Confession: Until a few days ago, I had never heard of a “skort”. Perhaps this is a male luxury, since the essential constituent parts of male attire – shirt, pants, socks, shoes, optional jacket or jumper – have remained essentially unchanged for four or five centuries. Women in that timeframe have gone through the bonnet, the corset, the miniskirt, pantsuits, and a hundred other innovations.
This week’s big political row, as some of you will know, relates to the mandatory wearing of Skorts by Camogie players at inter-county level. Many of the players would prefer to wear shorts, which apparently are a constituent part of a “skort”, with the other constituent part being a ring of fabric sewn to the outside of the garment to make it appear as if it is a skirt.
On Sunday, the two teams contesting the Munster Camogie final will, in contravention of the Camogie Association’s rules around skort-wearing, take to the pitch in shorts. The CA has yet to announce any punishment for this infraction of the rules, and it appears vanishingly unlikely that any disciplinary action will in fact be taken. The women will play their match in shorts. The world will keep turning.
The absence of disciplinary action here tells its own story: The CA is not so committed to its own rule about what players should wear that it is actually prepared to enforce it. Which should suggest to us, I think, that the rule itself was probably tossed in there without much thought. You can imagine how that goes: At some point somewhere in some endless committee meeting there was likely a moment where somebody drafting the rules said “and we’d probably better have some rules about the uniform”. Somebody else probably said “Helmet, shirt, and skirt”, to much nodding. It is possible that somebody else said “some of them might want to wear shorts” and that in response, another person – definitely not a man because we didn’t know such things existed – said “skorts would be fine”.
And that, I would almost bet my house, is how the uniform for Camogie came to be decided. Not with some big plan to oppress women and declare them unequal, but in a casual effort to throw down stuff on paper that really doesn’t need to be on paper in the first place.
It is a measure of the fundamental unseriousness of Irish politics that this became, in the vernacular, “a thing”.
You will note, dear reader, if you have been following this story, that an individual villain was never identified. There was nobody in politics or sports or media commentary who was staking out the villainous position that Camogie players must wear Skorts for the sake of tradition. Nor was there anybody defending the CA’s right to have female sportspeople wear traditionally female garb. Instead, we got that speciality of Irish politics: The argument with nobody. Here’s a prime example:
Imagine for a moment the organisation behind that photo: Somebody somewhere in Sinn Fein actually had to come up with this idea. They then had to email all their female representatives and inform them to come to the Oireachtas wearing shorts. They then had to summon the press. It is supposed to speak for itself: Sinn Fein alone stands with the Camogie players.
Okay, but stands with them against whom? Not the CA, which is not actually imposing its own rules. Not the Government, which probably regrets only that it did not have the idea itself to send out the female members of the cabinet in fetching sets of shorts. Not the media, which is happy to indulge this story as the human rights cause of our age.
The villain here, if there is one, is some kind of vague thing, like “a culture of sexism in the country”. But where actually is that culture of sexism? The very moment that the female camogie players announced that they would wear shorts instead of shorts, the national reaction approximated to something short of a shrug. If a culture of sexism did exist, then you might at the very least expect to find some kind of organised lobby that exists to defend that culture. You might expect to see or hear from at least somebody out there who thinks that female skort-wearing during camogie is of at least trifling cultural importance and should not be abandoned without a debate.
But no such person exists. Instead, the political class has gone to war with the vague notion of sexism, and then declared another stunning and brave victory over it. This has largely been indulged by the media, who can never get enough of you-go-girl displays of feminist power-taking-backery. We’ve come very close to another national conversation about our attitudes to women.
But what are those attitudes, really? Do we think that the paying public will turn away from Sunday’s Camogie final because some recalcitrant sexists refuse to watch women in shorts? If anything, I suspect the opposite is true: We’ve had a lot of politicians and activists pretending to be interested in Camogie this week because standing with the camogie players is the cheap and easy way to declare yourself a progressive in good standing.
And besides, it’s a whole lot easier to stand with camogie players against imagined sexism than it is to find houses for the several thousand women with children in this country facing homelessness this summer.
That’s politics in Ireland these days. Skorting the hard issues, if you’ll forgive the pun.