Continuing story of stubborn resistance

All-Ireland SFC Qualifiers/Leitrim v Meath: No football people gripe less about hardships than the faithful in Leitrim, the place where it is most extreme. Eleven years have passed since Leitrim's crowning as Connacht champions. It was that year's story of enchantment, and the football fraternity delighted in seeing the dark county finally, after 67 years of waiting, enjoying its day in the sun.

Football has changed inordinately in that last decade, but the west's smallest county has clung stubbornly to its place in the foothills of respectability, a hardy plant in unforgiving soil.

Although sharing a spiritual kinship with Galway and Mayo, Leitrim football teams have been cuffed about the head by both those vast and ambitious counties more often than they care to remember. Connacht football has always been a macho power struggle between the muscular counties of the west and it was almost inevitable Leitrim would get caught in the crossfire at some juncture.

Of the 100 Connacht championship matches Leitrim played in the 20th century, they won 28, defeating Galway four times and Mayo three.

Population, ambition, and tradition: all were stacked against Leitrim. But it was mostly down to the bald fact of population. Except during those miraculous combinations of genes and effort and organisation that enable the smallest county to field an optimum team, but even then the odds were frequently too great.

"Aah, '58," groans Michael McGowan when asked about how close he came in a Leitrim shirt. The Kinlough man had spent the day - Tuesday, burning hot and heaven sent - helping bale his brother's field, and the afterglow of the heat and outdoors made those youthful games seem freshly played.

"I can still see Seán Purcell winning a pair of frees late in the game and tapping them over. Seán was a wonderful player and maybe was a fine actor too because he got those frees very cleverly. It was experience and know-how.

"We had a very good Leitrim team then but we were unlucky in that Galway were exceptional. They went on to win the three All-Irelands in a row but they beat us in two of those years and I think we gave them as tough a game as any team."

McGOWAN WAS a dedicated football man, both as principal at the De La Salle Brothers school in Ballyshannon and at home in Kinlough, the northernmost town in the county. He has served at virtually every administrative level and it was during his time as minor manager that Colin Regan, a youngster from his home town, began to make an impression.

A regular on the Leitrim senior team since 1998, Regan set out on Tuesday evening for training in Carrick-on-Shannon, a 210-mile round trip from his workplace in Letterkenny, and considered what it means to be a Leitrim player - and person.

"The most frequent thing I heard when I went to Dublin to college was, 'you're the first Leitrim person I ever met'," he laughs. "It was a common and genuine reaction. I found it understandable because I was the 11th in a family of 12 and by the time I left school, they were scattered all over the world. So you could see how we would be regarded as a rarity in our own country."

As his family was Church of Ireland, Regan attended secondary school in the Royal and Prior in Raphoe, a hockey school. Nonetheless, he was talented enough at the native game to play county minor for two years with Leitrim before graduating to the senior grade.

He attributes his relative lack of concern for Leitrim football's historical oppression to the relative detachment of his school years and the fact he grew up along Leitrim's tiny but spectacular stretch of coastline.

EVEN WHEN the county team enjoyed a renaissance under PJ Carroll in the early 1990s, he felt it was regarded locally as a south-Leitrim concern. Only when Melvin Gaels of Kinlough won the county championship of 1998, its first since 1965, leading to the promotion of five members to the county team, did Regan feel as if it that north/south distinction had been bridged.

Since he made his debut, though, Leitrim football has dominated Regan's life.

"I first came into the panel under Johnno (John O'Mahony), which was a great experience, but ended up making my debut against his Galway team. And we had a reasonably successful league; we had gained promotion and felt ready.

"Then Galway gave us this unmerciful walloping. I certainly didn't see it coming. I was walking off the field in a daze. It was the beginning of a difficult time for us.

"I think Peter McGinnity, who was doing a fine job, got a bit of a raw deal. Maybe some of the more senior lads in the panel didn't fully get him.

"Then Shane McGettigan tragically died out in Boston. Shane was a great friend of mine, and in a small county like ours it was an awful blow. I remember shortly after that we actually headed up to Donegal to play a relegation game and we had no manager.

"We have had peaks and troughs since. Joe Reynolds took us to a Connacht final - which I missed myself because of suspension. Then I headed out to the States for a couple of years to work with the Irish Voice newspaper and you would hear mixed reports about how things were going.

"When I came back, Declan Rowley was there and he had us in excellent shape. There was none of the stereotypical training with Declan; it was all imaginative, new stuff. And we pushed Roscommon twice in the championship, but maybe we lacked that bit of confidence.

"And that is where Des Dolan has been brilliant for us. I mean, no one will ever accuse Des of lacking confidence."

In a way, Regan's experiences mirror those of Packie McGarty, one of Leitrim's most respected footballers, a hero and eventually a team-mate of Michael McGowan's. McGarty grew up in Mohill but employment with the ESB took him to north Donegal and soon after to London, from where he would fly weekly to play for Leitrim.

That his native county were fated to draw Meath in tomorrow's tantalising qualifier in Carrick-on-Shannon pleased him greatly, because it was his vintage that last met Meath on a regular basis.

"Petrol was scarce so the league was organised in a way to avoid teams having to travel so far. I enjoyed playing Meath. They were tough, honest boys back then as well and clever too. Peter McDermott was managing them and that is a bright man.

"One time we played them and McDermott was trying out a new fella in the forwards. So he was talking to Tony McGowan before the game and was asking him all about the boy we had marking him. He needed to know the quality of the opposition before he would evaluate his own player. He was a shrewd operator."

Leitrim regularly had the measure of Meath in those years - in 1969 they were league semi-finalists - but in McGarty's own verdict, "we won nothing when it came down to it".

When he returned from London, McGarty bought a shop in Clondalkin and ran it for over 30 years. He met as many Mohill men in London and Dublin as he ever did at home, something that was a sad but accepted fact about his native county.

LEITRIM'S POPULATION and emigration trends meant strong clubs could go quiet overnight and stay like that. Aughawillan, a parish with just a couple of hundred people, were kingpins in the 1990s. Tommy Moran, a long-serving county officer, remembers his home club in Ballinamore reeling in county championships but their last came in 1990.

"It was always hard to hold on to players. Life took them elsewhere."

But. Leitrim has not been left untouched by the building phenomenon that has transformed rural Ireland in the last 10 years. The phenomenal beauty of the county is no longer a secret and companies like MBNA are bringing outsiders to the main hub of Carrick.

Even Kinlough has seen huge expansion over the last five years and has started to enjoy success in the county underage competitions. Michael McGowan revealed that Melvin Gaels have an Austrian youngster named Tomas Ferrari, surelythe subject of future bon mots from Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh. All over the county, houses are going up.

"I sometimes wonder when people are going to start living in them though," laughs Tommy Moran. "But hopefully, more people will begin to move in here."

As Colin Regan has it, the spectacular vistas around Glenade and the Horseshoe mountains have become "a little Bohemia for artists of all kinds".

It is not certain if a future Packie McGarty will emerge from that community but the point is, more people are moving back. Practically all of Reagan's family have relocated to the county.

There is no doubt the busiest place in Leitrim tomorrow will be Seán McDermott Park.

Meath have reason to be grateful to the quiet county anyway. Seán Boylan's mother came from Aughavas and Colm O'Rourke was, of course, a Leitrim man by birth.

Packie McGarty will be back on the old sod but has to confess that several of his grand-daughters, neighbours of Boylan's out in Dunboyne, will be wearing Royal jerseys.

"As long as it is all green and gold, I don't mind" he says.

OUT OF CONNACHT, Leitrim nonetheless face into their latest championship occasion as raging underdogs, a tag that has loyally followed Leitrim men down the generations. It is of no consequence. For people like Tommy Moran, who remember the rife pessimism that permeated the county in the late 1970s, when light and life was steadily draining away, let alone football, there is a lot more to be optimistic about.

This is Leitrim's third championship game of the year and, encouragingly, they stayed biting at Galway's heels all the way three weeks ago.

The visit of Meath, one of the great football counties of the modern era, into Seán McDermott Park - perhaps the most pleasant country ground in Ireland - is a cause for celebration itself. It is what the qualifiers are about. Winning remains a tall order, but this week, with the sun warming the county, anything seems possible.

"We have some nice young players now," says Michael McGowan. "And you know what I like about them? They are stubborn."

After everything, they are surely that. If it weren't for stubbornness, Leitrim football would have disappeared years ago.