National Sporting Heritage Day–Launch of the PRONI Guide to Sports Records

Join us at PRONI as we celebrate the National Sporting Heritage Day with the launch of our new and improved Alphabetical Index to Sports Records at PRONI. This guide has been developed to make it easier for researchers to find archival collections relating to the sports that they are interested in. PRONI has in its custody a wide variety of material relating to sport and recreation, ranging from popular sports such as football and rugby, to more obscure activities such as ploughing and water-skiing.

We are delighted to be joined by researcher, Helena Byrne, at our launch who will discuss her own interactions with the Northern Ireland Women’s Football Association Records at PRONI with her talk Game Changer: looking back on the first UEFA competition for women:

Northern Ireland will face Croatia in the first round of the playoffs for a place in the UEFA Women’s Euro Switzerland 2025 tournament in October. Northern Ireland is hoping to qualify for their second Women’s Euro tournament. Demand for tickets for England 2022 and the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2024 far exceeded expectations. This reflects the growing popularity of the sport. However, very little has been published on the early years of the UEFA competition which started in 1982.

In 1971 UEFA members voted to recognise women’s football and its members were directed to take control of the organisation of women’s football. However, despite this positive position it took a further eleven years of campaigning before UEFA formally organised a competitive competition for women’s international football teams. Even then the governing bodies were unsure if a competition was going to go ahead in 1982 and if they would be able to afford to participate without any substantial investment from UEFA. This presentation looks back on how the first competition was organised as well as the challenges faced with a focus on Northern Ireland.

Helena Byrne is a librarian that specialises in web archiving and an independent researcher focusing on the history of women’s football in Ireland. She regularly contributes history segments to FAI Women's National Team match programmes. In her role as Curator of Web Archives at the British Library she has been the lead curator on a number of sports collections for the UK Web Archive. The most recent football collection was UEFA Women's Euro England 2022. She is currently co-lead on the 2024 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games collection for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Content Development Group (CDG). This collection will be published online shortly.

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