The ghosts of Christmas past had it harder than us

ENOUGH. Enough of the affairs of State. It’s the time of year for reflection and excess, joy and pain, laughter and tears. And whatever you’re having yourself with a hot drop.

One reflection that has engaged me in recent days is how far we have come as a nation. Whatever gripes there are about modern living, a delve into the past suggests that we’ve never had it so good.

Here’s a Christmas-cracker question for you. Would you walk 20 miles to watch a hurling match? Would you walk 20 miles to actually play in a hurling match? Such was the lot of John ‘Jack’ Lowry. A young man from south Galway, he missed the bus to a major match in Birr, Co Offaly, and had to take off on foot. He made it to the match on time, and took his place on the pitch.

Then, to heap misery on sacrifice, he was, depending on which account you believe, either taken off or sent off in the first-half. Can you imagine the rushing rapids of emotion that went through the poor man’s head as he trundled ashore? All that leg work, all that sacrifice, all the love scattered along his lonely route, and fate was still determined to rub his nose in it.

Apparently, he took the whole affair stoically, but the main thing was he got a lift home afterwards.

Young Jack Lowry isn’t around anymore, or at least I presume he isn’t, because the above event was the All Ireland final of 1888, played on Easter Sunday. Jack’s 20-mile hike is contained between the pages of Hell For Leather: a journey through one hundred hurling games, a self-explanatory title that spans games from the above one to the All Ireland final of 2013.

An alternative title might be Hurling as History, History as Hurling. Having located the tome in a dark recess of my attic, where it had been secreted as a Christmas present, I couldn’t refrain from getting stuck in ahead of the big day. It’s a compelling read, but the outstanding feature is how it shows the everyday existence of those who have gone before. Parents of children who await Santa Claus find it difficult to convey that there was life before I-Pads.

Back in the day, when the internet was something that might be found on a fishing trawler, we managed to survive and prosper.

Believe it or not, there was a time when getting from A to B was achieved without reference to a Sat Nav. But we always had television, and, yes, son, there never was a time when we didn’t have access to motorised transport.

Just ask Dick Walshe, who attended the 1937 All Ireland final in Killarney. Dick was among a small band of Kilkenny supporters who cycled the 120 miles to the Kerry town for the match.

They took off on the Saturday, found a bed for the night on the Kerry border, and rose again at 4am to pedal forth all the way to Fitzgerald Stadium. That’s certainly stating ‘not what your county can do for you, but what you can do for your county’.

But, just like poor Jack Lowry 50 years earlier, the sacrifice was not repaid with joy or victory. Their opponents, Tipperary, hurled them off the field, before Dick and his friends turned the bicycles for the epic journey home. “We were in great gusto going, but, I needn’t tell you, to come home bet…we came home a different way. We went through Tipp and they all recognised us and they were shouting. Some of them were decent enough and asked us in for tea. No matter what you saw, and what anyone says, there is no-one more decent than the Tipperary people.”

So said Dick, some time after he had got past his post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s easy to romanticise the epic journey. It even has the makings of a road movie: the Kilkenny cyclists undercover of disguise as they pedal their way to exhaustion, like survivors from a great massacre, keeping an eye out for snipers in the shadow of Sliabh na Mban. Apocolypse Now for sporting Gaels.

If the past is to be mined for today’s entertainment, then Ronnie Bellew and Dermot Crowe, the authors of Hell For Leather, have come up with a perfect show.

“It would make an interesting reality TV challenge, if a group of modern GAA supporters were asked to re-enact the type of journeys undertaken by foot and bicycle by their diehard counterparts from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s,” they write. The outstanding occasion of that era, in terms of pedal power, was the 1944 Munster final replay, which came to be known as ‘the Great Bicycle Final’, because of the legions who cycled to Thurles to attend. A newspaper report from the time summed up the occasion. “I, myself, met a man and his young sons, who had cycled from Cork…On the way to Thurles, the chain of his 15-year-old boy’s cycle broke. His two companions made sugan ropes in a field, tied his bike to their own, and towed him the rest of the way to Thurles.”

No greater love hath any man for his county than to tow his son to a match. Not that everybody had access to a bicycle. Many walked to that match, among them 65-year-old Peter Ryan, who tramped the 40 miles from Lisnagry, in Co Limerick. So what about that reality TV show? We could have a host of your favourites celebrities — and one or two whom you might like to see suffer and ail — gathered together for a marathon cycle, a complete re-enactment, including the models of bike, the clothes and the bottles of milk for sustenance. Set them off and watch them suffer. ‘I’m a celebrity, get me to the match on time’. For the rest of us, reading of those days evokes a different lifetime, one to muse over and reflect on, and give praise for the comforts that cushion modern living. Sport, like Gaelic games, remains rooted in the community, and that carries its own loyalties and passion. That much hasn’t changed. But what price are today’s Gaels willing to pay to see their representatives doing battle in the flesh? For some, a dark cloud lurking on the horizon is enough to give pause for second thoughts on whether to travel or not. Others will brave any elements, but the notion of hopping up on a bike to go to a match is way beyond the ken of most.

Of course, the matches in those days meant more, in one way. There was precious little else to distract them. And, on the whole, how bad was that? So, as you batten down the hatches and recline in the comfort of your home, give pause to those who went before on Christmases past. And, while you’re at it, go easy on the turkey.