Mayo LGFA raises questions over 'inequality' and lack of movement on GAA integration
A social media post by the executive of Mayo LFGA has revealed that no meeting has taken place in the county despite every county in Ireland being instructed last November by the GAA Steering Group to set up a County Integration Committee.
The statement, under the heading 'We Love It Too', elaborated: "No such meeting has taken place in 2026. Not one. No minutes have been returned. As far as we can establish, that is true across this entire province and most of the country.
"The reason given is cost. So let us do the costs, in one county, for one year, out of two sets of accounts that were each presented to their own members.
"One line of Mayo GAA’s expenditure, team administration (€1.35 million), worth every penny of it, is 4.7 times the entire annual expenditure of Mayo LGFA that looks after 7,015 members in 36 clubs and five inter-county teams.
"What does Mayo LGFA own?
"No pitch, no astro, no clubhouse, no office, no storage container, no shed.
"Our county jerseys spend the off-season in officers’ houses. The cones, balls, first-aid kits, programmes, silverware and flags live in somebody’s spare room.
"When we run a county final, three or four cars set off to three or four houses to collect the county’s belongings.
"We explain this because for the past week the deficiencies of women’s Gaelic games have been discussed in public as though they were a mystery. They are not a mystery.
"The resources now being described as too costly are the resources our players and volunteers have been doing without for years.
"Then there is the argument about attendance. That ladies football does not entertain. That the crowds are not there, and neither is the revenue.
"Until this season, every LGFA senior, intermediate and junior championship game in County Mayo was fixed for eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning. That was our slot.
"If you were a reporter you could attend precisely one match. If your club had a junior team and a senior team you had to pick one daughter over another.
"This year, Mayo GAA and Mayo LGFA worked together on a new approach to championship scheduling. We built our programme around the men’s fixtures, using different times and, where possible, different days. We worked to avoid clashes between each club’s teams and give reporters room to reach more than one ground.
"Coverage matters. It affects a sport’s ability to attract supporters and sponsors alike. Sport Ireland’s study published in March 2025 found that women’s sport accounted for just 18 per cent of national sports news coverage during 2025. The share is smaller again at a local level.
"After decades of unequal investment, limited promotion and restricted fixture slots, attendance cannot be treated as a verdict on what ladies’ football is worth.
"It also reflects the opportunities the game has been given to reach an audience.
"There is a road in Castlebar where a brother and sister grew up in the same house, play for the same club, do the same five sessions a week and wear the same county jersey, yet inhabit two different footballing universes.
"If the same disparity of opportunity existed in their education or working lives, we would be rightly appalled.
"Our senior county players receive €20 a week towards nutrition during the inter-county season. Their mileage is capped. This year’s training camp was one night in Enniscrone. This is what the LGFA can currently provide for them. It is not remotely what they are worth.
"There are women in Mayo talented enough to play senior inter-county football who have decided not to, and the reason is not that they stopped loving it. The cost is just too high.
"Forty-six Irish women are on AFLW club lists this season, and Mayo supplies more of them than anywhere else.
"Sarah Rowe, Niamh and Grace Kelly, Rachel Kearns, Dayna Finn and Saoirse Lally are now playing football professionally on the other side of the world. Just not our football.
"We are all too aware they are coming for more. It is hard to argue that our players are not elite athletes when a professional sport keeps flying around the globe to recruit them.
"Tradition dictates that everything defaults to the GAA and always has. The facilities, the funding, the first pick of dates, the coaches, the supporters, the media routine, the sponsorship, the volunteers, the status.
"The advantage of a 90-year head start, reinforced by hundreds of millions of euros of public investment, cannot be overcome through goodwill alone.
"Institutions built around men develop structures that suit men. These structures are now held up as insurmountable practical constraints. Only two dressing rooms, only one good pitch, the standard of the toilets. We understand entirely how that happened.
"But you cannot build something for one half of a community and then point to the state of the building as the reason that the other half must wait to come inside.
"The one-club model, offered sincerely by many, is not on its own the answer. Some of the finest examples of co-operation in our county exist outside one-club status.
"Equally, there are clubs in Mayo where the one-club model works beautifully. Elsewhere, though, one-club is a name on headed paper, a paragraph on a sports capital funding application and little more.
"Women and girls need reliable access and representation that does not depend on the sentiments of the GAA officers at the top table.
"Some still appear to expect the LGFA to remain silent about inequality and to be grateful for whatever access it receives.
"We know all too well why people hesitate to challenge that expectation. When access depends on goodwill, speaking plainly can feel like putting hard-won cooperation at risk. That fear has kept too much unspoken for too long. Mayo LGFA has more than 7,000 reasons why saying nothing is not an option.
"Mayo GAA underage structures and Coiste na nÓg worked this season to develop a standing order for fixture conflicts that was fair, honoured by most, and gave us sight of their calendar so we could build around it.
"It transformed the season and cost nobody anything but communication and goodwill. There are employees and officers in Mayo GAA who encourage, advise and advocate, who pick up the phone every single time. There are GAA clubs who bend over backwards to support Mayo LGFA. These people lay waste to the claim that this cannot be done.
"Some of the most meaningful progress in women’s sport is happening quietly. At the start of this season, our title sponsors approached us, unasked, and insisted that our county players receive the same individual vouchers as their male counterparts. No photographer. No press release.
"We handed them out on an ordinary morning after training. Some of these women have worn the Mayo crest for well over a decade. They could hardly believe it.
"That reaction says something about how much such recognition means, how rarely they have been able to take it for granted. The generosity mattered. But so did the simple fact that somebody had thought of them, without prompting, as equals.
"This year, the Mayo club championship series has a title sponsor for the first time too. These businesses are giving practical expression to something every girl and woman in Mayo deserves to hear: your game matters, your dedication deserves recognition, and your future is worth investing in.
"The past ten days have given us so much to be proud of. The magnificent Mayo leaders, Cora Staunton, Fiona McHale and Tom Parsons, using the megaphone they earned so powerfully.
"The Gaelic Players Association, whose advocacy has moved things we could not move.
"The lads who are married to our players, who are their classmates, brothers and coaches, friends, who have been quietly raging on our behalf all week. We thank you.
"Dr Mary McAleese gave four years to integration and was called offensive for describing what she found. Mary turned on the big light. She did the hard part. The disparity can no longer be treated as something people simply did not know about.
"Club AGMs and county conventions give members a chance to seek specific changes. Ask for LGFA and Camogie representatives to have seats and a meaningful voice on the committee controlling finance and facilities.
"Ask your county board when its Integration Committee is holding its first meeting, and ask to see the minutes.
"Public representatives and funding bodies should check whether clubs and associations are meeting the access and equality commitments attached to public funding.
"Businesses and individuals alike, if you believe that the women’s game deserves to be funded at the level of ambition and commitment the players bring to it, please consider joining Grá Mhná Mayo.
"Join your LGFA or Camogie club or county executive. Great people lending their time and talent can and will move the needle.
"Come along to the championship finals taking place across the country. It is the cheapest and most entertaining vote anybody will ever cast.
"This week we mourned the loss of Valerie Collins McNally. In 1976, Valerie was part of the historic Mayo team that defeated Galway to win the county’s first Connacht Senior Championship.
"Her generation built Mayo ladies’ football at a time when exclusion scarcely needed an explanation. We owe them, and every girl following in their footsteps, more than another promise that equality will come when circumstances allow.
"We’re already well into extra time.
"Equality is always impractical until it is inevitable. The GAA can lead this change and take pride in it. That means turning its commitment into a timetable people can trust, shared decisions and access that women and girls can rely on.
"We love the GAA, and you cannot love something honestly and lie about it at the same time."