Irish Times Sport Ireland Sportswoman of the Month - April

 It’s not that the judges for these awards ever seek sympathy, they acknowledge that there are more challenging tasks in life than figuring out which of our sportswomen, in a month of excessively high achievements, most deserve a salute. But you’ve a cold heart if you couldn’t even feel for them a small bit after the April deliberations they endured.

There was our silver winning quartet of Emily Hegarty, Eimear Lambe, Aifric Keogh and Fiona Murtagh at the European Rowing Championships. There was Katherine O’Connor smashing her Irish heptathlon record, setting personal bests in four of her seven events, to put her within touching distance of the Olympic qualifying standard.

There was Emma Slevin, the first Irish woman to make a European Championships gymnastics final, and there was Aoife Cooke qualifying for the Olympics by running 2:28:36 in the Cheshire Elite Marathon, moving her to fourth on the all-time Irish list.

There was Rhasidat Adeleke who broke an Irish 200 metres record that had stood for 21 years, and then broke her own new mark a week later. There was Mona McSharry who qualified for the Olympics 100m breaststroke by becoming the first Irish swimmer to break 1:07, also bettering her own 200m record for good measure.

And then there was the form of the rugby trio of Cliodhna Moloney, Dorothy Wall and Beibhinn Parsons which earned them a slot in the Six Nations team of the tournament.

And that’s only the half of it.

Any of the above would have been a worthy addition to our list of monthly winners so far this year, but in the end Orla O’Dwyer got the nod after she became just the second Irish woman to win the Aussie Rules AFLW Premiership title when she was part of the Brisbane Lions team that beat Adelaide Crows in April’s Grand Final.

The 22-year-old, playing her second season with Brisbane, had an outstanding individual campaign, made all the more challenging because of so many quarantine requirements along the way, enough to put her second in the voting for the club’s player of the year award behind their star midfielder Ally Anderson.

Even before she made her mark in Australia, O’Dwyer had established herself as one of our most gifted dual players, winning multiple Gaelic football and camogie honours with Tipperary, including two intermediate All Ireland football titles and two underage camogie All Irelands.

One of her Adelaide opponents in the final was her former University of Limerick team-mate Ailish Considine who became the first Irish Grand Final winner in 2019.

O’Dwyer will be back in action for both the Tipperary camogie and football teams this summer, intent on making an already memorable 2021 one she will never forget.