TEDDY O’Regan admits he’s not too sure whether we’ll see a Carbery senior camogie team in action next season.
He hopes the division will be allowed to enter the senior county championship, but there’s a strong possibility that the door could be shut, too.
Divisional teams were granted a reprieve to enter the 2025 championship after it was initially feared they wouldn’t be permitted in the current format.
The Camogie Association’s proposed implementation of Rule 29.1 would have meant that if players lined out for their divisional team, they would be ineligible to play for their club in the same season. That would have sounded the death-knell for divisions, but a request for derogation for 2025 to allow divisional teams enter the senior championship was approved.
That news was greeted with cheers in Carbery, as the division knows and appreciates the value of giving club players the opportunity to compete at senior level.
But divisions were also informed at the time: ‘Please note the derogation is for 2025 only and will require a motion for a rule change at Congress 2026. It should be noted that there is no guarantee that any motion brought to Congress will pass.’
So, with the future of divisional teams up in the air, there is a chance that Carbery will not be involved in the senior championship beyond next season. If that’s the case, the team that exited the championship at the preliminary quarter-final stage to Blackrock could be the last Carbery side in action under the present rules.
They went down fighting, losing 0-14 to 0-9, but some of the factors that contributed to Carbery’s loss also highlight the difficulty divisions face.
Carbery played just one championship game – a 2-18 to 1-8 win against Seandún in August – and were handed two walkovers subsequently, against Muskerry and then against Avondhu in the divisional final. It meant this Carbery team didn’t have game-time together, and when up against a club team like Blackrock, that was always going to be a disadvantage.
‘It doesn’t help the cause of divisional teams when you see what happened this season,’ says Teddy O’Regan, the Carbery Camogie Chairperson, who was also part of the management team.
‘We were handed two walkovers which were detrimental to us, and when Muskerry played Seandún it was 12-a-side as Muskerry didn’t have the players. In the other group, Carrigdhoun conceded to Avondhu.
‘When you have so many walkovers, it gets harder to make an argument for divisional teams,’ he admits, though Carbery could not be found wanting here. They did everything within their power to give local players a chance to play for their division.
But with a club-first approach, Carbery’s players had commitments in both camogie and ladies football, and that gave us the crazy situation last weekend when some Carbery players played three championship games in 28 hours. That took its toll.
‘You could see it in the girls, there was nothing left by the end. They gave it their all,’ O’Regan says, as, for example, Clon footballers had a senior championship game on the Sunday morning of the Carbery v Blackrock tie, after a premier intermediate camogie tie the previous evening.
‘Everything is just so squeezed, and for all the talk of integration we need to reach a place, like in the men’s GAA, where it’s football one weekend, camogie the next. It’s asking a lot of players to have so many big championship games on the same weekend.
‘You could see how tired our players were against Blackrock, and that’s understandable given how many games they played.’
Carbery went down fighting, with pride in the jersey, and now their future will be decided off the pitch.
