Drive time

YOU don’t want to be in traffic just after six. That’s when it is at its worst, thousands of commuters trying to squeeze through Dublin’s exit corridor or becomes an unmoving mass of metal, a cavalcade of purring engines.

You pass the time, attempting to dilute your frustration with an ear cocked to current affairs discussion. You don’t want to be heading for Dunshaughlin around six. The 25-minute journey can, on the slowest moving days, become an hour and half of sighs and chewed fingernails. The phone calls Eamon Barry gets before any training session proves it.

Some of the lads might be 10 or 15 minutes late. Barry understands. He has to travel in that traffic himself, from Store Street where he is stationed, to Dunshaughlin, where he dons a track-suit for his miracle-working.

Training usually doesn’t get underway til eight or after, a commuter belt necessity. By day, most of the players are based somewhere in the big smoke. If nothing else, training soothes the stress.

Nobody is too sure, but they reckon Dunshaughlin must be among the oldest clubs in Meath, if not the oldest. Patsy McLoughlin, who comes to training every night now in these heady times as the most senior member of the club, was one of the collaborators on the club’s Centenary yearbook in 1986.

“So, this club was founded two years after the formation of the Association,” Patsy explains helpfully. He’s a font of knowledge about the black and amber, involved in the club for 60 years. But, he never thought he would live to see a day like next Sunday.

“This is just amazing. It’s a long time from the day we used to line out in the junior championships. I remembered in the 1940s and 50s, we would cycle to our games, there was no such thing as a team bus, or even a clubhouse. And we only had the bare five.”

They won the junior title with the bare 15 in 1950. Eight years later, they had three substitutes on the sideline when they won it again. And they won a third junior championship in 1967, with a team that included Noel Curran, who went on to win an All-Ireland medal with Meath and father to Dublin’s star of the 1990s Paul.

However, another decade passed before the team got senior status and by that stage, “most of the ’67 team were over the hill. If we had managed to become senior seven or eight years before, we might have made a dent,” recalls Paddy O’Dwyer, who played alongside Curran and is now club chairman.

The club flitted around in senior for a few years, but soon dropped back to intermediate where they stayed until winning the intermediate championship in 1997, with a mish-mash of some older players and the bones of what would make up the Leinster champions. Ironically, they defeated Eamon Barry’s Duleek in the final. Within two years, Barry had harnessed the potential in Dunshaughlin into their first Meath senior title.

It’s a strange club, Dunshaughlin. While the town itself gallantly tries to fight the seeping suburbia of Dublin (they put a cap on new house-building in the town a couple of years ago until amenities were up to cope with the sprawl), the next few years is certain to see the estates sprout like weeds. Already Jim Gilligan, who taught the entire team in national school, sees the change in his classrooms. The past 10 years have seen the village become a town.

And yet, the club has remained remarkably untouched by all the development. The team is linked together by a small number of families, the Kealys (with six brothers on the panel), the Kellys, the Gogans. Players whose fathers and uncles had been involved in the club and who grew up in the townlands that necklace the town. The metropolitan sprawl might be slowly changing the character of the town, but it has yet to touch the soul of the club.

“You just need to look at the names on our team-sheet, they are made up of a lot of brothers. It will be a long time before the growth of the town is reflected in the teams. You can see it, maybe, at under-age level now with St Martins, they are starting to win a lot, but it is going to be a while before it breaks through to senior level,” Barry says.

Without going too far down the road of sentiment, it is possible to see Dunshaughlin’s Leinster title and All-Ireland attempt as something noble, an expression that the town has a soul of its own despite the commuter influx. But, that is half the story. There is also the jaw-dropping success of the past four years.

Dunshaughlin’s Leinster title a few days before Christmas was the culmination of four years of just getting better. In their first year in the senior ranks, the team surfed all the way to the county final. They lost but the foundations were solid. Eamon Barry came across from Duleek and within two years of becoming a senior club, they won the county title.

“I knew there was something in these lads when I took over. In their first senior final, they were beaten by Skyrne, but since that, they have won three on the trot. And it has been very enjoyable working with them.

“It sometimes happens in any club, that a good bunch of players come along at the right time, and they are dedicated and ambitious,” says Barry, under-playing his own role in turning Dunshaughlin into Meath’s major force.

It is up to the players to laud Barry. Richie Kealy, one of those who spends evening after evening stalled on the M50 roundabout, isn’t shy about expressing what Barry has done for Dunshaughlin. “When Eamon came in 99, the whole thing took off. We wouldn’t be a few days from an All-Ireland semi-final without Eamon. In fact, I feel this club would sill be without senior success, without Eamon.”

Kealy is one of six brothers on the panel. Any attempt to investigate whether this leads to sibling rivalry of a gael kind is batted away good-naturedly. “It’s not something we talk about, maybe after Paddy’s Day,” he jokes.

Given that they won three Meath titles in a row, it seems spurious to second guess Dunshaughlin’s credentials, but they are the outsiders of the four teams left chasing the AIB Club football title. Are they good enough to beat a team chasing their second All-Ireland title in three years? This season, Dunshaughlin started poorly and actually lost their Meath title to Blackhall Gaels in the quarter-finals only for somebody to notice Anthony Moyles playing when he was under suspension.

Blackhall were thrown out of the Meath championship, but Dunshaughlin offered them a replay, which they won comfortably. Since then, even taking their annual marathon with Rathnew into consideration, they have been flying. “Maybe, we were finding it that bit harder to maintain the momentum this year,” Micheal McHale, one of the revelations of their season at centre-back, says.

“After three years on the road, things were going a little stale. The Blackhall game was the kick up the arse we needed.”

The journey to Sunday’s semi-final had to run through Rathnew. For two seasons, they played thrilling trilogies, but last year’s loss to Rathnew left a sour taste, especially when the Wicklow club went on to win Leinster.

“We always thought we were good enough to beat Rathnew and we let ourselves down badly last year. We were disgusted with the way we played in that game,” McHale recalls. This year, it only took two games to separate them, but Dunshaughlin were clinical in dismantling Rathnew’s Leinster title.

Central to that, and all their convincing victories this season, has been Niall Kelly. Currently under-taking a masters in Economics in Trinity, the towering midfielder’s presence around the middle, along with his radar-like long balls have been key to their success.

Sunday will offer a different challenge. Big names in the form of the Nallens, McDonald and Moyles come into Dunshaughlin’s path.

“Yeah, they have plenty of big names and everyone in Gaelic knows what McDonald is capable of on his day. And it might look like we haven’t faced a side with those kind of quality players before, but you have to remember we have played against the likes of Geraghty, McDermott and Giles. So, this team has faced and beaten big reputations before.”

Kelly says experience is the single biggest difference between last season and this. And he uses the Leinster final to illustrate his point. While Mattock Rangers froze on their first big day, Dunshaughlin were unfazed, it was business as normal. “I think beating Rathnew so convincingly helped. They were Leinster champions and there had been so much said about that rivalry, but that gave the team much more confidence. We could have won eight or nine Meath championships in a row, but without the experience of those games, we mightn’t have taken the extra step.”

Kelly’s form has garnered such recognition in the recent past that he was named player of the Leinster club championship recently.

A justified award. Since moving into midfield, because of an injury to Graham Dowd, he has been the club’s driving force.

“I was moved into the middle, I suppose, because of Graham’s misfortune and things have just come good for me there. I was bit injury-plagued last year and I just wanted to prove myself.”

That he has certainly done, to such an extent that some Dunshaughlin people openly wonder on this calm February evening why Kelly isn’t more of a regular fixture with Boylan. He has been on the fringes of Meath teams for two years, but another all-action display on Sunday will strengthen his case.

Speaking of which, you might remember Eamon Barry dared to go up against the master last year, and got 30 of the 79 available votes. It’s a good thing he didn’t manage to unseat Boylan, for Dunshaughlin’s sake, but they will tell you in Meath now Barry has set his stall out.

“Well, after you have been successful managing a club, I think inter-county management is a logical progression from that,” says the affable Garda. “I hope to be a county manager some day, mightn’t be with Meath.”

Pat Maloney is the first to arrive to the ground this evening, the lights of his Range Rover shining in the darkness. Every night there is training, someone from the committee comes to open up. It has been that way since Stephen Burke, the groundsman, died suddenly last year. In the clubhouse, there is a picture of Burke receiving the Meath clubman of the year award. Nobody says it, but as I’m shown it, everyone seems to radiate the words. “It’s a shame he’s not around to see Sunday.”

Maloney’s son Ray is on the team, but they joke Maloney can’t lose on Sunday either way. He’s a blow-in from Belmullet. It’s all in jest. In this club, despite the influx of recent years, there is a family feel. Even if it takes an hour and a half in the daily frustrating grind of the rush hour to get everyone together.