by Kevin Egan

Ask any player, and they’ll tell you that this time of year is for dreaming. The Centra Camogie Leagues are just getting started, and whether your team has brought on board a host of All-Ireland winning minors or you’re working with the same group of players, there is still a sense anything being possible.

That means dreaming of Croke Park, perhaps making a big play to clinch a game in front of thousands of your friends, family and supporters.

That dream drives players on and anyone who ever kicked a ball or picked up a hurley can identify with that feeling.

It’s a lot harder to identify with training hard, working on your fitness, doing your research and study, with the dream that if things go well, you’ll have zero bearing on that big game and nobody will mention you when the post-mortems take place.

That’s the landscape for a referee, and yet Liz Dempsey is as motivated as ever as she prepares for her 14th season of taking charge of top level inter-county camogie.

A player herself all the way up through underage and into adult level, it’s a little known fact that Liz also has a junior championship football medal with her native Thomastown. Anyone willing to put their time and commitment into football in Kilkenny is not afraid to go against the grain and follow the path less travelled. Even so, the perennial question for all whistlers is still the first one we put to her – in a nutshell, why refereeing?

“It’s really just the enjoyment I get out of it,” comes the answer.

“The friends I’ve made down the years, the camaraderie that’s there with other referees, I just get a kick out of it. When I started, I wanted to give something back and I felt it would be an opportunity to keep fit even after I stopped playing.

“But as time goes on you start to enjoy the games, you enjoy being part of it and the interaction with players, and then you start to think about what can be achieved for yourself and for your umpires, since we’re effectively a team.”

Dempsey kept it low-key while she got used to the role, starting with club underage games. 

“I didn’t want to be in a situation where I’d be making a decision for or against a player I might be playing against myself the following day.

“But eventually I hung up my own hurl and in 2010, Clare McDonald was the county secretary, and she came to me to know would I put my name forward for the inter-county panel. I didn’t at the time, but then in 2012 I said I’ll give it a go.”

Her rise through the ranks didn’t take long to gather momentum; though the Kilkenny team stunted her progress by reaching five All-Ireland senior finals in a row between 2016 and 2020, ruling her out as a possible candidate to oversee the showpiece fixture in the calendar.

For many of those years, she was a selector on those teams, leading to a special day in 2014 when she refereed the junior final between Down and Laois before changing colours to be part of the Kilkenny backroom team for the senior decider against Cork.

Fast forward seven years and Cork captain Linda Collins scored the winning point in the Rebels’ 0-15 to 1-11 win over the Cats in the 2021 semi, and the stage was clear for the Thomastown woman to referee her first All-Ireland senior final. Nine years of upward momentum had seen her reach the mountain top.

“2014 was special to me because when you go out there for a game like that, you know that for the two teams that were playing, they had put years of preparation and training into reaching Croke Park on All-Ireland final day and to be trusted with that responsibility meant a lot to me. It’s a really important day in my refereeing career and even if we didn’t win the senior final, that was definitely special.

“But refereeing my first senior final has to be the pinnacle of my career. Players will say the same thing, there’s no feeling like your first final, and I’ll always treasure that.”

If refereeing those finals was a huge part of her development into one of the leading referees in the country, she had to lean on all her experience in the aftermath of the 2024 senior final, when every spotlight in the media landscape and all across social media was trained on Katrina Mackey’s controversial goal that ultimately separated Cork and Galway.

“That week was hard, to be honest,” she admits. “You’re thinking, ‘Is it worth all this hassle, all this media attention?’ But look, once the week passes after it, or even that week you go and do a club game here in Kilkenny, you kind of forget about it. You’re back in your own bubble with your own people and you just park it, because if you sit down too long and analyse it, it just gets to you and you might never go back out to referee again.”

It’s that time of year when all around the country, county boards are trying to find the next Liz Dempsey.

Given the aftermath of the ‘24 final, Dempsey could be forgiven for saying that a thick skin is a vital attribute for anyone considering taking up the whistle. Instead, however, while she says that she closed off her social media and would advise any current or future referee to do the same, she still believes that the same things that drew her into refereeing are vital to fulfilling the role properly.

“Of course you have to be serious and to know the rules, but you have to have the craic with people too.

“Yes, you need to be a cool, calm kind of a person because there’s no point if the referee is going to be losing their head along with everyone around them!”

Dempsey also believes that it’s an ideal time for anyone who was on the fence to get started, since they’ll be coming in for new rules that she expects will speed up the game and make it better for everyone.

“I think what we’ve seen from men’s football, and I watch a lot of rugby as well, the dissent rule should be really good.

“It’s not even players that I think will be the ones that will really have to change their behaviour. If you have a manager on the line that’s shouting and abusing you, the team is going to be penalised, not just them.

“Overall, the game is in a good place, but I like the rule about the removal of the helmet. I think that will speed the game up because in the last couple of years in close games you had someone going down with a cut hand and suddenly the helmet comes off. This will cut out the time-wasting. Sidelines from the hand inside the 45 will speed up the game as well.

“It’s going to take time to adjust for everybody; referees and players, managers and coaches. But once the games get going, people will just adapt and forget the way it was before.”

Meanwhile, Dempsey is every bit as excited for the new year as the players that she will be looking out for in the coming weeks and months.

“Every year is different, it brings its own challenges. What comes, comes, all I can do is go out and try and do my best at each game and to improve myself as I go along, and see where it takes me.”

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