Inishturk’s field of dreams

Edwin McGreal

ROBERT O’Toole steered his jeep along narrow roads and through tight gates. Eamon Heanue sat shotgun while his son Ryan was in the backseat, sandwiched between this reporter and Mayo footballer Diarmuid O’Connor.
The Ballintubber star was on the island back in June to raise a red flag at the local national school for young entrepreneurs, an event The Mayo News reported on.
But at the local school, Mikey O’Toole told us about the big weekend in September that is the All-Island Football competition. It will be played on Inishturk and the islanders would like nothing more than to win the competition on home soil. We wanted to go for a look at the local field of dreams, and Robert and Eamon kindly offered to drive us there.
The thought occured to us as we travel towards the western side of the island, where is there enough flat land on this beautiful outpost for a football pitch?
The terrain of Inishturk is undulating, rocky and hilly. It’s perfect land for sheep farming. Not so much so for football, you would think.
Then we turned the corner and it appeared from nowhere, like an oasis in the desert.
Surrounded by rocky hills on all sides is the island’s field of dreams. Inishturk football pitch looks like it is hewn right out of the limestone hills that surround it.
Yet only parts of the top corners of the pitch had to be cut from the rock. The vast majority of the field was flat to begin with. It is a curiosity when you examine the terrain which surrounds us.
“God must have wanted us to play football when he was making this island,” one islander told us later on.
Eamon and Robert showed us into the dressing rooms, finished just in time for Inishturk’s first hosting of the All-Island competition in 2012, along with pitch improvements. They won the competition once themselves, in 2008.
As luck would have it, they were followed that year by a film crew led by former Galway goalkeeper Pat Comer, and the scenes after the final whistle on that show would have brought a tear from the stone hills that surround the pitch on ’Turk.
They are hoping to go one better this year, by winning it on home soil. Many of the footballers born on the island no longer live there and are scattered throughout Ireland and beyond. The romantic ideals of island life don’t always dovetail with the economic realities.
But they are doing their best to not let that get in the way. The morning of last May’s Connacht semi-final in Salthill saw Inishturk footballers gather at St James’ pitch in Renmore for a collective training session. They will do likewise as many times as they can before September 12.
All with the hope of bringing the finest hour to their field of dreams.