The bunker mentality

There was great news last week for anyone in Ireland with an interest in golf. There had been a protracted period of uncertainty about the future of the Irish Open golf championship, following the withdrawal of sponsorship by Murphy’s, earlier this year. That uncertainty was laid to rest with the announcement that Nissan had come on board as the main sponsors of the event – committing the not inconsiderable sum of €2 million to the golfing festivities. Happy days!

Bord Fáilte were also committed, coming up with €250,000 out of the public purse. It is a decision with which it would be difficult to cavil: golf is hugely important to Irish tourism, and a flagship event like the Irish Open is potentially vital, in terms of projecting the role of Ireland as a leader in world golf. As a piece of marketing, it seems to make a lot of sense. Excellent.

So would it be possible to screw up such a fine and apparently unadulterated piece of good news and turn it into a source of embarrassment? You’d have presumed that the organisers would have had their radar finely tuned, and that precautions would have been taken, to ensure that they avoided any slip that might risk tarnishing the announcement.

Well, presume what you like – but it seems that there is nothing that sports organisations in Ireland are incapable of screwing up!

There are hundreds of golf courses all over Ireland. Among these hundreds, there are numerous potential candidates for an event like this. And, yet, to host it, the organisers have selected one of those clubs that remains a bastion of male segregation – or anti-female segregation, rather – Portmarnock, which is an exclusively male club. Under no circumstances are women allowed to join.

Were the organisers completely unaware of the fact that this might be interpreted as an insult to women? Or were they blind to the fact that the willingness of Bord Failte to support a high profile event, in a club which specifically excludes women from membership, might be open to question?

Questions would inevitably be raised about the appropriateness of the use of public funds in a way that might be thought to endorse Portmarnock’s policy of excluding women – and they were. The best that Bord Failte could do was to dig itself further into the bunker. “The private club has no bearing on the running and staging of the event,” a spokesperson commented. “What it does in its own time is of no relevance to the Irish Open.”

This, of course, is simply not true. The choice of Portmarnock as the venue for the event is a de facto endorsement of the club – and, by extension, of its policies.

It is precisely in situations of this kind that the opportunity arises to make specific points about public policy. Bord Failte could have told the organisers that they would be happy to support the event – but only if it took place in a club in which there is genuine equality between male and female members. The organisers might well have gone ahead with the running of the event in Portmarnock. But equally they may have felt that 250,000 euro was sufficiently persuasive as a contribution to have reconsidered, and run the event in a club which is not stuck in a stupidly archaic and blinkered warp of the kind that blights the not-so-fairways of Portmarnock.

Actually, it is not true to say that Portmarnock is an exclusively male establishment. The club has a total of 1,200 members. Of these, one is a woman.

This is an accident of circumstance. It is a tradition at Portmarnock that the President of Ireland is given an honorary membership of the club. This honorarium was instituted at a time when it would have been inconceivable that a mere woman would have broken into the all-male club of Irish Presidents.

Well, Mary McAleese is the current incumbent of the highest office in the land, and accordingly she has been given an honorary membership of the otherwise exclusively male elite in Portmarnock. The incongruousness of this has been highlighted by the decision to bring the Irish Open to the club – and so Mary McAleese is faced with a choice.

Should she remain a member of this segregationist club? To me, it is quite clear that she should not. She should resign in protest – and in doing so, put further pressure on those responsible to begin the process of change that would see women being treated as equal citizens on the golf courses of Ireland.

That would be a good Christmas present, not just for the women of Ireland but for the citizenry as a whole. Because we are all demeaned by the existence here of rotten elitist institutions that treat women as undesirables.

And with that thought, I will leave you for now. Happy Christmas. And may the pagan in you flourish until we meet again in the New Year.