From Buckley Park to Mounthawk Park: soccer's struggles in rural Ireland

Kerry FC's run to the FAI Cup last four gave a glimpse of what can be achieved. 

KINGDOM COME: Kerry FC manager Colin Healy after the FAI Cup semi-final match against Shamrock Rovers. Pic: Ben McShane/Sportsfile

A sunny, autumnal day in Kilkenny and a few hours to kill. What to do? The city sits gorgeously under the canopy of blue sky, the plethora of coffee shops and prominence of the castle offering tempting possibilities, but there is a dilapidated old dump out on the Callan Road that won’t be ignored.

Buckley Park used to be a thriving League of Ireland ground catering for 6,000 fans. Kilkenny City played Shamrock Rovers in an FAI Cup semi-final here in 1991. Bohemians won a league title on the same patch a decade later. Underage Republic of Ireland games were hosted on the carpet that acted as a pitch.

The grass now reaches midway up your calves and the two stands are littered with cowpats and pigeon shit. Seats and advertising hoardings are rusting and rotting, graffiti is sprayed on the walls of what was once the TV tower. It’s sad and it’s grim and it serves as a haunting reminder of soccer’s eternal struggles around the country.

If the many iterations of League of Ireland clubs in Cork and Limerick and Waterford through the years serve witness to a never-ending existential battle then the job of eking out an existence in smaller towns and markets is harder again in places like Buckley Park, and in Mounthawk Park where Kerry FC are the latest in a long line of ambitious rural outposts.

Kerry’s FAI Cup run came to an abrupt end in Tallaght Stadium on Sunday afternoon when they lost their semi-final 6-1 to Shamrock Rovers, but something the club’s CEO, Billy Dennehy, said to the Irish Times late last week had already made a deep impression and fed into the unplanned pilgrimage to Buckley Park.

Dennehy spoke of how the cup quarter-final win against Sligo Rovers had represented “the resilience and the fight” required to give birth to a League of Ireland club in the Kingdom, and how their path to that last four tie against the league champions-elect had been a process of “one unattainable thing after another”.

He explained how Mounthawk could have been sold out five times over for their win over the Bit O’ Red, how Tralee had been festooned in flags and bunting in recent weeks, and how this was all so different to days of still recent vintage when soccer wasn’t permitted in certain schools in the county.

That’s the bit that caught the eye. Stirred up some old emotions.

To come from a rural corner of Ireland, whether a town or a townland, and owe your first allegiance to soccer was to remember these slights and cultural prejudices because this stuff didn’t end with Liam Brady being expelled from school for choosing soccer over Gaelic football back in the 1970s.

The mind goes back to the midlands in the late '80s and early '90s when three years of pleading for a soccer team in the local CBS failed to make any headway with principals or teachers wedded to the GAA. And to two more years in Ballyfin College where the school soccer team was permitted but came to understand its place.

Ballyfin won a Midlands Schools Cup in 1993 but any ambition of making a dent in Leinster was lost when the Gaelic footballers and hurlers pushed deeper into their own calendars and key players like Willie Kirby, a future All-Ireland winner with Kerry, and Paul Cuddy, a future Laois hurling stalwart, were made unavailable for the soccer game.

There ended the run.

Is there bitterness in that? Not any more, but a sliver of regret lingers.

Kerry FC seem to be going about things the right way. The hope is that they can succeed and pick up where the likes of Kilkenny FC, Kildare County, Monaghan United, Thurles Town and others fell by the wayside in a game where a shortage of money has by no means been the only difficulty to overcome.

Dennehy has spoken about his journey from underage Gaelic footballer with Kerry to professional soccer player in England, and how there were no supports there for a young lad emerging from his neck of the woods. Go back another generation and Roy Keane was making similar utterances about his path from Cork to Nottingham via Dublin.

The tendency when talk turns to the FAI’s grand and expensive plans for properly-funded and staffed League of Ireland academies is to focus on the difference they would make to the Dublin clubs and the Corks and the Galways, but these would be beacons of light to youngsters in surrounding towns and counties too.

Imagine what a fully functioning academy with qualified coaches and trained administrators, state-of-the-art facilities and links knitted in to the nearest League of Ireland club could do to embed soccer into the minds of local communities where it might, in the past, have existed, or been barely tolerated, on the fringes.

Imagine that and the future can be more Mounthawk Park than Buckley Park.