In the summer of 2023, approximately 50,000 people attended the Women’s Rugby World Cup at Thomond Park and the Aviva Stadium as Ireland hosted the tournament for the first time. Later that year, the Republic of Ireland women’s football team qualified for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the first time in the country’s history and the coverage and public response exceeded anything women’s football in Ireland had previously generated. In 2024, Irish women athletes won more Olympic medals in Paris than the men’s team.
By any historical comparison, women’s sport in Ireland has never been in a stronger position. The question is whether the progress of the past five years represents a structural shift in how women’s sport is funded, covered and developed, or whether it is a series of individual achievements that have not yet produced the systemic change that would make them durable and self-sustaining.
The evidence points in both directions simultaneously.
The Funding Picture
Sport Ireland, the State body responsible for the development and promotion of sport in Ireland, publishes annual funding data through its grants process. Its women in sport programme provides targeted funding to national governing bodies to increase female participation, develop women’s high performance programmes, and improve coaching capacity for women’s sport. In 2024, Sport Ireland’s dedicated women in sport programme had a budget of approximately €4.5 million — a significant increase from earlier years but still a fraction of total Sport Ireland high-performance funding, which runs to tens of millions annually across all sports.
The gap between men’s and women’s funding within individual sports organisations is often wider than the Sport Ireland headline figures suggest. Within the IRFU, the women’s programme has received increased investment, but the gap between the budgets available for the men’s and women’s national teams including coaching staff, preparation time, facilities and match fees, remains substantial. The same pattern holds in the FAI, where the women’s national team operates with considerably fewer resources than the men’s programme.
The GAA’s Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) and the Camogie Association have both undergone significant governance and financial discussions with the GAA in recent years, including votes on potential unification with the parent organisation. The funding relationship between these bodies and the GAA reflects historical separations that have left women’s Gaelic games with less access to the GAA’s considerable resources than the equivalence of their games with the men’s would justify.
Media Coverage: Improving but Still Unequal
Media coverage of women’s sport in Ireland has improved significantly in the past five years, driven partly by broadcaster investment and partly by the commercial logic of the Women’s World Cup audience numbers. RTÉ’s coverage of the 2023 World Cup, the camogie All-Ireland finals and women’s rugby internationals has been more consistent and more prominent than at any previous point.
But the baseline from which this improvement starts is low. The volume of print and broadcast media dedicated to women’s sport in Ireland remains a small fraction of the equivalent for men’s sport. A GAA All-Ireland senior football final, men’s receives blanket coverage across all national newspapers, radio stations and television channels for the preceding fortnight. The equivalent women’s football final receives a fraction of that coverage, despite attendances at the LGFA All-Ireland finals that routinely exceed 40,000.
Research by DCU Institute for Media, Sport and Health has consistently shown that women’s sport accounts for less than 10% of sports media coverage in Ireland, a finding replicated by similar research across most European countries. The figure has improved since 2019 but has not approached parity.
Participation: The Grassroots Picture
Sport Ireland’s Active Ireland Survey tracks participation rates in sport and physical activity across the population. The 2023 survey showed that 47% of women reported participating in sport or physical activity at least once a week, compared to 56% of men, a gap that has narrowed from wider differentials in previous surveys. Within individual sports, women’s participation in football, GAA, athletics, swimming and gym-based fitness has grown substantially. The FAI’s women and girls participation initiative has delivered notable growth in club-level female participation supported by the FIFA Forward development programme and an increase in girls’ teams at underage level.
The retention challenge is more difficult. Research across sports consistently shows that girls who participate in sport at primary school age drop out in significant numbers during secondary school, driven by a combination of factors including body image concerns, competing social pressures, lack of female coaches as role models, and the lower visibility of women’s sport at senior level. Reversing this dropout requires interventions at school level, physical education curriculum reform, female coaching development, and the kind of visible female role models that the recent generation of international successes has started to produce.
The Athlete Experience
Behind the statistics is the lived experience of women athletes competing at national and provincial level in Ireland, many of whom are effectively amateur competitors managing professional training demands around full-time employment. While men’s rugby, soccer and (to a lesser extent) GAA have professional or semi-professional structures that allow elite male athletes to train full-time, the equivalent structures for women are far less developed.
A senior international footballer on the Republic of Ireland women’s team may be combining full-time training camp commitments with a part-time or full-time job, without the financial support that would allow them to prioritise the sporting commitment. The introduction of professional contracts for women’s international rugby players, a relatively recent development, following the Women’s Rugby World Cup is a meaningful step that has not yet been replicated across other sports.
The camogie and women’s football players who represent their counties at All-Ireland level receive expense payments that are a fraction of their preparation costs. The time demands of high-level inter-county sport training multiple times per week across a season that runs most of the year are equivalent to those of the men’s game, but the financial recognition is not.
What Needs to Happen
The changes that would make the most material difference to women’s sport in Ireland are not complicated to identify, though they require sustained commitment and resources. Funding parity not as an aspiration but as a requirement within national governing bodies receiving State funding through Sport Ireland. Media commitments from RTÉ, Newstalk, Virgin Media and the newspapers to increase women’s sport coverage to a minimum proportion of total sports output. Professionalisation of pathways in at least two or three women’s team sports, starting with the sports where the talent pool and fanbase already justify it.
And continued, sustained visibility of successful Irish women athletes in media coverage, in school curricula, in public discourse, so that the next generation of girls grows up in an environment where female sporting achievement is as normal, as celebrated, and as well-resourced as the male equivalent. The last five years have been the best in the history of Irish women’s sport. The question is whether the institutions and the funding will consolidate that progress or whether, as has happened before, the next decade will see it drift back into the margins.
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