A big little All-Ireland for Garnish and St John’s: No gazebos, but the ham is real
The victorious Garnish squad and supporters following their Beara JAFC final victory over Urhan in Castletownbere in 2018.
At last count, there are 16 GAA county finals around the 32 counties this weekend. Senior ones, that is. Many deciders are done already but October brings the early Tuesday dusk and Thursday evening chill that suggests success is a block, a tackle, a fetch under the crossbar or a percentage, maybe two, of practice away. If you’re pulling the car into training this week, the cannister isn’t far off.
Even with minimal spectators, finals are to be savoured for sure. They’re the occasions. Whether it’s on tv or on one of the multitudes of livestream, someone, somewhere will delicately place a snack on its haunches and exhale that this decider, under Sunday’s sun, is what the GAA all about.
Cork is preparing for its little All-Ireland; the fact it features the feted Glen Rovers and the Rockies, and is being televised live to the nation, only heightens the sense that Páirc Ui Chaoimh is at the epicentre of the GAA’s universe this weekend.
Of course, that is beyond misleading. The GAA is a galaxy of small, competing planets in the great cosmos and beyond the boundaries of Blackrock on Cork city’s southside and Blackpool north of the river, there are few who’ll concern themselves with anything more than the result and some cursory details from the day’s big carnival. Most are too busy watching for the sun to skirt along their own horizon.
“It’s about home, isn’t it?” says Ollie ‘Rue’ O’Sullivan of Garnish GAA club in Allihies on the Beara peninsula in farthest west Cork. O’Sullivan is 48 (a Cork selector with last year’s All-Ireland winning minors) and loosening himself for Saturday’s first round Junior B county championship against an upstart, one of the smallest and youngest clubs in Cork – and there are 257 others in the county – St John’s of Aubane, near Millstreet.
Throw-in is at 5pm in Inchigeela, the village home of Iveleary GAA club, halfway between Toonsbridge junction and Ballingeary. As the players jostle for the referee’s throw-up on Saturday, Ollie ‘Rue’ – one of Beara’s favoured sons – and Jimmy Murphy, the St John’s manager on the far side of the field, might consider how uplifting it is to be here at all.
Another little All-Ireland in the making.
Covid-19 and lockdowns haven’t a lot to recommend them, but there is this: people have had time to walk their own roads and find a quiet, domestic groove to their lives. Wells Tower wrote of the ‘big feeling’, like the gods made this place first and concocted everyone as an afterthought, just to be there to enjoy it.
“I was down home a lot this summer, there was nothing happening in Cork, so it was doable,” O’Sullivan says. He lives in Ballincollig, but the draw west is powerful. “Different way of life, slower pace, way less stress, really nice. Maybe this whole (pandemic) thing, maybe people may go back to that. Christ, if we could do anything to generate jobs to keep people there or set it up so people could work remotely. Wouldn’t it be far better for life in general never mind the GAA?”
Garnish GAA club might be 100 years old in 2027, but the chances of celebrating the centenary in play are nothing like certain. Last Christmas they met as a group to map out a route to survival. Neighbours Bere Island have stopped fielding. In Garnish, the committee are all players, the players are sponsors, the sponsors are family. The numbers are depressingly easy to count. One lad coming up from the juvenile section this year. One. In 2021 it will be the same. One. I’ve been at GAA clubs in Cork city where two pitches are needed to cater for the underage.
“If any fella comes west of the Gap of Gour and looks like he ever put on a pair of boots, he doesn’t escape. We need everybody,” O’Sullivan explains.
If you’re travelling north east from the peninsula, through Castletownbere, there’s a gap in the mountain through the townland of Gour. That’s Garnish parish for football. When there were cups (and there was a Junior title a couple of years ago), Garnish carried through like booty via the Gap of Gour.
“The spirit is unbelievable at the moment. I think the lockdown gave the community something to cling to. ‘When is yer next game?’ But the numbers don’t lie. My young fella plays in Ballincollig, Saturday mornings I’d see two- or three-hundred kids in their jerseys. I say to them ‘look at the raw material ye can work with’. We are only praying and looking over the road for people to come into the parish.
“We are very dependent on every young man in the parish who is fit to play and represent us. Last December we reached a consensus we would drop down a grade. We’d been beaten early every year for the last ten. The best way to develop the younger lads in the community is to play more games.
“This year from our juvenile section we have one player – he is playing minor for Castletownbere,” O’Sullivan adds. “He would be the only lad in our club of the age to play minor this year. We have a couple of lads U16 who play with Urhan and previously we would have hooked up with Adrigole. The amalgamations have varied on the peninsula. At the other end, we’ve a few lads hovering around 40. If there was a Masters’ championship in GAA, we’d have a great chance of it.”
On the adjacent Iveragh peninsula in Kerry, Valentia Young Islanders are feeling the same tightening of the arteries. Indeed, more so. In a corner of The Kerryman’s sports pages last week was a report of their 22-point South Kerry championship drubbing at the hands of Renard.
At home, 83-year-old Mick O’Connell, a Gaelic football king, flinched. Renard 5-13 Valentia 0-6. Valentia’s Novice Championship game this weekend against Cromane won’t take place.
Garnish will land in Inchigeela to face St John’s with 18 mostly able bodies. Keeping it going. Eleven starters will set off from Allihies, even though some aren’t living at home anymore. There’s a trainee solicitor coming from Dublin, an engineering lecturer at DIT travelling from Kildare. But home is where the journey always begins. Eric O’Neill – player, selector, chairman, student – has the jerseys organised and folded. Other kit is sorted by Ross Murphy, captain and leader. When training was done last week, the car boot opened and unleashed the tantalising prospect of proper ham sandwiches, not the packet stuff.
Cormac, Eric and Paul O’Neill have grown up running the local pub in Allihies with mother Miriam honing their culinary skills. Once is a while, they’ll conjure salmon and crab sandwiches. “You’d eat your fingers after them,” Ollie ‘Rue’ says. “We don’t have gazebos for togging off and a team of physios and nutritionists, but the ham in our sandwiches is boiled bacon.”
No-one knows, save himself, what possessed John Barrett, in his seventieth year, and John Twomey, to get St John’s club in Aubane parish, near Millstreet, up and running ten years ago. But they fostered something that neighbours related to. “Even if you don’t have someone playing, people tend to fall in and help out,” Jimmy Murphy, the team manager explains. “Davy Tarrant supplies the team with bananas and Jaffa Cakes on match days.
“Jerry Kelleher makes the sandwiches, Paddy O’Keeffe’s wife Ber helps too. Once we had a lovely barbeque after training, a way for lads to get to know each other. People just rolled in behind us. Don and Mike Riordan, Denis and Paddy (O’Keeffe), Gerdie Murphy, Jerry Kelleher. They started something really important if youn are talking about the wellbeing off a parish.”
The ethos of St John’s has a faint Moneyball – without the money - whiff off it. Most of their number once played for Millstreet or Dromtarriffe, got lost or unappreciated along the way only to be rebooted by a different challenge.
“We are a one-team club, so there’s no underage,” Jimmy Murphy explains. “John Barrett went door-to-door a decade ago to start things off. We’ve a lad from Tullylease who got married to a girl from Aubane and that’s how we got him. Another lad from around the city, he married a local girl.
“We will tog 21 or 22 players against Garnish, but really some would be half-retired. We have a 44-year-old keeper, Hughie Sheahan, his son is playing too, and our youngest is Daniel McSweeney. It’s the pure luck of God that he is going out with John Barrett’s grand-daughter. Daniel gave it up at 16, is back now and is a lovely player. We love to see the girls going out with fellas who used to play football…
“Fellas who might have packed in at 23-24 and we coax them back three years later. Look why don’t you come down training? They love football, they go to matches, that’s where you meet them. I played til I was 42 or 43 and you’d love seeing fellas falling back in because you can’t beat the banter, the friendships.”
They’re good folk in Aubane. Ollie ‘Rue’ has footed turf close by in the Boggeragh Mountains. The club is kept afloat by duck races, barbeques, fun runs and plenty of rolled-up sleeves. The old national school in Aubane hums to the sound of dancing classes on winter Mondays.
They dance on the old Butter Road to Kerry during summer and pray at St John’s Well at the foot of Mushera Mountain every June.
“It’s a magical place for Irish dancing. That’s where our forwards get their fast feet from,” Jimmy Murphy reckons.
A year last July, he boarded a ferry out of Rosslare with his head in a spin, his heart back in the bonfires along Station Rd in Millstreet and out to Aubane. St John’s won their first ever county title, a Junior C Championship, against Ballyphehane.
“I was in such a state of shock it took me 20 or 30 minutes to realise what we’d done. I had to head straight for Rosslare but saw all the celebrations on Facebook. A week after, I met local people, women in their seventies, shaking my hand, telling us we did great and that everyone was so proud.
That’s better than a €10,000 lottery ticket. There was a time a few years ago we were down to 14 players, so to win a county title, that beats everything else by a country mile.” The Glen and the Rockies would understand.
There’s nearly 80 miles of road between Aubane in North Cork and Allihies in west Cork. On Saturday they’ll meet somewhere in the middle – and not just geographically. There’s 93 years of football in one club, ten in the other, but the importance of sending out the geansai is shared. They are a society, our society, in microcosm, struggling with rural depopulation and centralisation.
What Garnish hold in tradition, they forfeit in location, beautiful and barren. Just like Valentia Island, just like others. The socio-demographic study will be entitled ‘And No One listened...’ St John’s romantic successes may be fleeting unless they find a way to regenerate without an under-age structure. Last year they played 28 games and while sometimes St John’s get a beating from a Junior A side, there’s little better than games to keep the old fellas and strays coming back. And for as long as he’s able John Barrett will keep knocking on doors and stirring dormant passion.
“We played one team there last week and they admitted they’d never heard of us. That’s grand too,” Murphy explains.
“Down the years, clubs were laughing at us, but now when are after winning a Duhallow Junior B and winning a county C championship. We’re after getting new lights on the pitch. John Barrett put up the poles and lights last week.
"He’s a story himself, as fresh as paint, a selector who’s at training hail rain or snow. He’s a son playing (David) and a grandson (Eoin), who’s from Donegal, but he is training to be an electrician down here in Cork, so he fell in. John’s son is married up in Donegal, you see.”
Five miles away is Rylane, where Barrett’s sons Seanie and David, honed their champion boxing skills under the indefatigable Dan Lane, whose grandfather of the same name was the first Cork All-Ireland winning captain in 1890. Both boxing Barretts enjoyed national and overseas success. Seanie was also a goal-scoring Cork forward in the All-Ireland minor win of 1991. Lane says David was a contender who has touched gloves at Madison Square Garden.
Ollie ‘Rue’ has come across both and knows Lane from his involvement in representative bouts at the Garden between Gardai and the NYPD and NYFD. He knows the cut of St John’s jib. Lads who’d rather go straight than around you. They might just have the legs on Garnish too.
“I hope I am a sub,” says the man who captained Beara to their last Cork senior title 23 years ago.
“Or else I’d be looking around for someone to mark who’s slower than I am, and I might be looking a while for him.”
That’s going to be the way of it for a while. Looking out of the gate for better times. “Next year we have one more coming up. The following year we have two or three. In Cahermore National School we have better numbers and Paudie O’Sullivan, who captained Beara to an U21 title, is the principal. In the meantime, we decided last December that we’d do what we could to maintain a team in the parish, and that meant trying to get every fella involved.
“Your leg would want to be hanging in Garnish if you are thinking of crying off the team. Stand inside there in the corner, like a good man. One of our lads, a leader of men, played with a broken foot for a year. And they talk about Richie McCaw? Winning games helps. I wouldn’t underestimate St Johns for half a second, they won a Junior county last year. They’ve found a way not only to keep going, but to win big games. That’s our next trick.”
Saturday - Kilbrin v Goleen, Doneraile v Abbey Rovers, Randal Óg v Shanballymore, Deel Rovers v Ballinacurra, St. John’s v Garnish; Sunday - Dripsey v Glengarriffe.
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