Áilín Quinlan: In camogie skorts row, why not just listen to the women?

Odd, isn’t it, the way we once took for granted such a number of customs that negatively affected women.

Now, many of these traditions, once an unquestioned part of daily life, are, and rightly, viewed as archaic, cruel, bizarre and, in many cases, deeply harmful.

I wouldn’t describe a skort as cruel, bizarre or extremely harmful, but I would call it archaic.

But we’ll get to that.

In the meantime, back to the misogynistic Irish customs referred to at the beginning of this column.

There was symphysiotomy, a controversial, hugely painful and devastating operation on women in labour that went out of favour in most of the rest of Europe in the mid-1900s – but which, believe it or not, continued to be carried out in Ireland up to the 1980s.

The surgery, as I understand it, involves slicing through the cartilage and ligaments of the pelvic joint, or even, in some cases, sawing through the bone of the pelvis itself, in order to widen it and allow a baby to be delivered unobstructed.

Critics have blamed this absolutely harrowing and utterly terrifying medical procedure on what has been described as an unhealthy mix of a Catholic disapproval of caesarean sections, societal and institutional disregard for women’s autonomy and anatomy and, unbelievable as this may sound, pure medical experimentation.

It has been claimed that the operation left untold hundreds of women with life-long pain, disability, and emotional trauma.

In a newspaper interview several years ago, a woman described how she was given “gas and air and an injection,” before being brought to a room where her legs were tied up on either side of her body, and she was left trussed up and ready for the doctor, who arrived at the end of her bed armed with some kind of long silver instrument.

“They made a hole in your private parts and he inserted this silver thing up and cut the bone and pushed it over to widen your pelvis for you to deliver your baby yourself.”

So there was that.

Then there were the Magdalene Laundries, where women traditionally deemed wayward and ungovernable by the great and the good of Irish society – these women included girls who became pregnant as a result of being seduced or raped by towering pillars of the community, such as members of the clergy – were imprisoned, abused and exploited. Tortured, I would venture to suggest, is not too strong an adjective for what many reported experiencing in some of these institutions.

There’s the heart-wrenching scandal of the mother-and-baby homes.

Think of the ancient market town of Tuam where such a home operated for about 40 years on the site of a former workhouse. Unmarried mothers and children were housed there.

According to research by acclaimed historian Catherine Corless, up to 796 babies may lie buried in an area on the site, beneath which was a sewage system. The building itself was knocked down in the early 1970s to make way for a housing estate.

Now, over the coming weeks and months, excavation crews will gently turn the earth at this forlorn, makeshift crypt. Corless’s careful, painstaking, ground-breaking research asserts that a child died at this home every fortnight over the 36 years it was in operation.

Analysis carried out around nine years ago showed that there are indeed significant human remains buried in underground cavities there – structures which were later shown to be part of a disused sewage tank. Playing children reportedly found a skull or skulls in the area. A resident reported finding a skull in his garden.

Underneath the soft, subsiding patch of ground at the centre of Corless’s investigation was what looked like a stairway of some kind, but instead were stacks of skeletons. The skeletons of dead babies.

On we go.

There was the Churching of women who had given birth. On the face of it, this was a ritual which involved blessing mothers following their recovery from childbirth.

But there’s another, deeper, more sinister side to Churching. This was also a ceremony of ‘purification’ which ensured that the ‘sin’ of childbirth would be erased. Incredible as it may now seem, until the 1960s, many women who gave birth could only return to the church after they had received a blessing from a priest.

This, apparently, meant that a baby was often christened in the absence of its mother. Childbirth was basically regarded as ‘unclean’ by the church.

This was a church which fought the very concept of contraception while at the same time exerting immense pressure on couples to have legions of babies.

So, yep, there’s all of that. All were accepted elements of Irish society not so very long ago.

In the face of these horrors, the tradition of Leap Day, or Bachelor’s Day, or Ladies Privilege Day as it is also known, is relatively innocuous.

But let’s face it, the same misogynistic overtones are present.

The Leap Day tradition is based on a legend of St Brigid and St Patrick. St Brigid apparently went to Patrick to complain that women of marriageable age had to wait too long because their men were too slow to propose. She wanted women to be given the opportunity to propose themselves.

Patrick suggested that women be allowed to propose one day of the year every seven years. Bridget managed to convince the mean-minded old scoundrel to make it one day every four years.

Even today, a lot of women believe it is still solely the man’s privilege to propose.

On to skorts and the controversial insistence that camogie players must wear them. The requirement that camogie players wear skorts (basically a combination of shorts and a skirt) is now being acknowledged as an antiquated and repressive custom. Ridiculous. Unimaginable, even.

The very fact that the Munster camogie final between Cork and Waterford was cancelled with only 16 hours’ notice because players signalled their intent to wear shorts, should be and will eventually be viewed as a blatant breach of their human rights.

Tánaiste Simon Harris is one of those to back the stance of the protesting camogie players, rightly denouncing skorts as archaic.

The skorts controversy is not just a sports issue – I believe it is about yet another societal disregard for women’s voices, women’s right to choose, and above all, women’s rights.

For God’s sake, why can’t camogie players just wear shorts like other female athletes in every kind of sport imaginable? The Camogie Association need to get a grip, and stop making a holy show of themselves, and of us.