involved in promotional activity for a variety of companies including Liberty Insurance, Aramark and Dell and she is on the Committee of the Women’s Gaelic Players Association.
Geary has the magic of people wanting to be in her company. She has the steel of setting a goal and reaching it time and time again. She will be among a strong cohort of Cork women whose hanging up boots or spikes was only the start of another chapter of influence.
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Qualification for the European Championships in 2017 would transform how Women’s soccer is viewed in Ireland and that is the aim for Sue Ronan, as national team manager
The Women’s World Cup in Canada taking place in June and July will be broadcast to hundreds of millions of homes across the world. Stars will become known across the mainstream media in the same way as Stephanie Roche transcended what was seen as ‘normal.’
Since last year Continental Tyres have come on board as sponsors of the Women’s National League and that has raised Ronan’s profile, a development she is as comfortable with as she is developing squads to compete on world stages.
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Maev Nic Lochlainnn is Head of Sports Policy and the National Sports Campus Division at the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport. As such she is one of the key decision makers in framing how the Government relates to sport and will do over the next decade. A former management consultant with PwC, she has held senior public service roles in Communications and Transport as well as with the Dublin Airport Authority.
She is presently working on the implementation of the new structures in sports governance resulting from the Sport Ireland Bill and is playing a key role in the new National Sports Policy statement expected to be published shortly and in the development of the National Physical Activity Plan in concert with the Department of Health.
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Valerie Mulcahy is one of the group of Cork footballers who have dominated their sport like no other over the past decade. This year She played a key role in winning the National League Division One title when all seemed lost, just as she did in last year’s All Ireland Final. This summer she will bid for a tenth All Ireland title.
She is not only defined by her talent on the field though. She is a teacher in her native Cork, a leader within the newly created Women’s Gaelic Players Association and one of the reasons why Ireland voted Yes in the Equality Referendum last week. Mulcahy used an RTÉ Documentary earlier this year to talk openly for the first time about the fact she is gay. She canvassed and campaigned for a Yes vote because she believes in equality.
Being gay is a part of her, but it has been challenging to live her life within sport. That’s changing and she has played a big part in making sexuality as relevant as any other personal choice a player might make that is important to them but of no impact whatsoever on her ability to make great scores. Well done Valerie.
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Annette Ní Dhathlaoí is Head of Marketing at Liberty Insurance and was a key decision maker in signing the deal to sponsor the All Ireland Hurling and Camogie Championships from 2013 through to 2017.
Her career in Irish business has covered Nestle, Glanbia, Unilever, Heineken and Electric Ireland, all in senior brand and marketing roles. This year she has taken on new responsibilities at Liberty but remains central to the brands commitment to giving equal prominence to Women in Sport.
Ní Dhathlaoí has been key to recognising its potential for reaching new audiences in an engaging way. A major event in the coming weeks will cement her and Liberty’s roles as key players in the area and certainly of huge influence in its future development commercially and socially.
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Geraldine Larkin was appointed last year to the role of CEO of the Irish Greyhound Board. Her appointment has come at a time when the sport is continuing its stepping up as an important part of the rural and urban sporting infrastructure. Development in stadia and expansion to overseas betting markets promise a bright future for a sport that has a long traditional place in Irish society.
Because of Government funding through the Horse and Greyhound Racing Fund there is substantial oversight from the Department of Agriculture on how things are run, and intense scrutiny from sections of the media over perceived sins within the sport in the past. To date Larkin has performed with assurance and has overseen the extension of major sponsorship deals as well as a new ‘Jumping in the City’ partnership with Horse Sport Ireland.
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Sonia O’Sullivan is recognised as one of the greatest international sporting stars that Ireland has produced. A three time European Champions and two time World Cross Country Champion, she became World 5,000 metres Champion in 1995 and memorably ran to a silver medal in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Since retiring from competitive running in 2007 she has maintained a high public profile in both commercial and administrative terms. In 2012 she was Chef de Mission for the Irish Olympic team at the London games. This summer she will be back in Dublin promoting her own 5K race in partnership with Athletics Ireland. She is also crossing over having been a special guest at the Liberty Insurance GAA Coaching Conference in January.
The continued affection in which she is held gives her a strong platform to engage people in healthy sporting activity, a powerful angle in a world where the importance of fitness continues to climb.
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Múirne Laffan is Managing Director of Digital at RTE and has had primary responsibility for the development and growth of GAA Go, the joint venture with the GAA now into its second year of subscription based streaming to international audiences.
Content and production values around the programming have been stepped up again this year with The Sunday Game highlights now available as well as almost all the televised GAA Championship matches across the summer. Last year the global audience was over 600,000 and growth is forecast again for 2015.
Laffan also has responsibility for RTE’s online services in which sport plays a major part, and was a speaker at last year’s Sport for Business Digital Sport event. She is on the Executive Board of RTÉ and is a Council Member of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce.
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Sarah O’Shea is the Deputy CEO of the Football Association of Ireland. With big games coming up against England and Scotland, qualification in the balance for Euro 2016 and the detail of hosting Euro 2020 in Dublin, she is set for a busy period of time.
She is a qualified solicitor and joined the FAI as Legal Director in 2006 having qualified through the FIFA Masters programme. She also sits on a number of influential EUFA committees and alongside CEO John Delaney presents a powerful presence for Ireland amid the corridors of power in soccer.
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When AIB came on board this spring as sponsor of the All Ireland Football Championship it was a big moment for Maire Scully, who heads the sport and sponsorship division of Wilson Hartnell. With Supervalu, Liberty Insurance and Electric Ireland already on the books it is an incredibly strong concentration of access around the highs of the summer.
Having started her career with Aer Lingus and worked as a press officer with Basketball Ireland as well as in Journalism, Scully has seen every side of the equation when it comes to the business of sponsorship and the activation of rights. That serves her well in putting the case for some of the biggest brands behind Irish sport.
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May has been a big month for Fiona Hampton, Head of Sales and Marketing for Ulster Rugby. On the 30th Kingspan Stadium will host the first ‘Destination Final’ for the Guinness Pro12. And earlier it was announced that World Rugby and the IRFU would be bringing the Women’s Rugby World Cup Final to Belfast in 2017.
Those two big wins are down in no small part to the effort and attention to detail that Hampton has delivered in the five years since she joined Ulster from the Odyssey Arena. Hailed by colleagues in the Event and Tourism field she is one of the few women making a mark on the administrative side of Rugby in Ireland but is destined to play an ever more important role over the coming years.
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Katie Taylor believes in God, trusts in her family and happens to be a five time World Champion and Olympic Gold Medallist. Influence comes in many forms and most could be attached to what Taylor has done throughout her career to date.
She is the best known and most admired sportsperson in Ireland. She is an inspiration to millions of women around the world as someone who achieved all her goals in a totally male dominated world but never lost an ounce of humility along the way. Taylor is not yet finished with boxing. She has more Championships to win and perhaps one more Gold in Rio 2016. Regardless though of what the future holds in sport she has made an impression on Ireland that will last a lifetime and beyond.
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Sarah O’Connor has been Chief Executive of the Federation of Irish Sport since 2006 and played a key role in promoting the collective benefit and importance of sport to Government. Her ability to draw together different sporting bodies in presenting a united argument for sport is highly regarded.
Numbers such as the 40,000 jobs maintained by sport, and the €1.8 Billion of household spending it generates have been the result of her diligent pressing for a well state case that ‘Sport Matters’. She is also a member of the National Sports Campus Development Authority, Chair of Boardmatch Ireland and uses her Law background as Registrar of Just Sport Ireland, the countries only sports law arbitration service.
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It has taken over 125 years but in December Roisin Jordan became the first woman to be elected as Chairperson of a County GAA Board. The clubs and voters of Tyrone were happy to make history because of the credentials and the hard work that she had delivered down the years in administration within the county.
Those are exactly the attributes that have led to over 1,000 Chairs being selected down the history of the Association. Jordan was recognised for her work rather than her gender and the fact that it was news at all will hopefully look strange looking back in years to come. Being the first can never be taken away.
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Sport is nothing without integrity. It may sometimes not feel like that, but underneath the glamour and the show, people need to believe that what they see is real. Ethics are a tough subject in life and sport is no different. The person charged with upholding them in Irish sport is Dr Una May.
As Director of Participation and Ethics she plays a twin role in ensuring that sport remains as good as it can be, and that it is part of as many lives as it should be. That’s a responsibility which all involved at every level of sport need to take very seriously. She does and as head of the anti doping unit she has been a world leader in making steady but substantial progress in the battle for honest sportsmanship.
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Some of the biggest decisions in Irish sports sponsorship will cross the desk of Elaine Carey over the next 12 months. As the Chief Commercial Officer with Three she will run the rule over the investment the company has either made or inherited in being the main partner of the Irish national soccer team, the Irish national rugby team and the current Allianz League Hurling Champions Waterford in GAA.
This intense concentration of major assets has arisen through the takeover of O2 and with Vodafone revenues falling in the last quarter their will be pressure to justify renewing the investment. There are many reasons why all are a good fit and can be assigned to different business sections. It is Carey who will be charged with weighing them up. She knows the business well having been in senior roles at Three for eight years and before that working in senior positions at Eircom and Digicel.
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The biggest influential factor in sport remains what it is that is broadcast to the biggest audiences. Cliona O’Leary, as Deputy Head of TV Sport in RTÉ sits at the top table when it comes to determining the content and the quality of what that means in Ireland. Working closely with Group Head of Sport Ryle Nugent O’Leary is central to every decision on what and how is broadcast on TV in sport at national and international level.
She has earned her position through serving as series editor in GAA, Soccer and Rugby coverage and was the senior person within the RTÉ team, covering recent World Cups and Olympic Games. She fights hard for sport to maintain its high profile within the national broadcaster and is one whose decisions make a very real difference across all aspects of sport.
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The person responsible for one of the biggest single sources of investment in Irish sport over the past four years is Carál Ní Chuilín, the Northern Ireland Executive Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure. She has green lighted over £110 Million (€152 Million) of public expenditure on the redevelopment of Kingspan Stadium, Windsor Park and Casement Park across the city of Belfast and the job is only part done.
She will be central to the ongoing challenges of planning and construction at the latter two but will take heart from seeing the fruits of her labour when the home of Ulster Rugby hosts the Guinness Pro12 Final at the end of May. Northern Ireland will be a key component in the bids for the island of Ireland to host the Rugby World Cup in 2023 and the Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2017.
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She is only one of a team but Stephanie Roche has lifted Women’s soccer in Ireland to a level more in keeping with how it is seen, valued and respected around the world. Her appearance in the top 3 Goals of the Year at the Puskas Awards made her a household name here and will have prompted thousands of young girls to join the surge in participation within soccer.
With Ireland starting off a qualification campaign for the European Championships in Dublin in September, it must be expected and ancouraged that the grassroots growth will lead to pressure on families to attend more of the top Ireland games. Stephanie Roche will be a key marketing plus in terms of fulfilling the undoubted potential that there is in the Girls in Green.
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This time last year Aoife Lane was planning and preparing to give a platform to Women playing Camogie and Gaelic Football at inter county level. She has succeeded through getting great support from the players around the country. The WGPA, launched only in January has already created opportunities for players to voice their concerns, benefit from scholarships and look forward to other services in line with those available through the GPA to men. Even in these early days she is already making a real difference.
There will be challenges ahead in terms of funding and perhaps some hard conversations with governing bodies about the different views that may be held on issues that impact the sports, but Lane looks certain to meet them with the same measured determination and enthusiasm she put into launching the Association in the first place.
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Fiona Coghlan led Ireland to it’s first RBS 6 Nations Grand Slam and to the semi final of last Summer’s World Cup. Throughout these initial halcyon days for the sport she has been an ambassador to be proud of. Media savvy, and with the energy to combine her teaching job in Lucan with wanting to give as much as he can back to the sport which she only took up on arrival in UL back in 2001.
She is committed to encouraging more girls to take up the sport and what she has done on and off the field has played a massive role in growing Women’s Rugby beyond what we might have thought possible only a short while ago. With a bid to host the Women’s World Cup in 2017 under way it is hoped that Coghlan will play a big part in a bright future.
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Niamh Briggs had the daunting task of taking over from Fiona Coghlan as Captain of the Irish Women’s Rugby Team while at the same time maintaining her central role in keeping the team at the top of it’s game. To say she has passed with flying colours would be a massive understatement and regaining the RBS 6 Nations Tournament this spring is a sign that these days of glory for Women’s Rugby will be around for a long time yet.
Briggs was originally a Gaelic Footballer and has a love of all sport but Rugby caught her eye while studying at Waterford Institute of Technology and with Dungarvan RFC and Ireland is lucky that it did. Her skill in place kicking is not the product of weeks of intensive coaching with the best in the game. She admitted to me in advance of a recent radio interview that she learned the technique from You Tube. She is a serving Garda in Limerick in between pushing Women’s Rugby to new heights, and is one of the most engaging characters you could meet in sport.
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Compiling this list has been a great pleasure and an incredible challenge. It’s easy to include those who make a difference, less so to pass over those who have every bit an equal claim to be recognised for their efforts.
The media is less well represented in this year’s list but that is a sign of strength. reporters like Jacqui Hurley, Joanne Cantwell, Marie Crowe, Cliona Foley, Sinead Kissane, Evanne Ní Chuillin, Clare McNamara and Rachel Wyse are leading a charge to bring fresh perspective and intelligent analysis to our screens and pages and have in many ways already achieved the breakthrough. Those contributing to the Women’s Sports Journal, analysts like Fiona Steed, Mags Darcy and young documentary maker Darainne Mulvihill are also ensuring that there is plenty coming through in the next wave.
In the agency world that brings sport and business together there is also a massive influence being brought to bear by women like Kelli O’Keefe, Jill Downey, Pauline McAlester, Aoife McDonald, Maeve Buckley, Rachel Solon, Sinead Finnegan, Lydia Tierney and so many more.
In sports administration, perhaps the hardest ceiling to break through people with immense talent like Orla Strumble in Greyhound Racing, Tracey Kennedy, Rebecca Hocking and Jennifer Gleeson in GAA, Jane Davis and Barbara White in Horse racing, Eavan Mulligan, Orla O’Shea and Miriam Malone in soccer, Caroline Ledwith in Gymnastics, Nora Stapleton, Christina Smyth and Deirdre O’Connell in Rugby, Siobhan Earley, Kate Kirby and Gemma Begley in representing the interests of players and so many more across so many sports are showing that performance is not a gender issue.
From the business world women’s hands are on the sponsorship and partnership budgets at so many companies that to list all this influencers would take into next year.
Creating equality of opportunity and parity of esteem is in our control, as mens and women who want to make a difference. Keep representing the talent and tremendous influence of Women in sport and we will get there.
Thank you for being part of this list as a reader.
