Harty Cup final: ‘Everyone in East Clare loves being associated with this’

Mikey McMahon, St. Josephs, Tulla celebrates with his team and fans after the Harty Cup semi-final win over De La Salle. Picture: Dan Linehan

Brian Torpey didn’t take early retirement as principal of St Mochulla’s NS in Tulla because it interfered with his hurling, but these days it’s just as well he has every waking hour to devote to the game.

He needs them, and more.

It’s the talk, then more talk about the march of St Joseph’s, Tulla to a first-ever Harty Cup final (Saturday, 1pm, TUS Gaelic Grounds); in between the endless chatter, there’s organising and fundraising, but just as important is the celebration in the company of fellow disciples of colleges hurling’s newest upstarts, as they toast a team that’s a statement of identity, place and creed.

“Everyone in East Clare loves being associated with this,” says Torpey. “They feel a part of it. There’s a movement, a whole group behind it.

“It’s like the murmurings of starlings — the way starlings move in a wave. That’s the way I’d put it with this Tulla team. Down in Mallow in the semi-final, between the team, students, parents, and other spectators — they were all as one, just moving in the same direction. It was beautiful. It was special.”

Torpey is the straight-talking Tulla club delegate to the Clare County Board, but in Harty Cup final week, as chairman of the St Joseph’s secondary school board of management, he represents a much broader church.

He’s an emissary taking in neighbours like Feakle, Broadford, O’Callaghan’s Mills, and Clooney-Quin, because they’re all part of this Harty Cup story and journey. This is Tulla, but it’s also much bigger than Tulla; it’s wider East Clare.

“All those clubs have had lads that went to St Flannan’s and won the Harty. The line in all the parishes was always, ‘you’re great, you won an aul Harty medal’. And when they did, we were delighted for them, but this is different.

“This is an East Clare team and it’s that realisation we’re playing with the big boys; we don’t have to go into St Flannan’s for Harty hurling. We can do that in Tulla,” he adds.

“That’s the fairytale of our team,” says school principal Juliet Coman, “we’re a small rural community, made up of local hurlers, from local clubs. We have 31 on the panel and they’re all local. It has really put Tulla on the map; it’s paving the way for other schools that this is possible. You don’t have to be a huge school that has a name of reaching Harty final after Harty final.”

“The Harty Cup resonates with a lot of older folk and means so much,” says coach Tomás Kelly. “After the semi-final, I had a great chat with the grandfather of one of our players, Evan Maxted. He played with Abbey CBS when they won the Harty in 1959 and this brought it all back. It shows the Harty’s aura and the prestige; it’s a GAA competition like no other.”

This is the world that Kelly, Aidan Harte, and Terence Fahy — the triumvirate charged with guiding St Josephs’ Harty Cup dream — are immersed in and thriving in, as with each passing game they go further than the school has ever gone before.

“Starting out our target was to win a Harty game,” reveals Kelly. “The school had never won a game in the competition. It sounds very basic, but we were starting from that very low base. Can we win a game in the Harty Cup? Where could we go after that?”

Tulla’s cupboard was that bare: a defeat to Coláiste Chríost Rí in 1982 on their first Harty Cup day out; a draw against Nenagh CBS in 1999 and another draw in 2019 against Hamilton High School, Bandon. That was it.

“After this year’s first round loss against De La Salle, that win seemed as far away as ever,” admits Kelly. “For that game our name came out first, which meant home advantage, but because we were over 160km away from Waterford, it had to be a neutral venue. Then because we were the home team first time, we were automatically away the second day, so we were playing St Colman’s in Fermoy. When you’re a small school and you’re in with the big fish, you kind of get paranoid; we wouldn’t be that fashionable and you think you’ll never catch a break, that we’re always against the wind.”

That was then — now they haven’t just caught the wind, it’s a storm that has swept them into a Harty Cup decider, when they hope to join 22 times champions St Flannan’s and Ennis CBS’ 1962 side on the Clare role of honour.

“They’ve shown great grit and determination, because they’ve had to,” says Kelly. “Against St Colman’s we told them at half-time ‘we’re going out with a whimper here lads’, but they responded.

“We were five points down with three minutes to go, managed to bring it back to a goal, then Seanie Withycombe’s 21-yard free took a deflection and looped into the net to force extra-time. We kicked on from there. We’ve always said to them that if they can be in contention coming down the home straight they’d be very hard to stop.”

CBC Cork and De La Salle found this out at the quarter-final and semi-final stages respectively in two more come-from-behind victories, but in Ardscoil Rís, they face something completely different. The Limerick school has never been beaten in a Harty final, winning five titles since 2010.

“They’re basically the nursery of Limerick hurling,” says Kelly. “A Limerick minor and 20s team with a couple of Clare guys thrown in for good measure.”

Manager Terence Fahy says: “They were awesome in the semi-final, scoring 3-5 in the first 15 minutes against a fancied Thurles team. They’re like a Panzer outfit, but I don’t see our lads backing off that. They thrive on challenges.”

“It’s history,” says Brian Torpey, “and we love our hurling history in Tulla. We have the achievements of the great Tommy Daly and Clare’s All-Ireland winners and we have the Carrahan Flag — one of the oldest prizes in the GAA that dates from 1888 and was won by the Tulla team that went on to win Munster and contest the All-Ireland. The flag is on display in Cnoc na Gaoithe [the Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann centre] in Tulla. It would be great to have the Harty Cup with it.”

Tomorrow: Harty Cup final: Ardscoil Rís Limerick v St Joseph’s Tulla, TUS Gaelic Grounds,1pm