‘She knows it is harder’ – Kildare’s Grace Clifford praises female influence of manager Diane O’Hora

“I don’t think they really care,” O’Hora told the Irish Independent. “I don’t know if they really care. The one thing I would say is, there’s a level of mutual respect or empathy even.

“I know absolutely everything they’re going through because I went through it myself.”

Grace Clifford laughs now when that quote is put to her. “She’s not going to admit that!,” says the Kildare captain. “But that’s Diane for you. But when Diane says to you, ‘will you do this?’ – especially for the forwards because she was a forward herself – she still has, sometimes we might see a flicker of that left foot when she shows us stuff.

“It’s kind of like the campaign, ‘can’t see, can’t be’. I see the experience of having a female manager really positive. I’ve had amazing male managers but it’s someone who has done it.

“She understands it from a female perspective and she fights for us for everything. She knows it is harder. She would be in with the GAA fighting for things for us.

“It’s everything she does. She oozes that then and we survive off that then.”

Alone O’Hora stands. Twelve counties will contest this year’s All-Ireland Ladies SFC. O’Hora is the only female manager.

Half of those counties; Galway, Laois, Donegal, Mayo, Meath and Armagh have changed manager since the end of last season and each has plumped for a man. This is not evidence of sexism or discrimination. It simply reflects the numbers.

There are obvious sociological reasons why fewer women go into coaching after finishing playing. In December, the GAA in conjunction with the LGFA and the Camogie Association set up a female mentorship programme for Gaelic games with the purpose of creating a pathway for “ambitious female coaches”.

Any resultant deluge of women coaches can’t come quickly enough. For her part, Clifford is adamant that there is a need for a strong female presence in every management team.

“I think it’s really important,” she stressed. “Because our mindsets are different. I even think having a female selector to be the person to go around and asks, ‘is everything . . . ’

“Because we all know men and women, what makes them tick is totally different. Women, we can be even more complex. I find as well that girls like to ask a lot of questions.

“Even our male management will say, one of the them is involved in a men’s team, and he’ll say, ‘I’ll go into a training session there and the lads will just get on with it’.

“Where we’ll be like, ‘why are we doing this? What’s the reason?’. So just to get that balance of the people who understand it and who have done it is really, really positive.

“Plus I think it’s more encouraged. I’d love to get into . . . whether it be a coaching aspect. Because for a long time it was, play football, get married, have kids. But I see more people get involved now. There are more courses.”

It’s a big couple of weeks for Kildare.

They have followed the path of Meath in making rapid progress. From Division 3 to Division 1 in two years. Intermediate champions in 2023.

If they were a little tipsy on their own progress, their meeting with Dublin in Leinster acted as a cold shower.

But after years of, as Clifford puts it, “constant disappointment” and stasis, Kildare are back on the game’s grandest stage.

“It would be very dishonest of me to sit here and say there weren’t times when I was thinking, ‘what am I doing?’. I have a lot of friends who don’t play GAA either and they didn’t understand it,” she says.

“But there’s always that desire, the dream of being in Croke Park, of walking the steps of the Hogan Stand. That dream was genuinely in the back of my mind and that buzz.

“That week leading up to a big inter-county match, when you’re around your area and everyone is wishing you luck and you see the flags. It was that kind of buzz I’ve always craved and it was worth it.”