OUTGOING IRFU PERFORMANCE director David Nucifora said the union paid the price for failing to invest enough in women’s rugby until it hit a historic low.
Ireland Women failed to qualify for the 2021 World Cup and though the team has improved in recent times, qualifying for next year’s World Cup in England, they are streets behind top sides like England, France, and New Zealand.
Nucifora admitted that the IRFU failed to deliver sufficient resources to women’s rugby.
“If everyone’s honest with themselves, they can say that they didn’t invest in the game enough,” said Nucifora.
“The game was trying to exist in Ireland on the smell of an oily rag with regards to what we did for it. It had to have more investment in it, it had to grow.
“Yes, we’ve qualified for a World Cup now which is great but if we don’t keep investing, and I’d put growing ahead of investing, we’ve got to use every tool available to grow the game.”
Nucifora believes that women’s rugby is on a better track now, with head coach Scott Bemand leading improved performances this year and players on full-time contracts, but he insisted that there is huge work to be done.
He sees the quality of athletes playing GAA and imagines how big an impact they could make in rugby.
“You look at how many young women are playing GAA in this country,” he said. “If we don’t give them access to rugby, we’re mad, we’re crazy.
“You’re not going to do it the traditional way. We’re kidding ourselves if we think just clubs are going to attract enough players for us to be one of the best teams in the world. We have to use 7s, 15s, clubs, schools, universities, we have to give access to young women and attract talent, give them a positive experience, and make them want to play the game.”
Nucifora looks back with regret that it took so long for the IRFU to be in a position to give players contracts. He said there needed to be a viable competition structure to do so and suggested that the Women’s All-Ireland League didn’t offer that by saying the union could only offer contracts when the Celtic Challenge with Scotland and Wales started.
“You have to have something that allows the player to train full-time to play in,” said Nucifora.
“Once we got a sniff of that, we started to contract the players to train on a full-time basis. The difference with 7s was that right from 2014/15, they had the World Series that ran for nine or 10 months of the year. We had the competition structure, whereas 15s only had the Six Nations.
“I just wish that all those things had happened sooner.”
While the performances of the Ireland team fell under Nucifora’s remit as performance director and the failure of Ireland Women came on his watch, his words strongly suggest a difference of opinion with others at committee level in the IRFU.
Indeed, Nucifora went as far as to say that working towards positive change in women’s rugby was not all the high performance department’s responsibility.
A major turning point in women’s rugby was the scathing letter a group of 62 current and former Irish players sent to the Irish government in 2021 to express their loss of faith in IRFU.
Nucifora and former IRFU women’s director of rugby Anthony Eddy were named in that letter, having overseen a period where Ireland went from Grand Slam winner in 2014 to missing out on the 2021 World Cup.
Unsurprisingly, Nucifora said he didn’t think “it was done in the right way” but he admitted the letter had a positive impact in the end.
“There were things that people could have done in the years leading up to that but chose not to do,” said Nucifora.
“They either chose not to invest or not to do it. If you’re involved in high performance, you need the game to be as big as it can be. If there’s not a willingness to change some of the things being outlined, is that totally high performance’s responsibility?
“I don’t think it is. Yes, some of it is, absolutely, but it’s not all of it. The game has got to want to grow and invest. If the letter had a positive impact in spurring some of those other areas of the game into action, we were always up for the action.”
