Mighty McMahon returns to battle

PEADAR MCMAHON is a man of steel. Flesh and blood predominantly, but the Kilrush man has a will and a shoulder of iron.

“I broke my collar-bone a while back, I fell on it awkwardly and smashed it in three places,” he recounts. “It never knitted back properly. I had an operation in Cork and now I have plates and screws and all that sort of thing in it.”

That knock cost him 14 months of his footballing life, an existence rather barren of success. One wonders, why the 28-year-old returns after that to the three or four nights a week of hard slog during the bitter winter months, more of the same through spring and into what passes for the summer?