'There are people everywhere completely dedicated to the club, but Jimmy O'Mahony topped all of them'

Jimmy O’Mahony is presented with a GAA President’s Award by GAA President Nickey Brennan in 2009. Newcestown official Donie Keane said: ‘Jimmy linked the past with the present. He kept contact with players who had moved away and kept them abreast of what was happening — but he also made modern players, the youngsters, aware of their heritage.’

The date isn't important. The game doesn’t matter. It’s the cast that makes the story.

Sean Crowley can remember being a passenger in Jimmy O’Mahony’s car as they hustled towards Kealkil one evening years ago, anxious to see their club Newcestown take the field.

“Time is getting tight, Jimmy,” said Crowley.

“They can’t start without us Sean,” said O’Mahony. “I have the jerseys in the boot of the car.”

Crowley laughs now at the memory.

“That was Jimmy for you, every trip was an adventure. And all of it for Newcestown.”

Jimmy O’Mahony, who passed away last month, was there from the start with Newcestown. Literally: he was a teenager at the December 1958 meeting which discussed forming the club, and the club’s first playing field was provided by his father, Denis.

“And provided rent-free, which was obviously a huge help to the club in the early days before we eventually purchased our own grounds,” adds Crowley.

“He was appointed secretary at the 1966 AGM, so he was in place when we won the junior (football) county in 1967 - though it wasn’t played until March of 1968 - and we won the Flyer Nyhan (junior hurling) cup the same year.

“He was the secretary after that, even when he went into a home a few years ago. He never lost that office, meaning he was secretary for every adult championship that we won, he saw two men from the club win All-Stars in the one year when Kevin Kehily (football) and Tim Crowley (hurling) won in 1982, all of that.

His life was dedicated to the GAA, absolutely.

The record bears that out. He served Newcestown at board level in West Cork and the Cork County Board, and was a selector on four Cork teams which won All-Ireland titles at various levels.

In 2009 he won the GAA President’s Award and helped to organise the Newcestown club lottery.

“Morning, noon and night he was there for the club,” says Newcestown official Donie Keane.

“I know there are people like that in every club, who are completely dedicated to the club, but Jimmy topped all of them. Fanatic was hardly the word, he was all-consumed with the club and progressing the club.

“There are great clubmen in every club, but this man gave his whole life to Newcestown, I couldn’t stress that enough.”

(That was reciprocated. The usual process in writing a piece like this is to sound out someone familiar with the club to identify a particular friend or associate of the man in question. In this case my informant was to the point: “Call anyone in Newcestown. They’d all have died for him.”)

Beyond that dedication was a sense of fun, however. 

Donie Keane says simply that everything was an adventure when Jimmy O’Mahony was on the case.

“In the seventies and eighties - and maybe later - it wasn’t unusual to have an entire underage team, almost, in one car going to a game.

That was Jimmy’s form - always available to bring lads to matches, and I can remember seeing his car head off to games and young lads practically hanging out of every window and the boot, 12 or 15 of them.

“The adventure part came in on the journey home after those games, though, because those were the days before mobiles. So Jimmy might end up making half a dozen stops to ring lads from payphones about the next match, and who was needed, and who to get onto.”

Crowley agrees on the focus rolling on to the next contest: “That was one very noticeable thing about him, it was always the next match.

“You’d be in the dressing-room after a match and the final whistle was nearly still sounding outside and already Jimmy would be saying ‘what about next weekend, we have a match, how many of ye are available?’, which was a great attitude to have.”

Not that the games always went ahead. When work needed to be done on the church in Newcestown at one point mass was held in the club meeting rooms, which were adjacent to the playing field.

Convenient for the community. Tricky for referees.

“There was a game one Sunday morning and the ref had the sliotar in his hand, ready to go, when a man walked out to the middle of the field and took the ball out of his hand.

“It was Jimmy. He told the referee there’d be no match played while Mass was being said in the meeting rooms next door, so we had to wait. And wait.

“After an eternity the people started coming out, Mass was finished, and Jimmy threw the ball to the referee and said ‘now you can start away’.”

Donie Keane fleshes out another story: “Jimmy used to tell a story himself about a minor game Newcestown won years ago, a final maybe, and he brought the team into a pub on the way back.

“The order was 15 bottles of lemonade but one player piped up looking for a pint. He was gone 18 but Jimmy wouldn’t buy him a pint with the rest of the players. He got the 15 bottles of lemonade but then he bought the player a pint out of his own money because he was gone 18 - not long before, so he was still eligible for minor.

“But that was typical of Jimmy’s attitude - he was meticulous it came to protecting the GAA from anything like a possible suggestion that the club was buying drink for underage kids.”

Reaching senior hurling was a particular highlight for him, adds Keane: “He took great pride in getting to that level. We had been up senior in football but Jimmy was delighted altogether when we made senior hurling.”

Crowley adds that O’Mahony had mastered one of the most challenging arts in Irish sport, not just the GAA.

“There was never a man who could organise All-Ireland tickets like him, getting tickets for club members.

A stream of people would be on to him because he was out on his own when it came to organising ticket swaps for an All-Ireland hurling final, for instance, with clubs that wouldn’t have an interest in hurling.

“One consideration was whether a member was entitled to an extra ticket if he was married, on the logic that the wife would be going to the game as well. Now, whether that ticket went to the wife or not we didn’t know, and I wonder if a couple of lads could have produced marriage certificates for the ‘wives’ who were getting tickets, but he always came through with the tickets, which people obviously appreciated hugely.”

“He was always there,” says Donie Keane. “No matter who the club officers were, he was always there to drive things on.

“He linked the past with the present. He kept contact with players who had moved away and kept them abreast of what was happening - but he also made modern players, the youngsters, aware of their heritage. What they had to live up to.

The circumstances of the lockdown meant the send-off Newcestown gave him was severely curtailed. 

Sean Crowley gave the eulogy and describes the experience as “a bit unreal”.

“There was no removal as such, it wasn’t the funeral we would have had in normal times, which was very unfortunate. 

So many people would have loved to pay their respects and say good-bye properly.”

On the day of the funeral the hearse drove up through the village to the GAA field, and turned around by the club meeting rooms there.

The local national school is right next door, and when the hearse turned around applause could be heard from the school as the children clapped for Jimmy O’Mahony.