Football in Kerry has healed much harsher wounds than Galvin spat
The word in Kerry was that Paul saw a bee land on the notebook and he was only trying to protect the ref by swatting the apian intruder.
The bee took off towards the linesman and Paul went to protect him too, and Tomás O’Shea as well. If you believe Bertie won the money on the horses, or that Sinn Féin was concerned about our democracy, you could believe the story of the belligerent bee, too.
Most people in Kerry expected that Galvin would be suspended for two months or possibly three, but not six. That is extreme because nobody was actually hit during Paul’s tantrum.
Was this a ridiculous penalty befitting a ludicrous act? Remember the Cork County Board suspended the whole Cork football team for six months because they wore foreign jerseys while losing to Kerry in a Munster final during the 1970s.
If they had won, there would have been no fuss. So they got six months for losing. But sanity prevailed then, and hopefully it will now. It is an amateur sport. Whatever excuses there may be for players losing their cool in the heat of competition, there is no excuse for officials losing the run of themselves in the committee room.
In Kerry, football rouses the fervour of religion, which goes back to the bitterness of the civil war. Some of the conflict’s worst outrages were committed in Kerry.
People later remarked that it was ironic the civil war was so bitter in Kerry because they did so little in the war of independence. In fact, there was considerable action in Kerry but, as elsewhere, those most involved tended to talk least afterwards. Those who did not understand what happened do not appreciate the importance of football in Kerry.
A lot was written about the sacking of Balbriggan when the Black and Tans ran amok for a few hours, or the events in Dublin on Bloody Sunday, but the history books say little about what happened in Kerry on the night of October 31, 1920 and the following 10 days. On the first night 13 policemen were shot and two others were kidnapped.
The Black and Tans laid siege to Tralee for the next nine days. The incident received enormous international publicity at the time. One French journalist, reporting for Le Journal de Paris, visited Tralee that week and described it as more terrorised that any town that he had seen in France during the First World War. “The town was as deserted and doleful as if the Angel of Death has passed through it,” M. de Marcella wrote. “Not a living soul in the streets. All the shops shut and the bolts hastily fastened. All work was suspended.”
The events made front-page news in the New York Times on three different days and the front page of the Montreal Gazette four times during the ensuing week.
On four different occasions during those days questions were asked in the House of Commons about what was happening in Tralee. Yet Dorothy Macardle did not devote as much as a full sentence to those events in The Irish Republic, her magnificent chronology of the period.
In March 1921, the British army was ambushed at Headford Junction near Killarney. The British promptly admitted that seven soldiers were killed and 12 wounded. But the British cabinet was informed that nine were killed, while witnesses counted 12 military coffins, and the IRA believed that 24 were killed and one died subsequently of his wounds.
“Sure that couldn’t have happened,” one authority on the period told me, “because that would put Kilmichael in the halfpenny place.”
Maybe the real story about Headford is not that we do not know how many were killed, but why we don’t know. Dorothy Macardle never even mentioned the Headford ambush. Neither did Charles Townshend’s British Campaign in Ireland, but The Irish Times described the battle at the time as “one of the fiercest that has yet taken place between crown forces and rebels in the south of Ireland”.
After the bitterness of the civil war in Kerry most of those involved just wanted to forget the whole bloody mess and get on with their lives. Some were persuaded to record their stories by the Bureau of Military History for the historical record to be published after their deaths.
Con Brosnan was one who told the story of his involvement in the shooting of District Inspector (DI) Tobias O’Sullivan in Listowel in January 1921. O’Sullivan usually walked home for his dinner. Brosnan and two others waited inside a pub for a colleague to signal the DI’s approach from across the street.
When they got the signal, they rushed out with their pistols at the ready and killed the DI in a hail of bullets. It was only in the midst of the firing that Brosnan realised O’Sullivan was holding his five-year-old son by the hand. Although the boy was physically unharmed, one sensed that Con Brosnan never got over that day and regretted what happened for the rest of his life, especially after he had children of his own.
Brosnan was a captain in the Free State Army in north Kerry during the civil war. Afterwards he devoted much of his energy to football and he ensured a safe conduct for republicans to play games.
He joined with republican players like John Joe Sheehy and Joe Barrett. Together they used football to help overcome the bitterness. John Joe Sheehy captained Kerry to all-Ireland success in 1924, just one year after the civil war ended.
In 1929, Joe Barrett captained Kerry to the initial win of their first four-in-a-row. He was selected as captain again in 1931, but he gave the captaincy to Con Brosnan in recognition of the latter’s magnificent contribution to Kerry both on the football field and off.
WHEN the histories of the war of independence and the civil war were being written, Kerry people chose to forget and turned their passion to football. It was fitting that another Kerryman — former GAA president Seán Kelly — was a driving force in opening Croke Park for rugby and soccer last year.
There was a lot of anxiety about the playing of God Save the Queen before the Ireland-England rugby international. President Mary MacAleese made a splendid appeal as she reminded people of how the England team honoured their commitment in 1973 after Scotland and Wales had refused to travel to Dublin following Bloody Sunday in Derry.
Her hopes were realised. The British national anthem was played without a note of disrespect from a crowd of more than 80,000 people. The Irish people in the crowd that day demonstrated their pride with an unforgettable rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann. The Irish team was inspired and the record victory over England in the ensuing match was a fitting climax to a great day. It was a magnificent reminder of the power of sport to build bridges. In Kerry, they have good reason to know the healing potential of sport. Let’s preserve our sense of humour and keep what Paul Galvin did in perspective.
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