Farrelly blowing whistle to kickstart a new era
GIVEN the significance of the moment, the backdrop deserved something grander. After 132 years of waiting, on Wednesday night the gender barrier was broken when Maggie Farrelly became the first woman to take charge of a male inter-county competitive fixture when she blew the whistle on Fermanagh and St Mary’s in an opening-round McKenna Cup game.
It was a moment, you might have imagined, that demanded trumpeting, but instead the only sound was provided by the driving icy rain that swirled around Tyrone’s centre of excellence in Garvaghey on a night when polar bears opted to be robed in body warmers.
If it was not the backdrop that the outside world would have wished for, you suspect it fitted just fine with Farrelly’s own world view.
Every step she has taken has been accompanied by hype all focused on gender; she became the first woman to officiate at an Allianz League game when she ran the line for Dublin v Kerry in January 2014, while last summer she blew the whistle on another piece of history when she took charge of the Fermanagh v Antrim minor clash in Ulster.
It is not quite how the Cavan woman sees herself.
‘I’m not trying to break down barriers or anything like that,’ said Farrelly, speaking in the aftermath of Wednesday’s game.
‘Every year, particularly at provincial and national levels, you are doing your fitness tests and the rules tests and any game that you officiate at you are being assessed.
‘You have the advisory reports coming back to you so you know yourself that it’s performancebased, particularly with the rules application, and you are there on your own merit — you don’t get any favouritism.’
She will sink or swim as a referee by her performances rather than her sex, and there was enough summary evidence on Wednesday night that she has got what it takes to stay afloat.
In truth, it was one on of the easier games to handle, but she dealt with a brief first half-spat by showing two yellow cards, and did not shirk, showing St Mary’s full-forward Matthew Fitzpatrick a red one for a second cautionable offence midway through the second-half.
Flashing cards, of course, is hardly a measure of a referee’s competence, but ruling without ruining most certainly is.
‘The biggest tribute I can pay to Maggie is that I did not notice her a whole lot,’ said Fermanagh manager Pete McGrath.
‘No one paid any particular attention to her and that is testament to the fact that she refereed the game very well,’.
Her climb up the refereeing ladder is remarkable given that she only took up the whistle in 2008 as a favour to her club Laragh United, who faced the sanction of losing the right to play league fixtures if they did not supply the county board with a referee.
That she has gone from being an accidental referee to one of such competence that she is currently a member of the national support panel — which entitles her to officiate but not take charge of national fixtures — is down to an aptitude for hard work and a passion for what she does.
Ulster Council chairman Martin McAviney has predicted Farrelly will be promoted to the national referees panel inside the next two years, which, if it happens, means she will go mainstream.
One of the predicted benefits of a female referee is that it may elicit the kind of respect from players and managers that can at times be in short supply to the male refereeing population.
While there may be a grain of truth in that, Farrelly knows that she has to be steeled in a role where sensitivities are regularly torched.
‘I have actually done research into this as part of my Masters in Sports Development and Coaching,’ she said.
‘A lot of research would say that to be a referee you would have to have certain characteristics.
‘When I conducted a survey and interviews with fellow referees a lot of them would say that you would need to have a different skin fold measure in comparison to other people.
‘You probably need to smile and nod a lot of the time; you wouldn’t want to take things to heart,’ she added.
That she is made off the stuff to deal with what will be thrown at her over 70 minutes is validated by the challenges she faces nine to five. She works in the South West College in Omagh on the Princes Trust in a mentoring role with disadvantaged youths, seeking to help them find a pathway in life.
‘Some of them may have left education at a very early age or are unemployed, the usual sort of scenarios that young people are faced with.
‘It’s challenging because you are dealing with individuals on an individualised basis,’ she explained.
In that context, there is little to fear from policing 30 men at play over 70 minutes and she doesn’t.
‘You are out there refereeing for 70-odd minutes and it could be the best 70 minutes of your life or the worse 70 minutes and you just have to deal with it.
‘As soon as you cross that white line you are the referee and when you cross that white line again after the 70 minutes you are just Maggie Farrelly, you are just yourself. You can’t think otherwise.’