What’s the story, Ruairí? – An Irishwoman’s Diary on sport and history in the Glens of Antrim

For the rural convert to urban living, there are few things more heartwarming that the little boy going about his business in a small village with one hand clutching a clearly precious hurl.

Cushendall in Co Antrim provided ample such sights a short while ago, when the boys (wee boys might be more appropriate in this context) in question were still coming down from the high of seeing their team make it to their first All-Ireland club final in Croke Park on St Patrick’s Day. The Ruairí Ógs lost handsomely to Limerick’s Na Piarsaigh on the big stage, but it seems they weren’t entirely defeated, with the endless supply of hurling boys in the playground, on the corner by the Curfew Tower and just generally around and about, proving how a successful local GAA club carries much further than the pitch.

As any good GAA fan will know though, it does not travel beyond parish borders – one Cushendall resident joked that she was not too upset about the Ruairís’ defeat because she was, after all, from Glenariff – a whole two miles away.

The Ruairís

The website for the Ruairís carries a suitably triumphant picture of the team, with the backdrop of Lurigethan – one of the many misty, mountainy views that haunt this often other-worldly part of Ireland. It also includes an out-of-date notice about bus tickets to Dublin for the big match, which could be paid for at Kearney’s butchers, a fantastically shipshape family business carrying the original sign “D Kearney Flesher” on Cushendall’s Mill Street, the main thoroughfare.

Apparently, the news that Kearney’s was closing for the day of the All-Ireland was almost as big in Cushendall as the Ruairís reaching the final – the business is known for taking only two days off each year, at Christmas, with even family weddings not getting the treatment lavished on the team for their first outing to the final.

Proof of this commitment to the trade incidentally came during your correspondent’s visit, when an attempt was made to purchase dinner just as the shop was closing and, rather than being turned away, we were warmly invited in after a small bit of fact-checking: “Have ye money in your pocket? Then we’re open.” It was another little reminder that we weren’t in the Kansas of the capital any more.

The Glens (only a stranger would spell out “The Glens of Antrim”) do seem about as far from anywhere else as you can get in Ireland, despite lying just an hour from Belfast and three hours from Dublin (or possibly longer on a supporters’ bus). Even the surnames around here – McFetridge, McSparran, McQuillan – have a rough, guttural romance to them, especially when delivered in the raw purity of Glens accent.

This area of nine glacial glens was one of the last Irish-speaking parts of Ulster, probably because of its relative geographical remoteness until the Antrim Coast Road was built in the 1840s, and was thus fertile ground for the Gaelic Revival as the 19th century was in its dying years. In 1904, around the time of the GAA’s 20th birthday, the area hosted the inaugural and arguably revolutionary Feis na nGleann – a grand event aimed at fostering cultural rebirth in what should have been a natural home for all things Irish. It continues today.

An important driver of that first Feis was Glenarm native and Irish Volunteers founder Eoin MacNeill, who was old enough to remember Irish habitually being spoken in the area. The day featured 200 Irish speakers from nearby Rathlin Island, who arrived on a boat that had been paid for by another man of the Easter Rising with strong Glens roots, Roger Casement. By now as fierce an Irish nationalist as any man, Casement acted as umpire at a hurling match that was played on the beach as part of the Feis and won by the Carey Faughs. He is also said to have personally manned a scythe to clear of thistles the only field available to the Feis organisers in this time of unfriendly landlords.

In many ways, Casement was a local, having been nurtured by an uncle in Ballycastle after the death of his parents as a child, and attended school in nearby Ballymena. He was as seduced by the Glens as any man, writing in Autumn Day in Glenariff of how the sea there "could no more /Of stillness offer save in death".

Casement

Before he was hanged at Pentonville Prison in August 1916, Casement said he did not want his bones to remain in England, urging instead that he would be buried at the exquisite Murlough Bay, arguably the grandest spot in all of the Glens. Diplomatic and other troubles intervened however, and when his remains were eventually exhumed from the prison 50 years after his death, they were reinterred not in his beloved Glens, but in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery .

Murlough Bay features something of a memorial to this local hero, but a better one for Ruairí Mac Easmainn might be found these days on the streets of Cushendall, where the wee Irish boys with hurls in their hands roam freely.