Cork LGBTQ+ GAA club Na Laochra Aeracha to play history-making match
'The fact that it's the first time two gay teams have played each other in a GAA match - it's huge,' said Na Laochra Aeracha chairperson Aaron Kelly.
'It should be a lot of craic, and making history as well.'
The Cork side hope to arrange a challenge game against Dublin's Na Gaeil Aeracha in the coming months and there are plans forming for this to be just the beginning.
'We're hoping to maybe do a bit of a blitz between at least three of us within the next 12 months,' explained vice-chairperson Dean Kinsella.
'And maybe this is something we can even do several times a year. Maybe they come down to Cork one weekend, we go to Belfast another weekend, and we go to Dublin another weekend. We may tally up the points as part of an annual competition is what we're thinking.
'At the moment, there isn't anything established in Galway. We were speaking with Sporting Pride last year on potentially setting up something between all four provinces.
'You'd have one in Galway, Belfast, Dublin and Cork now. All we're doing is basically waiting on Galway to set up. And once we have one in Galway, that creates the perfect opportunity for us to do some kind of annual blitz.
'We can still go ahead and do one without Galway but it would be amazing to have a provincial LGBT inclusive blitz.'
Na Laochra Aeracha have made tremendous strides since being established 15 months ago. In January, their application to form a new club was approved by Cork GAA. Later this month, their men's team will play their first match in the Seandún Junior C Football Championship when they face Glanmire. They won the shield final at the Glenville 7s in June and earlier this month, their ladies football team won all of their games at a blitz in Kinsale. In August, just six months after players started training, the club will play its first hurling/camogie match in a nine-a-side challenge against Midleton.
The club found itself without a sponsor earlier this year but MTU Cork has since come on board.
'We just found ourselves in a very precarious situation at the start of the year where we didn't have a lot of money,' said Kinsella.
'One of the core values of the club is that we didn't want to be charging our members a lot of money, like some GAA clubs can charge, you know, up to a couple of hundred euro a year for membership fees. We just didn't want to do that because we were very cognizant of the fact that a lot of our members are students and they wouldn't have had that amount of money.
'We'd been chatting to a contact we had in MTU and a few of our committee members have been working very, very hard and diligently on building that relationship with that contact in MTU. We managed to get it over the line a few months ago.'
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