Topics

I bought a book called the Atlas of Irish history recently and there's a map of Ireland in the 12th century with the names of the main tribes by area.

And it is amazing that 800 years later there are fellas from the same families playing hurling and football for the same areas.

Kerry -O Suilleabhain-   Mickey Ned
Clare   O Lochlainn-     Sparrow 
Tipp    Ui Cearbhall -    John
Offaly  Ua Conchubair-  Matt
Wexford Ua Gormain     Larry
Tyrone Ua Neill             Stephen

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/1117/1224283516687.html

51 . Mayo football fans

I came across this by chance today.It's about Aogán ó Rathaille, the Kerry poet of the early 1700s.
An acquired taste but what  a legend he was.

http://www.drb.ie/more_details/09-03-21/Riddled_With_Light.aspx

What sort of cash are other counties spending?


http://www.independent.ie/sport/gaelic-football/how-the-numbers-added-up-for-banty-2417422.html

Thanks to the Meath lads for the link

I just heard on Raidio na Gaeltachta that over 100 players have emigrated from Kerry and  Kerry football since the start of the year. How is it in other counties ?   

"Don't Be Late!" by Jane Jeffer

"Caught in the Rain" by Tommy Fluck

Any others? 

A MAN who was ordered to climb Croagh Patrick for verbally abusing two gardaí has raised almost €3,000 for charity after completing the hike with 13 friends. Joseph McElwee was ordered to climb the mountain in Co Mayo by Judge Séamus Hughes after being found guilty of threatening and abusing gardaí while drunk in Donegal on March 28th. McElwee, a father of two children, came out of a pub in the seaside town of Rathmullan and launched into a verbal tirade against gardaí which lasted more than 10 minutes.
During the abuse he called Garda Nicholas Freyne a "Mayo w****r" and told him to "f*** off back to Mayo". Judge Hughes, who is himself a native of Mayo, ordered McElwee to do four stations of the famous mountain as a mark of respect for his fellow Irish people, especially those in the line of duty.

Last week the Irish Times reported that 62% of children in the 26 counties under the age of 14 live in 4 counties- Meath, Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow.

This is a serious issue for the GAA . What is going to happen to hurling if the trend towards population growth in only one part of Leinster continues? What will it mean for Kerry football?  Or, come to think of it , Munster rugby?  Will the 6 counties teams be at an advantage? Apart from Meath I can't see any of the other  4 counties dominating long term although maybe Kildare will get closer to the top and win the odd all-Ireland.

In praise of ... Gaelic sports

Football is supposed to be the people's game in the UK. But the real 'people's sports' are those across the Irish Sea
   
Editorial The Guardian, Tuesday 21 September 2010

On Sunday about 80,000 football fans gathered in Dublin's Croke Park to watch Cork defeat Down. There was no segregation of supporters, no need for stewards in high-visibility jackets or even police officers. It's a sport without agents or stars driving Ferraris. Moreover, 85 cents out of every euro that the devotees put into the game is reinvested in grassroots clubs. Football is supposed to be the people's game in the UK. But the real "people's sports" are those across the Irish Sea. The Gaelic sports of hurling and Gaelic football represent a real link between people, players and the governing association. Although Gaelic football attracts tens of thousands to its national championship, the players who turn out for Down, Cork and the other 30 counties of Ireland do so on a voluntary basis. A few have formed the Gaelic Players Association in an effort to extract more payments. But the GPA has generally been unsuccessful in creating a professional wage structure. Some stars earn money advertising everything from milk to fertiliser, but the overwhelming majority will turn up for training after a day at the factory or working on the farm. The Gaelic Athletic Association has had many proud achievements of late: the construction of Croke Park stadium, the end of its ban on members of the security forces playing its sports in Northern Ireland, and the generous decision to allow Ireland's national rugby and soccer teams to use its HQ as a temporary home. But the most notable is the survival of its amateur status. Long may it continue.

A voice that links us back to the best of Irish culture

The great Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh stands in quiet defiance against mediocrity, vulgarity and self-regard, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
THERE'S A word that older country people used to use as a term of unqualified approbation: elegant, or to give it its full phonetic due, "iligint".
I always found it striking because of its apparent incongruity. "Elegant" was Audrey Hepburn or drawing rooms, duchesses or Fred Astaire. We confused it with glamour, wealth and – in the narrow, snobbish sense – good taste. But Irish country people used it for a child or a dry stone wall, a cow or a fanciful story. It was meant for something deeper than tasteful opulence. It was a kind of synonym for "grace" in the double sense of that word, incorporating both the physical and the spiritual. It hinted at fineness, rightness, integrity.
Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, who turned 80 last Friday and delivered another display of magisterial mellifluousness on RTÉ on Sunday, is an elegant man. There are people who will say he is "only" an old fellow who commentates on GAA football and hurling matches on the radio. But he's much more than that, much more, even, than one of the finest things that ever has been or ever will be on Irish radio.
He is supremely good at what he does; but more than that, he does it with infinite grace – an innate sense of rightness of what to say and, more importantly, of what not to say. He links us back to the best aspects of an older Irish culture and outfaces the mediocrity, vulgarity and self-regard that replaced it.
There's a simple thing you can always do on a summer Sunday in Ireland, a thing so woven into the texture of life that you barely think about it. You can be washing the dishes, or trying to soak in the rare sunshine or reading the depressing newspapers. And you can turn on the radio and be mesmerised.
The less important the game is (to you at any rate), the more hypnotic an Ó Muircheartaigh commentary becomes. If it's a big match like Dublin and Cork on Sunday, the content gets in the way a little. But in a game between two no-hoper counties in the early stages of the championship, you can just listen to the music. I can't count the number of times I've switched on, discovered that the featured game held no interest for me, went to turn off the radio and found myself carried way out to sea on the riptide of this lilting, dipping, cresting, flow of words.
It used to make me angry that RTÉ had decided, when Mícheál Ó hEithir retired, not to use Ó Muircheartaigh for the TV commentaries. But of course they were right, because, although he's excellent on television, it is radio that is his proper home. This is because, rather than being just a commentator, he is two other, more remarkable, things.
Firstly, Ó Muircheartaigh is a translator. He translates the visible into the audible. You miss this if you can actually see what's happening. He doesn't really describe a game. He transforms its physical rhythms, its ebbs and flows, stops and starts, crises and lulls, into rhythms of speech. He's like a kind of ballet composer in reverse. Where the composer writes music for people to dance to, he takes the dance of a game and writes it as his own kind of mouth music.
And this is the other thing he is – a traditional performer. He is steeped in the culture of Corca Dhuibhne, in the richness of speech that comes from having both Irish and English, in the gliding, swinging motion of a Kerry slide, in the dazzling fluency of the lilters. This isn't just about the verbal facility, or the extraordinary combination of utter distinctiveness and yet complete clarity in his sumptuous accent. It's ultimately about an attitude of deep humility, a concern, not to show off or indulge oneself, but to form a bridge between what must be communicated and the audience to whom it is directed.
The poet Thomas Kinsella wrote of the experience of listening to a great sean nós singer in Corca Dhuibhne: "The song was Casadh an tSúgáin and the singer Jerry Flaherty . . . Nothing intervened between the song and its expression. The singer managed many difficult things, but the result was to focus attention on the song, not on the performance or on the quality of the voice. It was a special voice, adapted (like a reptile or an insect) to its function. Mere beauty of tone would have distracted, attracting attention for its own sake. And the singer's act of communication was thoroughly completed by his audience. They sat erect and listened, lifted their glasses and drank, and murmured phrases of appreciation."
Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh's is that special voice, perfectly adapted to its function of turning movement into sound – the sound of an Irish elegance that somehow survives, and in its own quiet way defies, so much cynicism and betrayal. We can but lift our glass and murmur phrases of deep appreciation.

It looks like Ireland is going to be in recession for a prolonged period that might even match the 1980s for length. Go bhfoire Dia orainn. The 1980s recession could have ended by 1983  if the government had sorted out the fiscal situation on time, according to colm McCarthy of UCD. Instead the misery went on until 1991 through Christy Moore's an ordinary man, self aid, emigration and the re-emergence of Meath as football champions. 

Anything you remember about that recession? We had a neighbour who lost his job in 1982 and never got another one. Will this recession be similar ?   

So. Interesting match. Are Tipp back in full working order ? Which team is likely to go further now that it's sudden death ? 

There should be loads of goals at least .

This was in an article about commuter estates in Ratoath co Dub/Meath today.

"And what really impressed me was the sense of identity, the sense of place, that the Irish have. A lot of it – I discovered much later – was down to the GAA." 

How much of your identifying with where you are from is down to those jerseys? It must be a bigger thing up north where the counties don't mean anything else now.  I think a lot about places in terms of GAA. eg Wicklow may be a very desirable place to put on the makeup and go to the beach in high heels but they are forever shite at football and nothing can take that away,  regardless of the perfume.  Mayo of course has that special link to football. The clinical ruthlessness of the black and amber . Tipp's faded glory. The joy when Derry won their all-Ireland and what it meant.   

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2010/0622/1224273027953.html


"The Kilkenny county board held a single meeting with nothing on the agenda only under-14 hurling in the county. That couldn't happen anywhere else."

Interesting article. The question is where does hurling go from here. Are Kilkenny likely to win say 8 or 9 in a row a la Crossmaglen Rangers in Armagh ? Will anybody else join them or will the sport be dominated by Kilkenny for the next decade?  Is anyone else making the right strides or is it just a case of waiting until Kilkenny run into the sand to pick up an all-Ireland ?

This was in the Irish times today

"Glamorous young mothers were known to buy designer "casuals" for the Brittas season and many wore high heels and full make-up with bikinis on the beach"

WTF? In county wickla ?

I was just reading there about Pat Fox and the Galway hurlers of the 1980s and it got me thinking about teeth. Do hurlers today have more fiacla than  their 1980s predecessors? Some of the hurlers back then were very mantach.  I seem to remember Conor Hayes with a shocking set of teeth.

Can any of you beat this contribution by Sligonian who goes far beyond the call of duty in following his county? Do any of you share this intensity of commitment with other family members?

It took me a while to get to sleep last night, replaying the game in my head as I lay on the pillow. One thing I had nearly forgotten yday, was i missed all last yr due to being away, which broke my continous championship match record of being at everyone since 1989, well 2008 was my last championship and id forgotten how nervous I get before the games, alot of toilet visits. Well when the game started my nerves went thankfully, I didnt really worry at all at our start although my Dad was going ballistic with ref even at that stage, and parents of young children gave out to him for his cursing

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/20/no-game-for-poor-countries

The scale of debt under which many of England's top football clubs now labour (Questions over health of Premier League, Sport, 19 May) is indeed a matter of concern. So too is the number of top-flight football clubs now based offshore. Owners using tax havens have been able to hide the financial meltdown of a number of clubs from view until too late. Stakeholders, club supporters in particular, have been betrayed and the football authorities caught napping.
Christian Aid recently sought to establish the true ownership of every club in the four top English leagues, the Scottish and Welsh Premier leagues and the Irish League in Northern Ireland. We discovered that 14 English Premier League clubs and a further five in the Championship, together with one in League One and two in the Scottish Premier League, were now based offshore.
In the developing world, that same secrecy leads to tax dodging on a truly massive scale. We estimate that every year, the revenue lost to developing countries amounts to $160bn – around one-and-a-half times the size of the international aid budget. If available to use, it could save the lives of some 350,000 children under five every year. Financial secrecy comes at a price. For football fans, it can jeopardise the existence of their clubs. In developing countries, financial secrecy costs lives.
Alex Cobham
Chief policy adviser, Christian Aid

Down's achievement still reverberates down the decades


SEÁN MORAN ON GAELIC GAMES
The county's emergence in the 1960s was a seismic event

IT USED to be a staple of big-match programmes: looking back through the years in convenient, quarter-century intervals. The idea appealed to hard-core nostalgia but its random nature struggled for topicality in football All-Irelands (apart from Kerry who could easily have been in attendance at Croke Park in late September on at least one (if not each) of the highlighted occasions 25, 50, 75 and 100 years previously).
There has been a bit more noise about such anniversaries this year with the golden jubilee of Down's first All-Ireland win being commemorated with gusto. And it's not hard to understand why they were one of those teams who stand out as time relentlessly pushes on, decade by decade.
At a reception held at lunchtime on the Friday of the GAA annual congress, hosted last month in Newcastle, county Down, the 1960 team were celebrated. Guest of honour was President Mary McAleese, for whom this was an evocative event.
For everyone involved in Gaelic games in the six cross-border counties of Ulster, the emergence of that Down team was a seismic occurrence.
Ulster and Connacht were late arrivals to All-Ireland success and for much of the first 50 years of the association's history these triumphs were the preserve of Munster and Leinster counties.
Even when the picture expanded it was left to Cavan to represent Ulster at the higher reaches of the game. Virtually monopolising the  province, Cavan won five All-Irelands in the space of their 20 years at the top, 1933-'52. That must have been encouraging for the nine counties but there was a qualitative difference between developing Gaelic games in the counties across the border and in the southern enclaves of the province.  Former Northern Ireland deputy first minister Séamus Mallon, has often recounted the story of how he accompanied his father to their own county's first All-Ireland, Armagh's agonisingly close encounter with Kerry in 1953. They missed a penalty – as weirdly they would do again in both the finals of 1977 and 2002 although on the latter occasion revenge was sweetly taken against the Kingdom – and lost. According to Mallon, his father hurled his cap to the ground and stamped on it, tears rolling down his face – it was the first time he had ever seen him cry.
Tyrone had a good team in the mid-1950s and Derry actually did beat Kerry in the 1958 semi-final only to fall to Dublin in the final. By the time the 1960s arrived, even Down had lost their first senior All-Ireland semi-final, against Galway. There's nothing new in the theory that the success of Ulster teams in the early 1990s raised the morale of northern nationalists and created the confidence that lent momentum to the peace process. Ironically, given the awful decades that were in store, there was something of that optimism in the air in the early 1960s. The thaw in relations between Stormont and Merrion Street, most vividly evident in the meetings of the respective heads of government Seán Lemass and Terence O'Neill, came just a couple of short years after Down had transformed football with the sheer novelty of their achievements. Mallon has also spoken of the excitement he felt, even as an Armagh man, at the sight of Down bringing record crowds to Croke Park, taking on and humbling the might of Kerry. Suddenly it was as if the whole association was properly integrated by equal access to optimism and ambition.
I remember talking to a hotelier in Down 20 years ago and he remembered motoring as a young man down to Dublin and not just for matches in Croke Park but to attend dances at weekends. The island belonged to everyone. President McAleese touched on this in Newcastle but also at greater length during an interview when she was still Pro-vice chancellor of Queens with Eamonn Rafferty for his book Talking Gaelic – Leading personalities on the GAA.
In this she talked about meeting Seán O'Neill, who 10 years ago was selected on the GAA's Team of the Millennium, at a wedding. "In the 1960s, Seán was one of our heroes, someone who gave shape to the importance of our culture, of winning and feeling good about ourselves. "Those early days of Gaelic football success were the perfect contrast to the culture of suspicion that seemed to envelop the game in the North."  Speaking of Down's 1991 success – in its way as epochal within the game as the 1960 breakthrough in that the Munster-Leinster duopoly had reasserted itself for the previous 23 years – she recalled the impact of that later All-Ireland when the team, complete with local heroes, arrived at the town where she then lived.  "We had won for Rostrevor, won for Down, won for Ireland and won for nationalism. We had gone to Dublin and come back with the Sam Maguire, which every county in Ireland aspires to having and here it was coming up the streets of Rostrevor with big  Liam Austin, smiling from ear to ear along with Pete McGrath." Fifty years ago this coming Friday, Down raised the curtain on their momentous year by defeating Cavan in the NFL final, having disposed of Kerry in the semi-final.
The crowd of 49,451 at Croke Park was a then record – which Down would incrementally raise in the following four years to the 70,126 figure that still stands – for a league final. In the previous two years both Kerry and Dublin had gone on to win the All-Ireland after first winning the league and so the form had to be taken seriously.
Down brought another record crowd, 87,768, to the 1960 All-Ireland and the following year, when retaining the title against Offaly, topped even that with 90,556 – an attendance that has never been equalled.  President McAleese said in Newcastle that she hadn't given up hope of receiving Down as All-Ireland winners at Áras an Uachtaráin at some stage in her tenure, which ends next year.
Fifty years ago her predecessor Eamon de Valera did just that and, according to contemporary reports, reminded the Down footballers he had once been an MP for South Down.
On their way home, the team stopped in the Ballymascanlon Hotel on the Carlingford Road where the Sam Maguire was filled with champagne, something that won't be happening if the last motion passed at the Newcastle congress – to turn cups into colanders so they can't be filled with alcohol – is eventually given effect.
It was cruelly observed at the time that the proponents of this strange proposal, Cavan, may have given up on having the opportunity again to pour anything into the Sam Maguire. But Down probably haven't.