New Mayo LGFA Chairperson aims to ‘make Mayo great again’

‘MAKE Mayo Great Again’ would sound arrogant coming from anyone without multiple All-Ireland’s to their name.

As a player, Sinéad Stagg helped put Mayo on the map at the turn of the millennium by winning All-Irelands with the greatest Mayo Ladies team of them all.

In 2023, she did again as a manager, guiding 33 girls to Mayo’s first top-tier U-14 title since 1994.

Her step back from that role earlier this year preceded a giant leap forward to the top job in Mayo LGFA.

As a player, a manager, and now an administrator, Stagg has always dreamed big, worked hard and delivered in spades.

She is less than 48 hours into her term when she speaks to The Mayo News in the exact same Ballinrobe Credit Union office where we interviewed her before the 2023 U-14 All-Ireland final.

Months afterwards, a county board was cobbled together following a public call for volunteers and an Emergency General Meeting.

Sadly, this was not the first time Mayo Ladies football made headlines for the wrong reasons.

But Stagg is not keen to delve into those episodes - nor are we.

“I just felt that if we could try and get good positive people involved, people with ambition, people with drive, and people that are positive, I think a lot of positivity is needed in the county at the minute,” she says, explaining why she went for the top job.

“I felt it’s very hard to ask other people to get involved if you’re not willing to put your own shoulder to the wheel so I had to be willing to do the same.”

CHANGE 

HER first public utterance as county chair was a bold one: “We want to bring positive and meaningful change to Mayo LGFA.”

That takes some unpacking. While Mayo LGFA’s dealings have sometimes been, shall we say, less than satisfactory, in times past, that’s not to say progress is not being made at grassroots.

In the past two decades, LGFA clubs have sprouted all around Mayo. In the past five years, clubs like MacHale Rovers, Castlebar Mitchels, Charlestown have won provincial titles and came close to All-Irelands. 

The once-unstoppable Carnacon relinquished their senior title in 2021. It has since been passed from Knockmore to Burrishoole, back to Knockmore and now, for the first time, to Westport.

Clearly, good work is being done within clubs throughout the county. Therein lie lessons to be learned.

“There’s so much good going on in every club,” says Stagg. “If each club can learn from each other what’s good about what’s happening in Charlestown, what’s continuing down in Westport, every club has different challenges whether it’s the number of players, whether it’s resources or capital funding, we can all help each other.”

This could be done, Stagg maintains, by establishing ‘speed dating’ events where clubs can share insights and resources.

Then there’s other bits of house keeping; sending out reports days in advance of the AGM to give clubs the chance to read them and formulate intelligent questions.

She also feels lessons are there to be learned from the people who stepped away from the county board in recent years. (Those who resigned en mass in early 2021 and the call to arms in early January immediately spring to mind.)

LOTS DONE MORE TO DO 

BUT back to football, where there is, to quote a former Taoiseach, ‘a lot done, more do’. Particularly to address the high dropout rate in Gaelic football - a plague which besets the girls most acutely in the early teens.

Stagg points to Leinster, which has set up a U-21 intercounty provincial championship, as an example to follow to retain both club and county players.

“There is a drop off in a lot of girls at that age that you’d love to give them something to keep going for.”

As we speak, the doors are shortly due to open in the Ballinrobe Credit Union, where Stagg has worked here for seven years after a nineteen-year career with the Ulster Bank.

She nods at the suggestion that a decade-plus in finance will stand to her in her new role.

Exhibit A: In 2023, her U-14s fundraised enough to leave a surplus of €18,500 for this year’s team. 

Seems then she’s the right woman to deliver on aspirations to build ‘great commercial partnerships’ for Mayo LGFA

“The long-term vision is that Mayo GAA and LGFA will come together and we will do everything in our power to work together with that template as well, but for now, our finances are in a really healthy state, and that has come from fundraising.”

That brings us to integration. No longer an ‘if’, but a ‘when’.

The expected ‘when’ is 2027 a year that could well overlap with Stagg’s tenure as Mayo LGFA Chairperson.

Stagg herself saw the drawbacks of separate associations when she struggled to find pitches for her Mayo U-14s.

“The girls that are playing county football are just as committed and are being put through exactly the same tortuous training and nutrition and everything else,” she says. “They love it, they want to be county footballers and they’re willing to put in that work and they are the exact same as the fellas that are doing it for Mayo, day in, day out, I still think we are a long way away from integration at a higher level in Croke Park.

“Leadership needs to come from the top and they need to be driving it forward, a bit like me and my executive team that’s coming in now, we’re saying we’re going to be the new leaders in Mayo. We have to lead from the top. The exact same thing has to happen in Croke Park between the LGFA and the GAA, once that starts filtering down I’m 100 percent behind integration. I think it has to happen.”

In that event, she hopes that Mayo GAA, football, or whatever we’re going to call it, will have one forever home in MacHale Park.

But there’s plenty of water to flow under the bridge between now and then.

“What I really want to do is I want to challenge us to do better. We can do better,” she says, pointing to the absence of any Mayo woman from this year’s All-Star nominees.

“We’re Mayo, a senior county team and every one of our clubs and underage groups should be striving to be the best that they can be and whatever we need to do to get them up there, get the right people in the right roles, that’s what I want to do, but I want to do it working with a team. I have a very good team around me.”

Last time that happened, Mayo won an All-Ireland title.