GAA’s lost generation

LAST month Eamon Fitzgerald packed his things, said goodbye to his mum and dad and made his way to Sydney via Shannon, London and Kuala Lumpur. It will be some time before he returns and, in that, he wasn’t alone.

Gerry Callaghan, his friend and club-mate from Tournafulla in west Limerick, clutched a one-way ticket of his own. So, too, did three friends from Castlemahon, 20 minutes down the road. Five more young men squeezed out of this island by the economic nightmare.

“I have a brother in Sydney, Anthony. He has sorted me out with a job,” said Fitzgerald, who lost his job after Christmas. “He is there five or six years. I’m happy about it in one way but you’ll be a bit lonesome leaving home. I’ll stick it as long as I can. There’s nothing to do here.”

Fitzgerald is a stonemason, Callaghan an electrician. Theirs are familiar tales, not least to the club-mates they leave behind in the village of Tournafulla where farewell parties have become a regular of the social calendar.

Their departures brought to 15 the number of hurlers forced to emigrate from the parish in recent years. This from a population of just 650 people, one nestled deep into the western tip of Limerick within shouting distance of the Kerry and Cork borders.

An entire hurling team. Taken.

Most of them headed for England, lured by the spike in employment that accompanied London’s successful Olympic bid. Bobby Mulcahy and his brothers John, Jimmy and Brian were all on the Br. Pearse’s side that won the London Championship last year and Christopher and Liam O’Sullivan brought the Tournafulla contingent to six. With the Olympic project all but over, many will move on to Australia. Seven of their former team-mates are already there. Another is in Canada. Most had been members of Tournafulla’s first team which, before the downturn, was scaling rarified heights.

In 2003, the club won a county U21 title, the Intermediate Championship and a Junior B league. Two years later they lost to eventual senior champions Bruree in the last eight and Garrycastle at the same stage a year later.

Great days but a club living off such a finite pool was left cruelly exposed by the downturn and their demise has been astonishing in its pace. They were still playing senior two years ago but they are a Junior ‘A’ outfit now after two successive relegations.

Those left behind are tasked with keeping the ship afloat. Club secretary James Wright will tog out for the B’s this season, two years after hanging up his boots. Gerard Moroney, who had himself hurled far beyond the accepted retirement age, has taken over the ‘A’s.

“Someone has to keep it going,” says Moroney. “We have a lot of nice young hurlers but the thing I would fear for them is in the physical stakes. At adult level it takes a couple of years to develop. We will be playing fellas now that probably won’t be good enough for adult hurling but we will have no choice but to play them. They will be only 16, 17 maybe. Like, we were senior when we lost everyone. We just have to get on with it.”

Similar stories are echoing up and down the country but a survey conducted by the sadly departed Sunday Tribune revealed that Limerick had lost twice as many club hurlers (150) as anywhere else and Tournafulla is at the very heart of that black spot.

The question is, why? West Limerick used to be the base for a thriving poultry processing industry, one that at its height employed over 500 people and another 100 indirectly, but it was wiped out with the closures of the Kantoher and Castlemahon plants in 2002 and 2008.

That left one dominant source of employment. Construction.

An extraordinary proportion of young men in Tournafulla earned their crust from the trade so when the boom went bust the damage done to the country at large was multiplied there and the consequences are being felt far beyond the perimeter of Fr McCarthy Park.

One of the village’s three pubs, Mulcahy’s, has closed leaving Keating’s and The Goalpost to jostle for the trade. “You can see it on a Saturday night,” says Moroney. ”The village is gone quiet. All the youth are gone, like.”

At times like this, the fate of one GAA club may seem somewhat inconsequential. Not so. As Wright explains, Tournafulla is a rural area and the GAA club is the focal point for it. “If we lose that we have nothing,” he outlined.

Founded in 1899, its continued existence rests on a knife-edge. A neighbouring club approached them at the end of last year proposing an amalgamation but the idea was rejected after an emotional agm where the club’s older members were most prominent among those calling for Tournafulla to stand or fall on its own two feet.

They will do just that. For now.

Their hand has already been forced at minor level where an alliance with Templeglantine has yielded impressive results but the concern is that the next generation will be forced to follow their elder siblings on to foreign fields in order to further develop that talent.

Moroney’s own son, Jeremiah, is talking about taking a J1 to America for the summer, young John Lane is on about going to Belgium and then there are those whose third-level days are just months from completion. What awaits them?

For now they have their hurling and the new season has offered some encouragement with a draw against Askeaton in the Junior Premier Hurling League and a 12-point defeat of Knockaderry in the West Junior A League.

A promising start but one that can’t disguise the fact that Tournafulla had just 17 togging out for that first fixture and one less for the follow-up. Last season ended with the numbers at training failing to reach double digits.

“You go back to 1956 when another local club’s second team beat our first team in Junior ‘B’ hurling and we came back from that,” says Wright. “We have had hard times here before and I’m sure things won’t always be this bad.”

Here’s hoping.