Dreaming of tomorrow

Thirty five years ago, Martin Ferris committed himself to the armed struggle on the day his father died. Tomorrow he’ll watch proudly as his sons line out for Ardfert in an All-Ireland football final. It’s been some journey. He spoke to Tony Leen.

TOMORROW, he’ll bring vivid life to the imagination of the soul. For weeks, Ardfert’s day in Croke Park has shimmered in front of Deputy Martin Ferris. He’ll try hard today, at the Sinn Fein Árd Fheis, to focus on the here and now; strength of mind will get him through - it always did - but it’s a big ask.

The gleaming black and white club kit, the national anthem, his two sons, Eamonn and Máirtín, on the pitch, another, Cianán, alongside him underneath the vastness of the Hogan Stand. The support in the stands, the neighbours, parishioners and rivals who piled into buses from across North Kerry.

“Best of luck Ardfert,” said one Tralee road sign, “from Kerins O’Rahillys GAA club.”

Martin Ferris can never purge his native Churchill’s one and only county novice championship in 1972. He was an integral part of it, and it forged friendships for life.

But tomorrow in Croke Park will finally dilute its importance. How does Ferris know? Because he has seen it in his mind’s eye. As befits a man who spent over a decade in the grimness of Portlaoise prison, much of it in solitary confinement, Ferris has a finely honed imagination. Kerry’s All-Ireland glories were played out on a cell wall and fleshed out when his friend and storyteller Batt O’Shea came to visit.

Yesterday, he gave away his second daughter, Deirdre, at the altar. He left Tralee early this morning to address the Sinn Fein faithful at the RDS, but the pressures are relative.

“I’ve lived on the edge all my life,” he shrugs. “Politics is one thing - being involved in the struggle, the great people you met, the pain and the suffering - but being involved in the football is a massive release. I’ve never had as much satisfaction from sport as this year. Just watching the players and the club develop, watching them earn their day in Croke Park. I’ll be okay if we lose, but I’d be gutted for them.”

Ferris is a selector with an Ardfert side that has played cardiac football all the way to Croke Park. Their Munster final victory came when Erins Own of Cork missed a penalty with the last kick of the game in Knocknagree.

In the All-Ireland semi, against an excellent Monaghan Harps outfit, Ardfert were two points down, deep into extra time injury time, when John Egan goaled for victory. Now they face a Loughrea side powered by 12 senior club hurlers.

“It’s been unreal,” says Ferris.

Much like his life. After the All-Ireland Under 21 football final in 1973, Martin Ferris had a choice. He had made a telling impact as a substitute in that final, teeing up Mikey Sheehy and John Egan for the scores that capped a remarkable winning comeback against Mayo. As a bustling full-forward, Ferris had given the runaround to John O’Mahony, who would later prove himself a good judge of football as an All-Ireland winning Galway coach. Mick O’Dwyer believed there was a senior career in Ferris, but there was a good reason he hadn’t started that day. He was on the run.

Ferris blended into the crowd in his hooded jacket for the semi-final against Offaly, in Tralee. Unknowing Kerry fans, alongside him, couldn’t understand why the M. Ferris listed at No 13 was playing so poorly, but his mentor (and fellow Republican) Joe Keohane had agreed that in the light of almost daily raids on Ferris’ family home in Churchill, it would be unwise to have his charge line out.

After the final, Ferris played a challenge for the seniors, ironically in Portlaoise, claiming a personal tally of 3-2. It would be his last appearance in a Kerry jersey for five years.

“I was arrested in February 1975 and sentenced to 12 months for membership of the IRA,” he reflects. “I was released that November, and got re-arrested in February 1976, and didn’t get out until June 1977, which was just after the hunger strikes.”

Undaunted, Ferris went back playing with Churchill, and made his way back onto the Kerry senior panel in 1978, training feverishly in the run up to the Munster final in Cork.

“The Friday beforehand, I was arrested and brought to the barracks in Tralee, and held until around lunchtime on the Sunday. Keohane had been to the barracks that morning to try and get me out. Finally Dan Ryan, God rest him, drove me down to Cork. He used to drive the team at the time, and was a dyed in the wool Rockie (Austin Stacks man). That was my last involvement with Kerry at 26.”

Regrets? “We’ll never know whether I was good enough, and I would be the worst judge of that. Many people would say I did well for the Under 21s, and O’Dwyer had some nice things to say, but you had to be absolutely committed to make it at that time and I had other things in my life.

“But I had played against a lot of the Kerry team with Churchill - Gaeltacht, with Páidí Ó Sé; Finuge with Deenihan; Beale with ‘Ogie’ and ‘Bomber’ - Remember, a lot of that Kerry team were from lower divisions, so I was able to compare myself to them.”

Ardfert were also a Division Five club, four seasons ago, but the return of their present manager Pat O’Driscoll, from America, coincided with a surge of young talent through the grades.

O’Driscoll and fellow selectors, Seanie Griffin, also from Churchill - his son Shane is captain tomorrow - Mike Fitzgerald and Ferris have moulded this squad, but much of the credit should go to the club’s under age structure.

“We started to get our act together off the field, but there’s a great crop of young talent there now. Twenty seven of the 32-man squad for the final will be under 25.”

In three years, the club has catapulted itself to Kerry’s County League Division Two, and plans are afoot - Bord Pleanála willing - for a further development of the local grounds to cope with demand.

“When Marie and myself got married, we got a local authority house in Ardfert, and that’s where we lived. I always played football with Churchill, even when I was living in Ardfert, but it was natural for Eamon (his oldest) to play with the lads he grew up with,” he explains.

Tomorrow won’t be Ferris’s first outing in Croke Park; he was on the Kerry Under 21 side defeated by Galway, in 1972, and, eighteen years later, he would secure parole from Portlaoise to watch Eamon play for the Kerry Vocational schools in the All-Ireland final. But this is a new, liberated, part of his story.

Ferris dedicated an authorised biography to his remarkable wife, Marie, and his children. Now at 53, he finds himself wistfully looking at his three grandchildren.

“I could look at them all day, and I keep seeing my own kids and how I missed out on their youth. I don’t want that to happen again, but with such a heavy workload at the moment, it’s frustrating,” he muses. “I still don’t have the time to give them, but I will over the next few years.”

He smiles again. “Eamon’s oldest lad Eirnán, is two, but I spotted he was a ciotóg when he was tiny. None of the rest of us are. ‘He’s a communist’, I roared!”

In the ‘Man of Kerry’ biography, author JJ Barrett investigates how the Kingdom has supplied an endless stream of writers and talented men. “High mountains and good teachers,” insisted the Maynooth professor, Fr Sean Quinlan. It’s a fanciful theory, but Ferris believes there is a green and gold aura.

“When I was a youngster, I’d go to Limerick with my mother and my Kerry jersey. There would be fifteen or sixteen young kids on the Canal bank and they’d flock around me. I realised then that, in the realms of the GAA, Kerry was very special. All anyone wanted to talk about was this man, Mick O’Connell.”

Ferris wishes he’d played more hurling - “the perfect field sport” - but is consumed by the GAA ideal, its cultural and community ethos. He had concerns with the opening of Croke Park to other sports - “it’s the ultimate symbol of a successful GAA” - but his political career has taught him the discipline of democracy. Tomorrow he’ll swoon, but when the English rugby team come, he won’t be there.

“God Save the Queen ringing around Croke Park? That would stick in my craw. You are talking about a pitch where the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries came in and cut down players and supporters. I’ll find that very difficult.”

And then he smiles again. “But it would be nice to see Ireland beating them, wouldn’t it?”