‘I was talking to a 74-year-old in tears’: The historical significance of Mayo’s All Ireland Glory
The renowned historian Professor Diarmuid Ferriter speaks to The Mayo News about the resilience of Mayo fans and the release after a “very layered history”
When Jack Coyne lifted the Sam Maguire Cup in Croke Park on the last Sunday in July, it wasn't only the final whistle of a football match that echoed around the ground. It was the closing of a story that had run through three-quarters of a century of Irish life — through emigration, funerals, heartbreak finals, and the slow, stubborn passing down of hope from one generation to the next.
Mayo's 1-20 to 1-17 defeat of Kerry ended the county's wait for All-Ireland glory dating back to 1951 — a gap that had become, for many, less a statistic than a kind of folklore.
For historian Diarmaid Ferriter, Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD's School of History, the day offered something rarer than a sporting upset: a live demonstration of how a county's identity gets built, tested, and renewed.
The historian watched the game in Mayo, and found himself, fittingly, in the shadow of Croagh Patrick.
"It was an extraordinary occasion," he says. "It was a lovely time to be here, actually, just because of the depth of the emotion of it swirling around."
He recalls speaking to a man for whom the wait had defined an entire adult life. "I was talking to a 74-year-old in tears, who of course had never seen the Mayo footballers win in All Ireland, so you could really feel the depth of the emotion, but also the release. It's an extraordinary release."
A layered history
He was near Staunton's pub in Lecanvey, a detail that turned out to carry its own quiet significance — the pub run by the family of a player from that last winning team in 1951.
"I'm also conscious of being in such a historic county because I was up very near Croagh Patrick and Staunton's Pub in Lecanvey, where of course the daughter there is of a former All-Ireland winner in 1951, and that family tradition there — so you just get that sense of a very layered history."
What struck him just as much, he says, was who else had made the journey.
"You get conscious too of the amount of English accents that were around — you know, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Mayo emmigrants, and of course that's such an important part of the story as well. So there was a real feeling that this wasn't just a story for the people in Mayo now; it really was for the Mayo people globally, and that's a very substantial number."
It's a point that reframes the entire occasion. Mayo's story since 1951 has run in parallel with decades of emigration from the county — to Britain, to the United States, to wherever work could be found — and Ferriter's observation suggests the celebration in Castlebar was really only the visible portion of something much larger, replicated in pubs and living rooms from London to Boston.
The GAA as keeper of memory
Asked about the wider historical significance of the win, Ferriter situates it within the GAA's unusual grip on Irish identity — a grip, he argues, that owes as much to absence as to achievement.
"It really underlines the hold that the GAA has on a sense of local and national identity," he says. "There are teams, obviously, who are regularly successful. There are those who have much longer waits. And what builds up over the course of decades is obviously a degree of frustration, but also expectation, but also wonderment about whether or not they can return to a former glory."
In a county where that wait stretched to 75 years, he says, those feelings compound into something close to a psychological inheritance.
"In a county like Mayo, where that wait has been 75 years, that builds up to exceptional levels, and it does lead to then this very emotional release. But also, I suppose, the different ways in which people coped with the dark days of defeat — you're dealing with mental resilience and a sense of a people who are very strongly bonded through their wait, but also now through their great achievement. And it's joyous."
It's a neat historian's inversion: the very thing that caused Mayo the most pain — final after final, decade after decade, a folk "curse" that grew up around the team's misfortune — became, in Ferriter's reading, the mechanism that bound the county together, and that made the eventual release so overwhelming.