Massive Mayo diaspora ready to celebrate if west awakes

Emigration is a thread that runs through Mayo life and therefore through Mayo football, writes KEITH DUGGAN

It was named for the hundreds of people who left the small townland on the shores of Lough Mask when there was no work to be had.

If the bronze statue in Kiltimagh of a suited man carrying his case and walking towards the train station is the most eloquent salute to the thousands who have departed Mayo down the decades, then Tourmakeady is one of the places most associated with leaving.

Just as the Achill Islanders gravitated towards Cleveland, Chicago was a natural calling point for Tourmakeady families.

In 1981, Tourmakeady made a rare impact on the county football scene by winning the under-16 B championship. But by the time that team reached the under-21 grade, nine of that side had left. The connection was so strong that the club did two tours of Chicago, in 1979 and 1986: when they arrived in O’Hare airport for the second tour, a greeting party of 500 awaited them.

Emigration, put simply, is a thread that runs through Mayo life and therefore through Mayo football. Few bona fide football counties have a narrative arc as clear and dramatic as Mayo.

With Mayo, it is always either the best of times or the worst of times. Average seasons rarely visit there. After the first All-Ireland title of 1936, Mayo established itself as a marvellously consistent football county, and it was the six league titles between 1933 and 1939 (Mayo opted out of the league in 1940 as a mark of respect to their midfielder Patsy Flannery who was killed in a hunting accident. They won it when they returned to action in 1941), as well as the consecutive All-Ireland titles of 1950 and 1951, that created the yearning in later decades for a return to glittering pre-eminence.

For most of the 1960s, several strong Mayo teams were locked in Connacht by the brilliance of the Galway three-in-a-row team.

The 1970s witnessed a series of mishaps and Mayo went from 1967 to 1981 without winning a single provincial title. So the 1980s was a decade of tentative rebuilding against the familiar backdrop of the economic recession and emigration.

First came the All-Ireland semi-final and replay against Dublin in 1985, occasions of huge significance because they once again placed a Mayo football team in the theatre with an establishment team. But when John O’Mahony set out to win an All-Ireland title in 1989, emigration and absent players played a major part in the story.

To begin with, he was missing the player who should have been the natural playmaker of that team. Ger Geraghty from Ballintubber had played centre forward for O’Mahony on the Mayo under-21 team in 1983.

Like many young men, Geraghty headed to America the following year – to Chicago of course.

He was still in O’Mahony’s mind six years later and when Peter Ford, Mayo’s redoubtable full back, returned from a few weeks in the Windy City reporting that Geraghty was still playing scintillating football on the shores of Lake Michigan, O’Mahony was intrigued.

In January 1989, Geraghty phoned to say he was thinking of coming back. “And then,” O’Mahony would recall, “he met a girl who would become his future wife. That put the kibosh on it.”