Suzanne Harrington: Stop embarrassing the diaspora with this skorts nonsense 

Are real life Fr Jacks calling the shots?

Suzanne Harrington: "Did the camogie committee not get the memo about how these days men can no longer go around telling women what to wear? That we have done away with this practice?" Picture: Andrew Dunsmore.

It's not often a Father Ted episode makes its way into the news cycle, but here we are.

Skorts. Like a historical re-enactment, a kind of collective flashback to the bad trip that was the status of women in Ireland in the not-distant-enough past. 

An Ireland where real life Father Jacks were still in charge and real life Mrs Doyles — and their camogie-playing daughters — were required to make babies and sandwiches and avoid having opinions. While wearing nice frocks.

Maybe it was an oversight. Did the camogie committee not get the memo about how these days men can no longer go around telling women what to wear? That we have done away with this practice? 

Because they’ve ended up looking a bit silly. A bit dated, like salad cream or Benny Hill.

Also, and perhaps even more unforgivably, the camogie committee has jammed the word ‘skort’ firmly into our temporal lobes. 

A word you may have blissfully avoided your entire life until now, both as a concept and an ugly sound — like something a malevolent JK Rowling character might snarl at you. Skorticus Riddikulus!

As portmanteaus go, it’s up there with Brexit, jeggings, and frappuccino in terms of pointlessness. The sartorial equivalent of a spork.

The skort itself is not the point. Some people might quite like them, might find them practical, perhaps even aesthetically pleasing. Whatever. It’s the 83% of camogie players who do not find skorts practical, comfortable, or fit for purpose who are the point. 

Their decision to not wear garments they dislike while playing their sport of choice seems like a fairly basic right, an unremarkable no-brainer. These players are not suggesting anything controversial, like playing camogie naked or using flamingos as camogie sticks.

No. They would just like to exercise their right to dress themselves, like adult humans, rather than being told what to wear by men. This tired custom of women-being-told-what-to-wear-by-men stubbornly persists, extending far beyond the camogie fields of Ireland — whether it’s women not covering their entire bodies in Saudi Arabia or covering their entire bodies in burqinis on French beaches or having a non-state approved hairdo in North Korea or showing their hair in Iran or exposing their shoulders in swathes of South Asia.

But Ireland is not like Saudi Arabia or North Korea or Iran. Nor do we ban wearing items related to religious belief, like France. We are a small, progressive country that everyone likes, because we don’t colonise or start wars, and are generally regarded as the best away fans at international sporting events. 

So when you see BBC headlines about skorts and shorts asking How Did We Get Here?, your toes might slightly curl as your brain involuntarily flashes back to the days of illegal Durex and the Abortion Express to England.

Come on, camogie committee. Have a word with yourselves. Obviously the comfort of the camogie players — physical and psychological — is paramount, but the secondary comfort of the rest of us — culturally — counts for something too. Stop embarrassing the diaspora as we are forced to explain words like camogie and skort to non-Irish people, then watch as their eyes widen. It’s cringe.