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22 Oct 2025

Kilkenny's Mary Fitzgerald named on Irish Athletics Team for Paralympic Games

A five person Para athletics team will travel to Paris next month

Kilkenny's Mary Fitzgerald named on Irish Athletics Team for Paralympic Games

The Irish Para Athletics team

Reporter:

Kilkenny People Reporter

18 Jul 2024 2:00 PM

Email:

sport@kilkennypeople.ie

The Para athletics team that will represent Ireland at the Paralympic Games this summer has been announced today.
A five person Para athletics team which includes Kilkenny woman Mary Fitzgerald will fly to Paris for the Games which take place from August 28 to September 8.
The addition of these five athletes brings the team size to 12 named so far with the remaining members of the team to be announced over the next two weeks.
Mary Fitzgerald made her Paralympic Debut in Tokyo, a different Games to the normal spectacle where she placed 6th in the women’s F40 shot put with a best throw of 7.79m. She will look forward to a different experience for her second Games with family and friends allowed to travel and support.
Shauna Bocquet is the first of two debutants on the team. The Galway native will compete in three events in Paris – T54 100m, 1500m and 5000m. She has set multiple personal bests over the last twelve months and has been invited to compete at various Diamond Leagues in Europe.
Paris will be Orla Comerford’s third Paralympic Games. She qualified the first female athletics slot for Ireland last July at the World Para-Athletics Championships, finishing fourth, just 0.06 seconds off the bronze medal in the 100m T13 final. The 100m sprinter has gone from strength to strength recently clocking a new PB breaking 12 seconds for the first time in her career. She ran 11.90 in the 100m final at the National Senior Track and Field Championships in June this year.
Greta Streimikyte is another veteran of the squad having also made her Paralympic debut in Rio 2016. Paris will be her third Paralympic Games. Similarly to her teammate Comerford, she secured a female slot for Ireland at the World Para-Athletics Championships last July.
Carlow man Aaron Shorten will also be making his Paralympic debut and rounds off the team as the only male athlete. His preferred event is the T20 1500m.
Both Shorten and Bocquet made their major championships debut last summer at the Para Athletics World Championships in Paris.
Paralympics Ireland is also delighted to announce that we will be using LEXI for the duration of the Games. LEXI explains classification in para-sport in a simple language the audience understands. A traffic-light system of four colours allows information to be shown intuitively whilst giving the flexibility to accurately represent different impairment types. LEXI will feature on all social posts from Paralympics Ireland in the build-up to and throughout the Games to help engage audiences.

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