Conor 'Claws' Clancy still putting his hand up for Clare
Conor Clancy at Kilmaley GAA Pitch. Picture : Eamon Ward
IN this county they still pop up everywhere, quietly overlooking and monitoring everything.
I meet Conor Clancy in the West County Hotel the week of Clare opening their championship against Tipperary, just like they did back in 1999 when in the game’s dying moments the man they called Claws pulled down a ball and Tipp pulled him down, resulting in Davy Fitzgerald firing a penalty to the net to keep Clare’s season alive and force a replay they’d win.
And as it happens when we take up a spot in the corner of the hotel bar, we realise that above us on the wall is a framed team picture of the men of ’95. Loughnane grinning. Dalo laughing. Liam MacCarthy glistening. Back when they were all young and all friends, Davy and Lohan included.
They actually all met up there on Easter Sunday, Clancy informs us. Well, most of them anyhow. Daly, forever the glue and leader, is planning some big weekend away later in the summer to mark the men of ’97 who’ll be honoured on All-Ireland final day and the men of ’95 who missed out on a silver jubilee reception in Croke Park because of Covid.
So to help fund it, Éamonn Taaffe organised a poker classic in the Woodstock Hotel which was well attended. A few familiar names would have brought it up to a round 200. Brian Quinn, PJ ‘Fingers’ O’Connell, Christy ‘Rusty’ Chaplin and the Lohans couldn’t make it while Loughnane and Fitzy tend to forsake these things more often than not. But everyone else was there and it was great to see them, even – especially Mike Mac – after the torture he used put them through. Some of the lads enjoyed the craic in the Woodstock so much they were supposedly still there ‘til nearly four in the morning. But as for Clancy, he said his goodbye and thanks before nine. He wasn’t drinking and he had a team to coach in the morning.
Ask Jamesie O’Connor to describe Clancy and the word he constantly uses is selfless. Back when they were players with Flannan’s teams and then Clare ones, with Clancy and his claw winning a ball, popping it off to Jamesie and Jamesie popping it over the bar (“I very much enjoyed that arrangement and relationship,” smiles O’Connor). And selfless still now with Kilmaley. Of all the lads who have put time back into their own club, O’Connor reckons there can’t be anyone who has invested so much of themselves and their time as Clancy has into his (“An unbelievable clubman,” vouches O’Connor).
There hasn’t been a year since Clancy finished playing with Clare where he hasn’t been either an officer or coach in the club. He’s been its chair as well as chair of the camogie club, gone door to door in every house in the parish to help raise the million euro and more it took to develop the club’s new facilities, coached just about every age group. At 50 this is his first year not playing some grade or another – last year he was still togging out for the club’s fourth team, the Junior Cs – while he’s been able to escape sitting on any executive but he’s still managing the club’s senior team, as well as coaching the U11s and U13s and the camogie U12s.
In many ways that would be in keeping with his nature: one of the quieter men of ’95 and ’97 being out in the quiet fields, away from the limelight and the glamour of county teams. According to O’Connor, Clancy would have been “very much his own man”. While everyone had a good word to say about him, he wasn’t someone you’d share a lot of words with. If he tended to keep company it was with Colin Lynch, who he played football with for Lisseycasey from when they were kids and is his right-hand man with the Kilmaley seniors this year.
But don’t mistake quiet for mute. An electronic engineer and a European sales manager by profession, Clancy 30 months ago on Twitter cited Martin Luther King: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” To Clancy, Clare GAA as well as Kilmaley still matter.
That social media post and others from him similar in tone were triggered by a semi-crisis within the county at the time regarding the state and standard of the county’s supposed centre of excellence in Caherlohan as well as who could be managing the county senior team in 2020. In a county where people have been shy to put their head above the parapet and publicly call out the county board, Clancy hasn’t, either in person, at county board meetings or on social media. What Loughnane said about him as a player still applied to him as a man. He couldn’t be intimidated. He was so brave he'd put up his hand anywhere.
“There’s no doubt that for a while there you’d be asking questions about where we were going as a GAA county,” he says. “And from that I had some run-ins with Pat [Fitzgerald, the long-serving county secretary] to the point we don’t speak anymore. But the way myself and the club saw it, what was the point in sitting back when you could see things needed to be changed and could be done better?”
One flashpoint came in early 2013 at a county convention when Clancy challenged the county board over a proposed bylaw concerning isolated players that could severely impact clubs like Kilmaley. Clancy wasn’t the club’s county board delegate at the time, a club stalwart that also worked as a steward and groundsman in Cusack Park was, but as club chair Clancy was willing to stand up.
“It didn’t make any sense why they were trying to bring that in, so I read out a letter on behalf of the club. Other clubs in situations like that have probably sat back thinking, ‘Listen, if we say anything critical it’s going to impact our club, we might end up getting a match below in Parteen rather than in Cusack Park.’ But I felt along with others in the club that we weren’t being true to ourselves if we didn’t challenge what was going on. And that remained our attitude. If things kept going on the way they were, we weren’t going to maximise the true potential within Clare.”
He’ll quickly point out that other clubs and officials have challenged the status quo in recent years. The likes of Whitegate’s David Solan. Brian Torpey of Tulla. The Éire Óg club. Change has been demanded and now change is afoot, following the report of the independent committee and the progressive leadership of new chairman Kieran Keating. And all the time he stresses his motives were purely in the best interests of Clare. It was never personal, even though Fitzgerald tended to perceive that it was.
“I’d personally have no animosity towards Pat. I think history will be very kind to Pat and acknowledge he did a lot for Clare, he just stayed on too long. The whole thing had just stagnated.
“Pat’s problem was that his strength became his weakness. He was willing and wanted to do everything. He wanted to book the bus, organise the dinner, open the gates in Cusack Park. Everything had to go through him. Now, he was able to do that for a number of years, he had an insatiable work ethic, but if you look at, for instance, the funding required of county teams now, one man, or at least a county secretary, can’t manage all that on top of everything else as well. You need to be able to delegate and bring other people on board and Pat just wasn’t that kind of guy.
“Take Caherlohan. Pat didn’t have the skillset for a project of that size yet he took it on. The redevelopment of Cusack Park was the same: it was atrocious really, the return we got for the money we put into it. Initially the seated stand was meant to run the full length of the main pitch but instead they only changed the seating and the roof. That should have been a separate project involving people with construction experience.
“I know in our club when we transformed a bog into a fantastic facility with two sand-based pitches we’d a guy called Gerry O’Malley involved with it. He’d be a very good addition to have in a committee overlooking the Caherlohan development. There are loads of people like him in Clare GAA with the skillset and willingness to give their time and expertise to help Clare GAA and get things done.”
Under Keating’s chairmanship though he can see the drawbridge is being lowered. The board is becoming more inclusive. While it’s still not known when exactly Fitzgerald’s latest contract as secretary expires, it’s apparent that his term and power is dwindling.
“I think since Kieran came in, most of the clubs are happy with him and to let him at it. And I think you’re beginning to see green shoots already. If you look at the performance of the U20s, we could and probably should have won both matches against Limerick and Cork when for the previous five or six years we weren’t competitive at all. The U20 footballers performed very well against Kerry. It’s encouraging.”
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Before Ger Loughnane showed up one summer’s day on the jetty out in Shannon and told him that like MLK, he had a dream, Conor Clancy had given up on his. For the Munster hurling final of 1994, Clancy had been the same as he had been at the 1993 final and the 1992 All-Ireland football semi-final: a spectator, a bystander, a former county hurler.
He’d been called into the senior panel straight out of minor, featuring in Len Gaynor’s first league campaign, but by championship he was off it again.
“I was definitely too green for it. I wouldn’t have had the strength at the time for it. I’d been on a successful minor team [that reached the 1989 All-Ireland minor final] but then all of a sudden coming into an environment where the expectations were different and the group was struggling, your own confidence also would take a hit. I wasn’t ready to be picked at the time.”
He still kept tapping and hurling away. Played for the U21s managed by Loughnane in ’92. But that didn’t prompt any call up to the seniors, not immediately anyway. But then shortly after the county’s calamitous Munster final defeat to Limerick in 1994, Clancy had a surprise visitor at work where he’d a summer job as an industrial painter. At the time Ger Loughnane was still not the successor to the departing Len Gaynor as Clare manager but in his own head he was. 1995 was starting already and with mobile phones scarce in those days he wanted to instruct his prospective full-forward to get ready.
“Until then I had been content enough playing hurling with Kilmaley and some football with Lissycasey. I didn’t have any aspirations beyond that. But then Ger showed up on this jetty overhanging these massive pipes we were painting. And I was thinking, ‘How did he find me here? What does he want with me here?’ But he basically said, Look, I’m going to be taking over this team and when I do I want you to come in. We have a role for you.’”
Being in Loughnane’s army though meant you had to drill, under the command of one Mike McNamara. It was the making of Clancy and his fellow foot soldiers because of how close it went to breaking them.
“If you were working during the day you’d be thinking about and dreading training that night. You’d feel the dread in your body. Because you knew what was coming. It wasn’t going to be a handy session, it was going to be an absolute beast. And you mightn’t eat. Looking back that wasn’t possibly the smartest decision from a nutritional point of view but because you’d seen fellas getting sick, you didn’t want it only coming back up.
“I remember nights in Shannon and Crusheen where the rain would be teeming down and you’d be in your car thinking, ‘Christ, this is going to be animal again. The field is going to be flooded in water and they’ll want us to plough through it. Do I really want to do this? Do I really want this?’”
Always though his soul would summon an answer: Yes. For the same reason he responded to Loughnane’s line about Nicky English only laughing at Clare in ’93. Clancy was a son of Clare and a Clare man who had endured too much ridicule and pain.
“I remember my father flying up to Belfast in 1981 with the Clare team for a league match because we had players like Tommy Keane and Marty Meehan and Seamus Fitzpatrick from the club playing at the time. Everywhere they played Dad would go, and soon afterwards I would too. I remember us jumping over a wall to see a Division 2 league game against Kerry in Listowel. We probably spent half the night getting back home.
“I was there in ’86 in Killarney when Tommy was captain and Clare were so unlucky to lose to Cork in the Munster final. But the worst was going back down there in ’87 for a replay against Tipp. It was a wet day and they destroyed us. I’ll always remember we were walking out with a few minutes to go and there was an old fella up against the wire wearing an old crepe hat and the dye was running down his face. Dad said to me, ‘Conor, that’s the lot of a Clare supporter.’
“And I remember being at the Munster final in ’93 in Limerick when Tipp hockeyed us again. I didn’t see English laughing but I remember when I was heading out with a few minutes to go there were Tipp supporters shouting at us heading out the gate. So when Loughnane referenced English, it resonated with players. It definitely resonated with me.”
Loughnane still intrigues him. Hurling, or at least winning, has long ceased to consume him the way it did but still he’s hunting, literally.
“I bumped into him there on the road not so long ago. I was rushing out to training and it was only when he passed me I realised it was him. He’s constantly up near my place, hunting with a neighbour of mine, John Keane, whose son plays with us in Kilmaley. And I tell you, he’s still a fit man, Ger, he’s still fresh.
“I’d say he knows where my house is, he’s around these parts so much. He should call in for a cup of tea one of these days.”
For what he did for Clare and Clancy, he’ll always be welcome.
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