“I sense that all boys and girls interested in football desire county fame.
In the Walter Mitty space of our minds we dream of scoring the crucial point or goal in the All-Ireland Final”
Second Reading
Fr Kevin Hegarty I WELL remember when I first learned what my peers thought of me. I was in third class in Scoil Pádraig in Ballina. An icy spring wind whipped through the school veranda where those of us interested in playing in the Gaelic football leagues were gathered.
One of our teachers, Brother Nicholas, had chosen the captains. They, in their turn, picked eleven players. After the tenth pick there were only a few of us left, looking forlorn and feeling foolish. Shades of the Janis Ian song, ‘At Seventeen’, and its line about those whose names were never called when making teams for basketball.
A discussion arose as to how the dregs of the sporting world might be accommodated. One captain, with the ruthless insight of youth, commented: “It does not matter with which team they play. Sure, they are all useless anyway.”
Despite that humiliating start, I persevered. Hope does not spring eternal but it can take a while to rendezvous with reality. I even won a North Mayo Under-14 medal as a sub with Ballina Stephenites. You would not want to read any significance into that. Our team mentors were kind dads, with gentleness in their eyes. They did not know how to hurt us. So their list of subs was of a charitable length.
I eventually got over my failure to be a Mayo football superstar and perhaps, even, to be immortalised in a Saw Doctors’ song. I sense that all boys and girls interested in football desire county fame. In the Walter Mitty space of our minds we dream of scoring the crucial point or goal in the All-Ireland Final.
It is the kind of thing that Brian Friel dramatised so well in ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come’, where Gar, as he completes his daily chores in his father’s shop, fantasises in the private part of his consciousness: “It looks as if – I can’t see very well from the distance – but it looks as if, yes, yes, the free is being taken by dashing Gar O’Donnell, pride of the Ballybeg team. O’Donnell is now moving back, taking a slow, calculating look at the goal. I’ve never seen this boy in the brilliant form he’s in today – absolute magic in his feet.”
Patrick Kavanagh once wrote that no one ‘can adequately describe Irish life who ignores the Gaelic Athletic Association’. Not only did the organisation codify the rules of football and hurling and structure the games on the foundation of club and county, it also played a major role in the resurgence of nationalism in the early 20th century.
Not that all nationalists understood its significance. Seán MacBride, possibly because he spent his childhood outside Ireland, failed to understand its importance. In August, 1936 he chaired a meeting as Chief of Staff of the IRA to discuss how to establish a Republic. Towards the end of a long meeting, the delegates from Mayo and Kerry were getting restless.
MacBride asked the writer, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, what was wrong. Ó Cadhain explained that, as Mayo were playing Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final, the delegates were anxious to get to Roscommon to see the game. “I see,” said Seán, “so a game of football is more important than the future of the Irish Republic.” Ó Cadhain reckoned: “I knew then that he would never do any good in politics because he did not understand Ireland.”
The civil war was especially bitter in Kerry. The needs of the county football team, however, transcended the corrosive politics. It has been argued that the mutual passion for All-Ireland success helped heal the wounds of war.
Gabriel Fitzmaurice, in his poem ‘Munster Football Final, 1924’, tells the story of how Con Brosnan, a captain of the Free State Army, granted immunity to John Joe Sheehy, a Republican on the run from the authorities, for the duration of the game:
“Nothing polarises like a war,
And of all wars, a civil war is worst;
It takes a century to heal the scars,
And even then some names remain accursed.
The tragedies of Kerry, open wounds –
John Joe Sheehy on the run in twenty four
The Munster Final in Gaelic Grounds:
There’s something more important here than war,
John Joe Sheehy, centre-forward, Republican,
Con Brosnan, free state captain, centre-field;
For what they have they both put down the gun –
On Con’s safe conduct, Sheehy too has the field.
In an hour the Kerry team will win.
Sheehy will vanish, on Brosnan’s bond, again.”
My random thoughts on the GAA have been prompted by the announcement that the association is to embark on a major history initiative to mark its 125th anniversary next year. A team of researchers will interview over 3,000 players, officials and fans of all ages. They also hope to collect documents, letters and photos. They are especially interested in the social influence of the games.
I think that this is the most important item of GAA news this year. It is essential that the narrative of our past be recorded. But, then, I may be a little bit biased. I never made it as a footballer, but I did manage to become a kind of historian!
