UCD giving it stick in Centenary Year

Tom Humphries/LockerRoom: Davey Billings calls. He says the Ashbourne Cup is on out in UCD soon, so be sure to give it an old mention. This is the Billings Method. Enthusiasm. It is better for you to be disappointed in Billings than it is for Billings to be disappointed in you. You make a mental note. Circle it in red. Camogie. Ashbourne Cup. UCD. Must do.

And for a week or so the idea is just a post-it in the messy desk at the back of your messy head. Must do.

You have a vague notion you might chuck a fly into the ointment of the Camogie Centenary celebrations by wondering aloud how any player gets as far as college and the Ashbourne Cup when camogie haemorrhages so many of those who love it through its daft age structure. Minor level in camogie, in Dublin anyway, is under-16. After that players are thrown into the senior sections, there to play I'm a Leaving Cert Student, Get Me out of Here with gnarled veterans. Some survive of course but it's tough socially as well as physically and many players just fall away and go to play something else. Others fall into lives of servitude or adopt slatternly ways. I'd have under-17, under-19, and under-21 grades just to keep players involved and on the straight and narrow, but nobody listens.

It's Centenary Year, though, and the column is about UCD and camogie and I don't want to disappoint Davey, who breathes so much life and enthusiasm into the GAA around Belfield. That idea gets sent to the recycle bin for another day.

Instead, looking for a nail to hang a column on we exhume Edward Gibson, or Lord Ashbourne, after whom the competition is named. Ashbourne was an odd cove and his ongoing links with camogie would probably surprise him. He was an attorney general and the first president of both Trinity Rowing Club and Trinity Rugby Club. He was something of a Gaelic League enthusiast and, while controversially wearing a kilt into the House of Lords, coined the slogan "Glad to be Gaelic".

Historians are unsure if Ashbourne was an influence on Tom Robinson, who many years later composed the seminal Sing if You're Glad To Be Gay, but in our research we did note that the edition of the Limerick Reporter and Tipperary Vindicator of May 7th, 1895, carried word of a Lord Ashbourne speech at Chatham where he opposed Home Rule, believing it would mean ruin, destruction, civil war and bankruptcy in Ireland.

Elsewhere on the page there was a news digest like the one which consumes an area of the front page of this paper. The digest teased with a variety of items, "Oscar Wilde will probably be released on bail today" being the lead with the most enduring interest.

Our eye falls, however, on the two items printed below the news of poor Oscar. One report concerned two men called Carroll and Kelly accused of "kicking to death a respectable young man named Gardener". And the second report announced the jailing for six months of a Cork woman, Bridget Sexton ("wife of a baker"), for cruelly neglecting her infant child. The Reporter and Vindicator promises that "the details of the case were of a shocking nature".

That the Reporter and Vindicator was easily shocked would come as no surprise to anyone who read the tart editorial which followed Oscar's conviction. "Horrid", "festering corruption", "abomination", "loathsome coterie", thundered the R & V against dual players and dabblers in the other code.

Anyway, back to the camogie. Lord Ashbourne was cajoled into presenting a trophy for the college competition back in 1914 by a very remarkable woman called Agnes O'Farrelly.

The UCD Camogie Club website carries an old picture of Agnes O'Farrelly. It's worth looking up. A forbiddingly handsome woman, she peers out defiantly from under a large beret and you can tell straightaway she wasn't the type of woman to take guff. I'd imagine old Ashbourne coughed up a trophy just as soon as Agnes suggested he do so.

She was a founder and first president of the UCD camogie club in 1914 and remained president till her death in 1951. If UCD was all that she did it would have been a remarkable and interesting life for a woman who came from Mullagh in County Cavan to be one of the first female professors within the NUI.

In 1914, however, camogie wasn't even at the top of her priority list. She was a founder of Cumann na mBan along with Mary McSwiney and Countess Markiewicz and was instrumental in bringing a lot of the suffragette sensibility to that movement.

She shared with Lord Ashbourne a keen interest in Celtic culture and she crops up in accounts of the Celtic Congresses held at that time, becoming Honorary General Secretary of the movement in 1925.

In A Short History of the Celtic Congress, Mari Ellis notes that Agnes O'Farrelly's "voluminous correspondence, in her flamboyant handwriting, is in in the ET John collection at the National Library of Wales". This is good news because she appears to have been footnoted in Irish history.

There follows an amusing account of her enthusiasm to get two hard-pressed Bretons to the Congress of 1925, for which she had already nailed Douglas Hyde as a speaker. "They are the most picturesque figures we can have," she wrote to ET John pleading their case. Finally a whopping cheque for £45 was dispatched to Brittany and she had her Bretons.

She ran in the general elections of 1923 and 1927 (as an independent both times) in the National University constituency and was unsuccessful but was her distinctive, defiant self throughout, campaigning both through Irish and English.

Other bits and pieces? She would later be Professor of Irish at UCD. She set up a Gaelic League summer camp at Cloghaneely in Donegal and published novels and poems both in Irish and English. That's all really. Just an interesting woman who deserves rescue, perhaps, from the margins of history.

One imagines she would enjoy being around UCD in a few days' time when Ashbourne Cup weekend gets going. There's a lot of pious old rubbish talked about women in sport but the Ashbourne Cup is one of those traditions that needs no patronage or piety. It's just athletes preparing for what most will recall as the best competition of their lives, players who will probably never be better at their craft at any other time in their career.

This is a big year for camogie. The game needs to sell itself as the wonderful product it is. Not easy. You look at Agnes O'Farrelly staring out from under her beret and wonder what she, a noted feminist, would make of the "Chicks with sticks" slogan.

I imagine she would have seen the humour in it, the defiant inversion of old preconceptions about women and sport, and the greater good which the attention brought about. The slogan has a touch of the Niggers with Attitude about it. It comes from a certain place. Oscar could call himself a queer, rappers can call themselves niggers. Certain people have earned the right to turn the weaponry of language around.

The face beneath the beret had a lot of attitude in it. Agnes O'Farrelly would have abhorred that self-hating cultural cringe of the leatherette and Beaujolais Irish which shunted camogie and those who play it off to the shadows for so long.

Out in Belfield on the 14th and 15th of February the sisters will be doing it for themselves, looking to have their names etched onto the base of that lovely trophy, a replica of the McCarthy Cup.

The name of every winning player is engraved there, a thread of defiant, flamboyant, determined excellence stretching back through the years when the game was almost crippled by neglect and unfashionability right to the era of the woman in the beret who saw camogie as perhaps the greatest game a chick, a girl or a woman could play.

Chick, girl or woman? In Belfield next weekend they'll just be athletes doing some kind of wonderful. That was always the idea.