Louisburgh’s annus mirabilis

As John Durkan spoke in the winning dressing room, he looked around and knew his Louisburgh team had achieved something special. 
Louisburgh had just won their first ever intermediate title and the dressing room was packed with players, families and many Louisburgh legends of yesteryear who could not believe this day had arrived. They had soldiered through many barren years, where winning a West Mayo was the limit of their hope and expectations. Some years even that was fanciful. 
Durkan was humbled as he spoke.
‘I said we had been a lucky team. That there were better players down the years but they didn’t have the rub of the green. I could see tears coming down faces, you could see how much it meant to the older crew,’ he recalls. 
It had been quite the transformation. Louisburgh had been junior just the year before. Indeed, only a few months previously they were without a manager when Durkan walked out after players turned up hungover and late for a challenge game. An intermediate title looked a long way off that day but here they were, making history and giving a day of days to their community. A day and a time never to be forgotten around Louisburgh, Killeen and Lecanvey.

***

Louisburgh had been ‘traditionally a junior team’ recalls Niall Corrigan, captain of the 1994 winning junior and 1995 winning intermediate teams. 
John Durkan was captain when they lost the 1989 Mayo JFC final to a Joe McGrath inspired Kilmaine. He was an inspirational figure as a player and likewise when he took over as manager at the start of 1994. 
He had a flock of talented young players coming through which would transform the team. Louisburgh won Mayo Under 21 B titles in 1994 and 1995 and that group was the spine of their junior and intermediate winning teams. 
Experience and guile is worth its weight in gold too though and Louisburgh were minus their talisman Pádraig Walsh. He had transferred to Kilmeena, where he was living but Durkan made an successful approach to get him back. Walsh was 37 in 1994 but was still a class apart and excelled at intermediate the following year too. 
‘We wouldn’t have won without him. You’d just have to give him the ball and it would be put between the posts,’ said Durkan. 
At the time they all lived locally. When Ronan O’Grady was in college in Limerick in 1995, he was the only member of the panel away. 
‘At midweek training we’d have 30 or so players at it,’ said O’Grady.
The beaches in the area were their Calgary as Durkan prepared their bodies and minds for the battles ahead. Silver Strand in Thallaghbawn and Carramore just outside the town became sites of penance.
‘There was no place to hide in Thallaghbawn,’ recalls Durkan.
‘But there was in Carramore,’ quipped goalkeeper O’Grady, with the experience of someone who used foliage cover to catch his breath on long runs.
‘John was a hard taskmaster. We were very fit. We won an awful lot of games in the last five minutes when our fitness would start to tell,’ said O’Grady. 
They won the 1994 West Mayo Junior semi-final with a win over Achill. 
‘We were lucky as a black cat that day,’ recalls Corrigan. They secured the West championship with a victory over Castlebar Mitchels B and qualified for the county final with a comfortable win over Moygownagh. 
It set up a clash with a different Carramore – the South Mayo club who would not give Ronan O’Grady and Co a place to hide like the beach at home. The sides were level late on and destined for a replay when John Dyar conjured up a piece of magic, firing over the lead score from the tightest of angles. He kicked another shortly after and Louisburgh were champions, 0-11 to 1-6. Pádraig Walsh had been the key man again, kicking seven points on the day. 
They partied that night and perhaps for a few days more.

***

The social side was an important part of team bonding. John Durkan was running The Weir Bar and Restaurant in Louisburgh and his footballers were not slow to give him custom. 
‘Every Sunday was super Sunday,’ said O’Grady. Socialising with opponents was a big thing too at the time. 
‘It was a great way to get to know opponents after games. It’s gone now but it was a lovely thing,’ recalls midfielder Brendan Heneghan. 
Scamps night club was on the go in Louisburgh then and many of the Louisburgh players would often end up in John Durkan’s kitchen afterwards. 
‘He’d feed us to sober us up,’ recalls Corrigan. 
‘We really were like a family,’ added Heneghan. 
‘The craic was 90 in our dressing room. So many of us were the same age. We always drank together, played together and did everything together,’ recalls O’Grady. ‘We knew the craic was better at night if we won – there were a lot of Mondays taken off work!’ he added. 
But they pushed it a bit too far in the spring of 1995.
As Louisburgh prepared to the intermediate championship, John Durkan had arranged a challenge game with Westport for 11am on a Sunday morning. Many of his players felt that need not get in the way of a good Saturday night in Scamps. By 11.30am he had only 11 players. Ten minutes later a few more arrived but it wasn’t long until Durkan was walking in the opposite direction. 
‘Westport were ready to go at 11am and here our lads were coming into the dressing room in dribs and drabs. I was embarrassed because they didn’t show respect for our opponents who were good enough to come out to play us in a challenge game and they didn’t show respect to me either,’ Durkan recalls. 
‘We were good party boyos,’ said O’Grady. ‘We usually knew what we could and couldn’t do. I don’t know what happened that weekend but we definitely crossed the line.’
They knew it was pointless approaching Durkan straightaway to ask him to reconsider departing. They left it a week or two and Corrigan, as captain, was sent down to The Weir as the players’ emissary.
‘I brought him out the back because the walls wouldn’t contain what I had to say,’ recalls Durkan but Corrigan heard him out, pleaded for clemency and Durkan decided to go back. The players were a relieved lot. 
George Gibbons and Séamus Healy were his selectors and were key members of the operation too.
‘They were with me all the time and it is them that deserve the accolades,’ said Durkan. 
Louisburgh were finding the intermediate grade a more open style of football than the cauldron of junior football. Their first round game was against Moy Davitts in Foxford. They heard dismissive talk abut being a junior team and ‘where is Louisburgh?’ from the opposition dressing room. It made Durkan put his fist through a door with temper. 
Louisburgh gave their answer and won 0-15 to 1-10. A semi-final win over Bonniconlon followed. Walsh kicked 0-7 in each of those two games. It set up a county final with West Mayo neighbours Kilmeena, a game which pitted the last two county junior champs against each other. Both were bidding to win their first ever intermediate title. 
Louisburgh won comfortably, 1-14 to 2-4. Writing in The Mayo News, Pádraig Burns said Louisburgh had ‘totally overwhelmed’ Kilmeena. Despite playing into a strong wind, Louisburgh took a 1-7 to 1-4 lead in at half-time with midfielder Brendan Heneghan getting the goal just before half-time. 
They dominated the play in the second half while man-marker Alan Mayberry ‘was in commanding form on Kilmeena danger-man Joe Ryan’, wrote Burns. 
He singled out John Dyar for praise in the forward line as the ‘natural successor to Pádraig Walsh who may not have scored his usual seven points but whose experience was vital on the day’. 

***

Louisburgh had made history and John Durkan was a proud man. When you listen to him speak, it’s clear his players would go through walls for him. 
‘I remember that Sunday so well. That meant so much. It was the biggest day for the club in my lifetime,’ he recalls.
It was a big deal because of the grá for the game in the parish.
‘It is woven into the fabric of the place,’ said Ronan O’Grady. 
‘The whole parish is behind you,’ added Brendan Heneghan.
Niall Corrigan had the honour of being the first Louisburgh man to lift the Sweeney Cup. 
‘I felt lucky. So many other people in the club had played for so many years and won nothing and here we had won so much in such a short period of time. It meant a lot to my mother too. She had done so much to get us out playing football,’ said Corrigan. 
It had been a tough year for the Corrigans. Niall Corrigan lost his father Michael and his first-cousin, Marie Keane, passed away aged only 41.
‘There was lots of doom and gloom in the parish so the football gave a lift to the parish,’ he recalls. 
A ‘big regret’ for Corrigan was that they did not acquit themselves well at senior and came straight back down to intermediate. However they won their second intermediate title in 2003 and stayed senior until 2009. 
It is only as they age that they fully appreciate what they did in 1994 and 1995. 
‘Most of the team were so young that we didn’t realise how big a deal it was,’ recalls Brendan Heneghan. 
The bonds remain. They meet up regularly and try to arrange a gathering of the full group every Christmas. 
‘When you’re involved in football, you’ve friends for life,’ said Corrigan. 
The club hosted a very successful dinner dance in January 1996 in The Derrylahan in Louisburgh. 
The top table was awash with silverware. There was the Sweeney Cup for the intermediate championship, the Division 2 (intermediate) league cup, Under 21 B cup, minor league and championship and under-16 league and championship. 
Intermediate selector George Gibbons managed the successful Under 21 teams too. He was singled out at the dinner dance for being involved with no less than four teams, serving as club PRO, being a member of the lotto committee and regularly ferrying club players to county underage training sessions. 
It was, as reported in The Mayo News, ‘Louisburgh’s annus mirabilis’. 
‘It goes by so quick but there are so many wonderful memories. It was great to be a part of it. The team has to take the credit, they made the sacrifices. In my time with them we were great friends. I met so many people along the way and made so many great friends. I was really privileged to live through that,’ said Durkan. 
And his players were privileged to have him at the helm. 

Mayo IFC final 1995
Sunday, October 1, MacHale Park
Louisburgh 1-14
Kilmeena 2-4

LOUISBURGH
Ronan O’Grady; Alan Mayberry, Michael McGreal, David O’Malley; Edward Ball, Eric Heneghan, Michael J Ball; Brendan Heneghan (1-2), Tom McDonnell (0-1); Séamus McDonnell, Niall Corrigan (0-1), Anthony Corrigan (0-1); Aidan Ball (0-2), Pádraig Walsh (0-3), John Dyar (0-4). Subs: Mark Sammin for A Corrigan; Tony Lyons for A Ball. 

This is an abridged version of the Louisburgh chapter from the recently released book 'Our Finest Hour - Mayo GAA clubs reflect on their glory days', written by experienced GAA journalist Edwin McGreal and published by the Mayo Books Press. It features 54 iconic moments from football and hurling clubs throughout Mayo. It's on sale in all good bookshops and online from mayobooks.ie where it can be shipped worldwide.