Mary O’Connor: ‘20x20 shouldn’t come across as by women for women — it’s about everybody’
Mary O’Connor is chief executive of the Federation of Irish Sport. She is a former acting chief executive of the Camogie Association, holds 12 All-Ireland medals in camogie and ladies football, and is a driving force behind the 20x20 initiative.
A. A lot of the individual NGBs (national governing bodies) had been working on different ways to raise the profile of women, to increase participation and to publicise events.
What this campaign is doing is unifying all those NGBs in the hope a rising tide will lift all boats. You have the likes of the IRFU, the GAA, the FAI, involved along with sports like baton-twirling and squash and pitch and putt, which wouldn’t have the same resources or income.
The premise of the campaign is that we feel if you increase the visibility of women, not just stars but women participating in events, that helps — marathons, park runs, all of that helps because it also encourages people to go to events and encourages girls to try sport as well.
A. It was. Looking at the Irish market, which is flying at the moment, that figure is 1%. That’s massive — and alarming at the same time, but that’s what this is about, challenging the culture and trying to stimulate behaviour change in Irish society as to how they perceive women’s sport at all levels.
There are a lot of men who’ve been involved in women’s sport in the last few years and it’s only when men get involved that people view women as being very good at what they do.
Obviously there was a lot of work done behind the scenes to get the campaign up and running but it’s not about comparing us to men, it’s about saying ‘this is the situation we’re in now, this is where we are — we want to go somewhere else and we’re calling on people to act individually, and the NGBs are each committing to act on one of the three pillars.
A. Some have picked attendance, some participation, some have picked visibility, which involves media coverage. There are three major field sports, plus hockey, say, but there are plenty of sports out there which are seen as niche sports, or emerging sports, but have huge international membership.
You can reach the Olympics in those sports but traditionally people are more aware of Gaelic games, soccer, rugby, and so on. At least there are more opportunities out there for girls to participate in different sports than when I was growing up — growing up in Killeagh the opportunity was Gaelic games, that was it.
Now we’re trying to make sure girls know they have the opportunity to try a lot of different sports and then they can pick one they like - indoor, outdoor, individual, team-based, contact, non-contact, there’s a huge variety there.
A: I think the campaign is aligned with the National Sports Policy. Over the last 10 years the ISC has been doing a lot of work with the money it gets from the government on development programmes and initiatives to get women involved in sport.
This campaign is pointing up the importance of having role models — to give them the opportunity to have someone to look up to, to aspire to be. Sport is not as rigid as it was, either, compared to the time when only the best got to play. There’s a pathway now for everyone, which is fantastic.
A. There’s been a lot of talk about obesity and so on and the aim of the campaign is to get girls participating, and that would make the nation as a whole more active.
But I’m conscious also that this shouldn’t come across as ‘by women for women’ — it’s about everybody, for adults to say ‘I’m going to do something’ because of the campaign.
For instance, Lisa Jacobs, the retired hockey player, said on Twitter after the launch that she’d commit to going to five schools to talk about her life in sport — she’s been inundated with requests to come to schools since then.
We have so many fantastic female role models, great sports people, but the problem is they tend to fade into the background. Because women are so humble, and often not assertive enough, they sell themselves short, but by doing that they’re selling future girls short as well.
It’s probably a part of Irish culture — ‘who does she think she is’ — but we need people to say, ‘yeah, I worked really hard and I won this and I won that, I had to try really hard and these were the challenges, but these were the benefits as well, I’d love someone else to come on and emulate that or beat it’.
A. There have been a lot of campaigns, and ‘This girl can’ was one run by Sport England. They had a budget of 10 million for that, and we don’t have a budget for this, we’re a non-profit organisation, but it’s about getting women active, and people active.
There are organisations which advocate for women in sport all over the world, but one thing we wanted to do was to bring not just NGBs along with us regarding the campaign, but organisations like Cara, which works with sports bodies to facilitate people with disabilities and awareness of disabilities.
We also went to Ireland Active, which advocates for gym owners and S&C practitioners. A lot of people engage with sport on an individual basis so we wanted to cover that aspect as well. We spoke to Healthy Ireland also because their support was important.
A. Now it’s about resourcing the campaign. The sponsors we’ve brought on board are already committed to women’s sport, and even though they knew they’d be sharing the platform with many other brands, to be fair they’re on board because they believe in this.
We’ll be getting someone in as a communications executive to try to get stories out there, as well as a live fixtures and events pages on the website.
That’ll show what’s on in women’s sport in Ireland, from elite sports events to park runs.
That was never done before — you had to go to an individual sport’s website for its sport, and on and on.
This will try to get all the information from the NGBs every week, and that should help with visibility as well in that it’ll be easier to find events to go to.
