Geraldine Barniville obituary: Irish tennis and squash number one who also made her mark in sports administration

Born: November 7th, 1942

Died: January 30th, 2026

Dr Geraldine Barniville (nee Houlihan), who has died aged 83, was an international tennis and squash player who later became involved in sports administration, coaching and sports medicine.

During more than a decade as the country’s best female tennis player, she played at Wimbledon a number of times and at the US Open. She represented Ireland some 70 times, and dominated the game at home.

Later, she came to focus her energies on squash, becoming the Irish number one at that too and playing at a succession of world team championships.

She brought the same high standards she had developed as a player to her coaching, administrative and sports medicine roles, including as team doctor to the Irish boxers at the Barcelona Olympics, where Michael Carruth won a gold medal and Wayne McCullough a silver.

She would subsequently serve as a member of the boards of the Irish Sports Council (then Cospoir) and National Coaching and Training Centre and become active at a high level, and expert, in anti-doping.

She was married to the late Dr Harry Barniville, also a tennis international, who she met while still a medical student.

They married in April 1966, had three boys, lived in Shankill and then Eglinton Square in Dublin, and won a great many mixed doubles titles together.

Born into a legal family in Birr, Co Offaly to Des and Phyllis Houlihan, she was the eldest of three children, older sister to Jim and Susan.

Her father had been a good underage tennis player, and saw her potential early on.

It is said to have been a competitive household, an environment that seems to have suited her, as she played her first adult tournament aged just eight.

She went to boarding school that year to the Sacred Heart Covent, Roscrea, and emerged at the age of 16 with enough points to study medicine at UCD.

The university’s age requirements left her with a year to kill but she moved to Dublin and did a secretarial course before working for a short time at Guinness’s.

Having started college, she played tennis for Ireland at senior level for the first time in 1960. She was 17.

She was serious enough about the game through her student years to travel continental Europe to play in tournaments when the opportunity arose, and she also played Junior Wimbledon that year.

She also played hockey at UCD and featured for Leinster. Tennis, though, was her real focus, and by 1963 she had displaced Eleanor O’Neill (later McFadden) as the Irish number one, a status she wouldn’t relinquish for more than a decade.

In 1964 she competed in the women’s singles at Wimbledon, losing to England’s Robin Lloyd by 11 games to nine in the third set.

A few months later she travelled to New York for the US National Championships, now the US Open, where she was again narrowly edged out, 11-9, 5-7, 8-6, this time by Carole Caldwell Graebner, who would herself only lose in the final – a performance that helped the American reach number four in the world rankings that year.

The New York Times reported the American “had a narrow escape… after two hours of exhausting play”.

Barniville’s fierce determination, a characteristic she was well known for over the course of her career both professional and sporting, was acknowledged in write-ups of the match, with World Tennis magazine saying she would “do anything to get the ball in”.

At her funeral, her son David, president of the High Court, suggested it might seem like “shameless name-dropping” if he were to list off all the great players she shared a court with over the years, and it is certainly quite a list.

On that same trip to the United States in September 1964, she played Billie Jean Moffitt (later King) in the Federation Cup, and also that year she beat Virginia Wade, a three-time Grand Slam winner.

During a busy summer, she also partnered the Australian Margaret Court (a winner of 24 Grand Slam singles finals) to the doubles title at the Irish Championships in Fitzwilliam – then a regular stopping off point for some of the world’s best players immediately after Wimbledon. Over the years she also faced former world number ones Martina Navratilova and Evonne Goolagong Cawley.

Fitzwilliam would play a major part in her story – even if it took the club quite a while to let her actually join.

She practised and played there regularly, but told Christina Murphy of The Irish Times in 1974 that she still felt like “a second-class citizen” as she had to be signed in by a male member on each occasion.

At least by that time she had moved beyond the point when, seven years earlier, this paper referred to her as Mrs H Barniville in a sports report.

It would be December 1996 though before the 1,200 or so all male members of Fitzwilliam, where her husband had previously been president, finally voted to admit women, having rejected the move three times in the preceding few years. She was one of three granted honorary life membership early the following year.

She is remembered by one friend as wanting to make an impact for women and struck a blow of sorts in 1974 when she won a 16-strong mixed singles event, featuring eight men and eight women, called the Players Number 6 tournament for the popular cigarette brand of the time which sponsored it.

It was organised by the former sports journalist and founder of the charity Goal, John O’Shea, in Clarinda Park, Dún Laoghaire. First prize was a men’s watch which she is said to have taken some pleasure in showing the kids in later years.

By then, she was also an international squash player. Part of the motivation for the gradual sporting migration appears to have been the shortage of other women to really push her in domestic tennis and her frustration at a subsequent failure to qualify again for Wimbledon.

In 1971, she was Ireland’s only winner in a 6-1 international defeat by England, and a newspaper report noted she was a mother of three children under four at the time.

Squash, which she had first played regularly on a court at the Mater hospital while training as a doctor, allowed women to play men’s league which Barniville regarded as an opportunity for self-improvement.

She was soon the Irish number one, enjoying a whole new international career at a time when the Irish women’s team was one of the best in the world.

She only retired from that top level after the European and World Championships in 1983.

It was in that sport she was also to become a prominent administrator as, among many other things, the first president of the newly unified Irish Squash, in part, some suggest, because male dominance was less of a factor than in tennis.

She also returned to her studies, completing a degree in physiology at Trinity College Dublin where she became a part-time lecturer, a course co-ordinator and a key member of the university’s Human Performance Lab.

Her expertise was soon being put to good use in a variety of roles and on committees at national and international level.

Remarkably, she still had another change of sport in her, namely cycling. Having competed in the first Wicklow 200, a 200km road race through the county and its mountains in 1982 when she was the only woman to complete the course, she continued to get out regularly until her deteriorating eyesight finally stopped her in her mid-70s.

She was predeceased by her husband, and survived by their three sons, David, Tim and Nick, as well as her brother Jim, sister Susan, her in-laws, nieces and nephews.

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