How turf helped Offaly GAA to brightly burn for county’s golden generation
The success of Offaly footballers in 1982 was rooted in the bogs of the county.
You cannot understand how Offaly managed to beat Kerry in that most famous of All-Ireland football finals without stepping off the playing fields and walking in the bogs.
This is a story that is peculiar to a particular place at a particular time.
In its essence, it tells how the bogs of Offaly gave the county a certain economic growth during the decades immediately after World War II. It was a growth that — in the greater scheme of the long sweep of history — was exceptionally short-lived, but its context made it extremely potent.
It is a smaller-scale version of how the mining of coal transformed communities across Wales and the north of England in their own time.
It is not that the bogs had not been used by people for centuries before the 1940s, rather that the imperatives of Irish society in the 1940s and 1950s demanded that the harvesting of turf be dramatically increased.
The demand for indigenous sources of power to bring prosperity to Ireland’s faltering economy was intense.
In the years immediately after the war, the Irish economy teetered on the brink of collapse and emigration reached heights not witnessed since the famine of the 1840s. The contrast between, on the one hand, the booming consumerist economies of Britain and America, and on the other hand, the stagnation of Ireland was stark.
The result was a mass exodus of the unemployed and the underemployed from Ireland.
The scale of the exodus was staggering. In the second half of the 1940s, about 150,000 Irish people emigrated. Then, during the 1950s, the floodgates truly opened and almost 500,000 Irish people emigrated. That was equivalent to almost one in six of the population.
The establishment of Bord na Móna in 1946 and its subsequent growth was one of the few economic success stories of the era.
What emerged over the first two decades of its history was a remarkable network of narrow gauge railways across the midlands which pulled turf from blanket bogs where new technologies were used to cut and remove layers of peat. The rural electrification of Ireland saw the building of power stations at Rhode, Ferbane, and Shannonbridge in Offaly, and at Portarlington just across the Laois border.
In itself, rural electrification underpinned immense cultural change in Ireland — but that’s a tale for another day.
For our purposes here, what matters is that it now saw the ESB join Bord na Móna as a key employer in Offaly, and this employment was supplemented by the building of a host of briquette factories and other spin-off employment.
Initially, many of the men who came to work in Offaly stayed in large hostels run for their benefit. This was particularly the case with seasonal workers. These men worked hard and did not have it easy, but engaged in sporting activities that ranged from tug-of-war and pillow-fighting to Gaelic games.
Then, as the work moved from being seasonal to more and more rooted in permanency, housing estates were built in the county.
It is not as if Offaly was suddenly transformed into the Irish equivalent of an oil-rich Arab emirate, but it brought much-needed employment and the arrival of people into the county who settled and set up families.
This, in itself, brought social change and it is a story of change that has been lovingly told in Bord na Móna’s ‘Living History’ online website.
Among the arrivals to Offaly was Paddy Fitzgerald, who worked first at the bog in Boora — his sons Pat and Mick played brilliantly for Offaly in the 1982 All-Ireland final. A new generation of GAA officials in Offaly had the foresight to seek to harness what was happening. They organised proper underage teams and built a serious championship in the county.
The rewards were not immediate — but they were incremental. Offaly won the O’Byrne Cup for the first time in 1955 and then won Leinster senior football titles for the first time in 1960 and 1961. They were exceptionally unlucky not to beat Down and claim an All-Ireland.
But the progress was enough to inspire a new generation of what was possible.
Men like Martin Furlong and Tony McTague were at the core of a brilliant Offaly team who beat Cork to win the minor All-Ireland of 1964 — the county’s first and only minor football title.
Also on that team was Willie Bryan, who went on to captain Offaly’s first All- Ireland senior football championship- winning team in 1971, with the Sam Maguire also being retained in 1972.
Bryan grew up in Walsh Island, a scattering of houses and farms surrounded by a glorious ocean of bog. He found work as a draughtsman for the ESB and for Bord na Móna.
Filled with men who worked in and around the bogs — or whose fathers worked there — in the two decades that passed between 1961 and 1982, Offaly contested seven All-Ireland SFC finals.
Three titles were won — the third and last of those titles was won in 1982 (by which time Offaly had also turned the history of hurling on its head, and had won the 1981 All-Ireland SHC).
The population of the county was, at that time, 58,312. Much has been made in recent years of the importance of having a big population when seeking to win All-Ireland championships but it’s not as straightforward as all that.
Either way, by the time of the 1982 victory, the power stations and the bogs were still hugely important to communities all across Offaly.
The following decades saw them decline dramatically and it was a decline that had a significant impact on the fortunes of Gaelic football in Offaly.
It was not just that they had proved essential in providing employment — it was also that they were centres where football dominated the conversation. Clubs were run and teams were picked in the shadows of the giant towers and amid the swirling dust of milled peat.
It meant that significant numbers of people who lived in the county also worked there, rather than commuting in and out, and the best of the jobs on offer brought decent working conditions. It’s obviously too simplistic an equation to draw a direct causal link between the heyday of peat and electricity production, and the successes of Offaly’s Gaelic footballers.
That would be to offer too neat an explanation, and neat explanations rarely fit well with history.
Instead, of course, every historical event has multiple causes. Some of those causes are immediate to the event itself. As the ‘Players of the Faithful’ documentary on RTÉ One tonight will show, the genius of Matt Connor and the finishing of Seamus Darby were displayed on the field when it mattered most. But the causes of historical events work in different ways and context always matters. In this instance, the story of Offaly’s bogs is a fundamental part of the story of how an All-Ireland was won in 1982. Although that’s not the easiest idea to fit onto a t-shirt.
Paul Rouse is Associate Professor of History at UCD and is the author of The Hurlers.
