The most embarrassing of athletic debates is over: As of midnight last night, camogie players are free to sport the bottoms of their choosing.
At an emergency meeting of the Camogie Association held Thursday night in Dublin to quell increasingly loud protests, delegates repealed an antiquated rule that prohibited players of the ancient Gaelic game from wearing shorts, as their male counterparts always could. The vote was one-sided: The Camogie Association said after the meeting that 98 percent of the delegates at its hastily called Croke Park summit voted to do away with the misogynistic mandate immediately.
Camogie, for the unfamiliar, is the female version of hurling, a pastime that according the Gaelic Athletic Association has been “popular for at least 3,000 years in Ireland with the first literary reference dating back to 1272 BC.” The old game remains huge in Ireland and among some portion of the Irish diaspora but is largely unknown by the rest of the world. There have always been a few slight rules differences in how men and women played the game—men were allowed much more contact on the pitch, for example– but the uniform edicts were anything but uniform. Only hurlers could wear shorts. From the Camogie Association’s rulebook: “Playing gear...must consist of [a] skirt/skort/divided skirt, sports jersey with long or short sleeves, socks and boots.”
Like much of the misogyny on the island, the camogie dress code conformed with the wishes of Catholic Church leaders: A recent history of the sport in the County Mayo publication Western People said that Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid asserted nearly a century ago that women who "sought to compete athletically in the vicinity of men" were "un-Irish and un-Catholic."
In recent years, players had publicly labeled skorts as uncomfortable compared to shorts, while also pointing out that nobody’s forcing the men to play in ‘em. Either point should have been enough to do away with the females-only mandate. Hurling and camogie, however, are overseen by two different sanctioning bodies. The Gaelic Athletic Association governs hurling; the Camogie Association calls the shots in camogie, and has a past of resisting calls for change. In 2024, the Camogie Association delegates voted overwhelmingly to maintain the shorts ban. What's more, after announcing that the ban on shorts would live on, the association’s leaders ruled that they would not take up the dress code rule again until 2027.
But a lot has changed since that vote. Camogie players held protests that brought attention to the dress code in recent weeks, and made the mandate a national embarrassment. Players took the field in shorts at two provincial playoff matches, but were ordered back to the dressing rooms to change into mandated uniforms. A third playoff game got postponed because players threatened to ignore the rule and local camogie officials weren’t sure how to handle the tumult.
“In no other facet of my life does someone dictate that I have to wear something resembling a skirt because I am a girl," Aisling Maher, captain of Dublin's camogie squad, posted on Instagram after a protest. “Why is it happening in my sport?"
Gender-coded dress codes aren’t strictly an Irish problem. In the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, the women of the Finnish beach handball team were fined a reported 1,500 euros by the European Handball Association for playing in shorts instead of bikini bottoms. (Beach versions of indoor sports were Olympicized for women to show skin, which explains why male handballers were not forced to sport banana hammocks on the sand.) The disparate handball rules became a big deal when Pink, the American pop star, offered to pay the Finns' fine and shamed the sanctioners who kept in place. The bikini bottom bylaw was soon summarily bounced.
Leading up to yesterday's meeting, no camogie player or official from the Camogie Association spoke up in favor of the shorts ban. Several county camogie teams, however, announced beforehand that they were going to Dublin to knock the dress code out. And so they did.
"The GPA would like to put on the record our admiration for Camogie players across Ireland and beyond, both at inter-county and club level, who made their voices heard to ensure this outcome,” said Brian Molloy, Camogie Association uachtarán (or president) after the repeal vote. “From midnight tonight, each individual player will have the option to wear skorts or shorts—adding choice while maintaining the professionalism and uniformity of our team kits in both colour and design."
Actually, speaking of bizarre rules that somehow survived into the 21st century, Molloy's organization and the GAA still ban professionalism in camogie and hurling, even though players play in an 80,000-seat stadium before paying customers and national TV audiences. But: One arcane mandate down, more to go.
