At the edge of Europe, Belmullet are making waves

BLOW IT UP: Belmullet’s subs look on during the closing minutes of their Mayo SFC semi-final win over Westport. Picture: Conor McKeown

Belmullet, and the rugged peninsula it acts as an onramp to, should be an island.

Being there feels like being on one. Surrounded by water on three sides, it almost is.

But it’s much less that, and more the essence, the élan of its people, of the water that surrounds it, of the earth it sits upon, that makes it what it is. It is an outlier of a place in an outlier of a county. Stand at the edge of Dun na Mbo and feel the beauty and the beast of the wild Atlantic on your face. Next stop Boston!

It’s a visceral place. Not wild, but definitely different.

“They’d ate ya in Erris,” they used to say, in a footballing context at least. In Ballina on Sunday at the Mayo county final, defending champions Knockmore will find out.

It’s 40 years since their one and only county senior final appearance.

Back then, the town, and the townlands the club draws from, was much like it is now. Bustling. Busy. Self-sufficient. Remote. Breathtakingly beautiful. Surviving, against the odds.

Ten months ago, there were few places in the country more ravaged by Covid-19.

Ten months later, as the insidious virus threatens a Lazarus come back, there are few places in the country doing better with it.

And, in a football-mad country, they are now in a county final. Against all odds.

Another manifestation of the ebb and flow of life in a place all too familiar with the transience of it.

Football has always mattered here. In the 1950’s and ‘60s, the Erris Leagues were the centrepieces to each sporting calendar. Townlands like Shraigh, Dooyork, Doohoma, Pulathomas, and “all posts in between in the Barony of Erris” fielded teams.

Legendary stories of epic battles live on like Homer’s poems. Lads arriving home in black taxis from Belfast just to play. Emigration has long been a scourge, gouging the area of its youth. At one point in the 80s, after the club’s sole county senior final appearance, the cyclical slide towards junior began.

Meanwhile, many young men from the area were winning county championships in London and New York.

There is a cadence and a candour to the way people from Belmullet talk about Belmullet that requires a trained ear if you wish to keep up. I have learned that it is best not to interrupt and ask, better to listen and digest. The club itself is made up of two parishes; Belmullet (the town, and everything east of it), and Kilmore (the peninsula).

Even that is a gross oversimplification. To even begin to understand the uniquity of the place, you would need to be looking at a map. As a good friend from there has wont to say about his homeland: ‘It’d be easier understand the Middle-East’.

Take the parish of Kilmore, it’s a long way from Blacksod to Ballyglass lighthouse. About 30km. I’ve heard some local’s remark, tongue firmly in cheek, that good footballers were scarce from “back behind the creamery”. You’d swear when you first hear it first they are talking about a disused industrial car park at the edge of town. Instead, they refer to an area from about Carne Golf Links (itself an incredible golf course) south, through Binghamstown, past some of the country’s most spectacular beaches like Elly Bay, through Aghleam, and Glosh, and down as far as Blacksod.

To spend a day “back behind the creamery” is to come a little closer to God.

I met Belmullet man Ian McAndrew back in July when talk of Covid was as ubiquitous as the virus itself, but that morning in our friend’s kitchen, words were strangely scarce. Silence apt.

Mercifully, Ian chose to fill it, and talk of football and Mayo’s now trademark ability to confound (it was early in the championship season), turned to how much his late wife, Bernie, would love to know how it would all pan out for them.

Bernie died from Covid in January this year. Both she and Ian were admitted the same night, taken from their home in separate ambulances. He never saw her again. Bernie was from neighbouring Kiltane. Anyone who knows Mayo club football knows Kiltane to be a sometimes hostile place to play, but there was nothing hostile about Bernie. Listening to Ian’s sincerity that morning in discussing the most heartbreaking of life events was humbling.

Like many conversations in Mayo, it began and ended with football, but real life happened in between. We spoke again this week in the build-up to Sunday’s final. He talked of a town that is buzzing with anticipation. He also spoke of a people familiar with a certain degree of discomfort in their lives, so Sunday’s final felt like a just reward.

One of those is selector Eamon Dixon, a full-time fisherman, for whom time must only exist as a social construct. He might be on the ocean, fishing by day or night, but, will always be at training that evening, often in Lough George, Claregalway, where Belmullet train once a week to accommodate the majority of their panel who live away from home (Claregalway is about a two-hour 10-minute drive from the town of Belmullet, forget all other parts).

It’s worth noting that Belmullet is farther north than Crossmaglen in Armagh.

Yes, the people of the peninsula are used to a little hardship, but they want nothing for it. After the year he’s had, it would be understandable for Ian McAndrew to feel like an island. Surrounded by an unforgiving ocean on all sides, but, like the town he’s from, he is not. So much of the oxygen he breathes comes from the place he loves.

The sport he loves. The club he loves.

“It seems silly,” he says, “to speak about sport when we talk about life and death, but, when I think of everything that’s happened from last January to the rising of this winter’s sun, I find these things to be inseparable.”