Football

St. Patrick's Day more important to the GAA than September Sundays

Cahair O'Kane

Cahair O'Kane

Cahair is a sports reporter and columnist with the Irish News specialising in Gaelic Games.

Na Piarsaigh captain Cathal King lifts the Tommy Moore Cup in Croke Park after defeating Cushendall Ruairi Ógs in Thursday's All-Ireland senior club hurling final. It might not have felt like it to Cushendall, but they were part of a day that is annually remarkable. Picture by Seamus Loughran
Na Piarsaigh captain Cathal King lifts the Tommy Moore Cup in Croke Park after defeating Cushendall Ruairi Ógs in Thursday's All-Ireland senior club hurling final. It might not have felt like it to Cushendall, but they were part of a day that i Na Piarsaigh captain Cathal King lifts the Tommy Moore Cup in Croke Park after defeating Cushendall Ruairi Ógs in Thursday's All-Ireland senior club hurling final. It might not have felt like it to Cushendall, but they were part of a day that is annually remarkable. Picture by Seamus Loughran

“To be the first team makes it extra special. For my own reasons, I’ve always wanted to win this one, for various different reasons. I would like to consider myself a thorough club man. Often, when you play with the county team, you find yourself adrift from the club set-up. I live beside the place, I grew up there, I’m going to finish there. I know numerous people down there, I try to give as much as I can back.”

Shane Dowling, Na Piarsaigh & Limerick forward, March 17, 2016

IT won’t have felt like it for Cushendall or Castlebar, and the spectacle might not have lived up to the expectations, but Thursday was a glorious day.

St. Patrick’s Day is not about mini-riots in the Holylands. It’s not about drowning the shamrock. It’s not about having your face painted. For GAA folk, St. Patrick’s Day is about the fulfilment of dreams.

There were over 31,000 in Croke Park for the All-Ireland club finals.

Eight of the 20 clubs in the richest football league in the world don’t clear that figure.

Southampton, Stoke City, Norwich City, Crystal Palace, West Bromwich Albion, Swansea City, Watford and Bournemouth’s average weekly attendance this season falls beneath the mark set by two amateur games.

The population of Castlebar is just over 10,000. Southampton is almost 23 times its size.

Cushendall’s citizens amount to just over 1,300. Stoke-on-Trent is almost 250 times its size.

Two games played on the biggest national holiday of the year, a day when there are so many other temptations for spectators, drew a Premier League attendance.

For many, it’s an annual pilgrimage. The club means so much to so many thousands of people in this country.

Nobody thinks for one second that Shane Dowling feels any differently about his club than any of the Cushendall men of theirs.

Same as Ballyboden, same as Castlebar. Same as Newbridge.

This is Newbridge club’s 90th year, and to celebrate, they’ve commissioned a playing jersey that bears the surname of everyone who has ever played for them.

You can only imagine what it would feel like for their young men to pull on that geansai for a championship game in July. It’s a spine tingling thought.

I come from a very small village called Gortnaghey, four miles outside Dungiven.

The surrounding townland of Drum hosts the club’s pitch, and bears its name as well as many of its players.

One of my very youngest memories is my father plastering the new clubhouse at the pitch a few years after it opened in 1989.

I was maybe 3 or 4 at the time but I remember going up to work with him (I haven’t done a day’s work since) and then getting to kick the ball about on the field.

That gave me the bug.

Our total membership would hardly push past 80.

To give the size of the place some perspective, they still talk about my year group at the local primary school as “the big year”. There were 18 of us in the year, and it was so uncharacteristically oversized that they shipped a couple of us into the middle class at the end of P1.

The club, the pub and the shop define most villages like ours. For a decade or more there, we had no shop. The pub has closed and reopened numerous times.

That wouldn’t be untypical of a rural community in modern Ireland.

Next year, our club will be 80 years old.

We’ve had All-Ireland medallists with Derry minors and under-21s, and so many of our players have represented the county in hurling and football down the years.

Hurling has been an occasionally fruitful addition. A senior county final in 1990 was the best they managed. An intermediate championship in 2003 was the last of it before the hurling stopped two years later.

In ten years of senior football, I’ve started in every Championship game, missed two league games through work, been dropped twice (for one game at a time) and missed 3 or 4 games through injury.

As well as the enjoyment you get from playing, there’s the pride in contributing to the continuation of the very hub of the community.

And the feeling of winning. I’ve been very fortunate to win two Derry junior championships. One in goals in my first year (2006), and the other at corner-forward in 2012.

You might scoff, but the joy of success transcends the grades. From senior to junior club, the sense of respective achievement is the same.

We walk on the same clouds that Slaughtneil and Crossmaglen and Ballyboden and Na Piarsaigh and Dublin do for those few days after winning a championship.

I’m thankful, too, that there’s still a club there for us. We were so close to the wall in 2013. Days of gathering at the gates of the field for a game not knowing if you’d have eight players or 18, having to pick the team with another couple of players and just fulfil the games.

On one particular afternoon, ringing a man who said he was ok to play because he’d only had two pints so far, and actually considering taking him just to field a team.

Another reality that will be very familiar to many.

Thankfully it’s been better since. A very small committee of very dedicated people worked very hard to keep it afloat and they’ve been doing serious work since.

St. Colm’s Drum will make it to 80 years of age now. I, like every other player in Ireland, hope to have some silverware to celebrate that milestone with.

That would mean the same to me as Thursday meant to Shane Dowling or Michael Darragh Macauley.

Far more than the third Sunday of September, it’s St. Patrick’s Day that reminds you of what it’s all about.