No way back for Tipperary and Kilkenny

Some people in Tipperary remember it quite vividly. Seamus J King, the hurling historian and broadcaster, says that he was talking to such a person. "He remembers it well. What they did when slaughtering was dig a pit and there were no mechanical diggers then, it was all done by manual labour. They built a ramp into the pit and drove the cattle down into it. Then they shot them in the pit and covered the carcasses with lime and buried them. There was no burning."

Viewed from our current tremulous perspective, the wonder about the 1941 epidemic of foot-and-mouth is that it left so few traces. According to King, local newspapers gave it comparatively scant coverage. Even now, it's hard to come across references in general history books to the eight-month outbreak and whereas there was a specific relevance to the GAA's championship, it looks extremely localised compared to the sense of national emergency this weekend.

First identified in February 1941, the disease was largely concentrated in south Leinster and Munster, leading to the slaughter of between 21,000 and 24,000 animals, and most seriously affected Kilkenny, Carlow, and parts of Laois and Tipperary. This obviously threatened an important part of hurling's prime territory and, in the end, it was Kilkenny and Tipperary who suffered most - both being withdrawn before the championship ended.

Yet, earlier in the year, the games proceeded. On St Patrick's Day, Leinster beat Munster in the Railway Cup final. Kilkenny backboned the winning Leinster team and Tipperary was represented on the Munster side. Tipp were even to play in the summer's championship, but never got to finish it.

Apart from Tipperary's withdrawal, the football championship was hardly affected at all.

Compared to today, there were obvious environmental factors helping contain the epidemic. War-time travelling restrictions were in force and private motoring was virtually unknown. Buses, trains and taxis, where available, and bicycles were the primary means of transport and, as a result, there was no major movement of population and consequently the dangers of the disease spreading were much reduced.

Despite the obvious difficulties hanging over a county that had done little hurling since March, Tipperary were due to play neighbours Waterford on June 1st. Plans were, however, quickly thrown into disarray on all fronts. Tipperary secretary Johnny Leahy announced that there would be no trains to Thurles for the match because of war-time fuel rationing. In the week before the fixture, there were 41 outbreaks of foot-and-mouth in Ballingarry in South Tipperary. The Waterford match was postponed until the end of July and won comfortably by Tipperary.

"The disruption was more in the south of the county than in the north," according to King. "This also helps explain why the Tipperary footballers conceded a walkover to Clare."

Cork awaited Tipperary in the hurling semi-final, while Limerick had already reached the Munster final by beating Clare. Cork were then on the brink of the only four-in-a-row hurling All-Irelands in history. The first in that sequence was to be controversial. Scheduled for August 17th, the Cork-Tipp match was dramatically called off when the Department of Agriculture forbade Tipperary to travel. "It wasn't just that match," says King, "but all the club activity within the county as well."

The Central Council of the GAA now had a dilemma. Already Kilkenny - in many people's eyes favourites for that year's All-Ireland - had been hit by the epidemic. Despite being granted a bye to the provincial final by the Leinster Council, Kilkenny were prohibited from playing Dublin unless a clear three weeks had passed since the last outbreak. It was a condition the county couldn't meet.

Apprehensive that the All-Ireland would never get played, Central Council turned down a request from Tipperary for a postponement and ordered that Leinster and Munster nominate their representatives. In the event of either winning, they were to be recognised as All-Ireland champions. Dublin was the clear choice in Leinster, but Munster decided to offer its nomination to the winners of a specially convened match between Cork and Limerick. On September 14th, Cork flattened the All-Ireland champions Limerick - minus it has to be said the Mackey brothers - 8-10 to 3-2.

There was no way back for Tipp and Kilkenny. The rest was perfunctory. Dublin edged out Galway in the All-Ireland semi-final before going down heavily to Cork in the final.

Yet the business of the season wasn't complete. In October the epidemic was deemed to have run its course. At the end of the month, Cork and Tipperary were scheduled to play their postponed Munster final. On October 26th in Limerick, the newly-crowned All-Ireland champions were thrashed by Tipperary. According to King, there weren't really any hard feelings in Tipperary at the aborted season. "They just got on with it," he says.

Cork and Munster GAA historian Jim Cronin believes that the postponed provincial final gave Tipperary a certain amount of slagging rights. "They wouldn't have let Cork forget it that easily," he says, "but it was mainly banter." There remains to this day, however, scepticism about how seriously Cork took the re-arranged Munster final. "No one can prove it either way," says Cronin, "but Cork would say that they weren't as keen to win it as Tipperary. And a few weeks later in the Thomond Tournament (for Munster hurling counties) - which was a big thing in those days - Cork introduced some new players and won the tournament well. It was really the first sign of a number of young players who were to feature in the All-Ireland wins which followed, people like Sean Condon and Con Murphy (future president of the GAA)."

Paddy Downey, this newspaper's former GAA correspondent, has heard direct evidence concerning the 1941 Munster final. "I later interviewed a few people in Cork like Jack Barrett and Jack Lynch. They said that on the way to the match, Cork players stopped off in pubs to drink. They were all travelling in different cars. There was one particular place in Croom where they were supposed to have called. I'm not sure if that's the match in which Jack Lynch said they remembered seeing three balls, but a number of them had drink taken. There was certainly an imbalance of motivation between Cork and Tipperary."

If Cork were in the process of launching an era of unparalleled achievement - having whacked the reigning All-Ireland champions, taken their crown and about to win three more in succession - Kilkenny were coming to the end of their cycle. All-Ireland winners in 1939, finalists in 1940 and favourites in '41, they weren't to win another for a further six years by which stage most of the team had changed. In November 1941, Kilkenny were beaten in the delayed Leinster final as Dublin saved the authorities further embarrassment.

Jimmy Phelan, whose goals had helped win the 1939 Thunder and Lightning final against Cork, feels to this day that the foot-and-mouth epidemic hastened Kilkenny's decline. "There was no hurling in Kilkenny that year because of restrictions.

For Phelan himself, the situation was particularly difficult, as he had been living in Carlow working with the Sugar Company since 1937. "When the restrictions got worse," he recalls, "the only way of travelling was on a bicycle."

The year of enforced idleness was the last straw for him. Although only in his mid-20s, he retired from hurling altogether. "I gave it up in '41. I'd no facility of getting down to training and I couldn't keep up the cycling there and back and there was no hurling in Carlow."

He has no regrets about the circumstances of his premature departure. "Nothing was on our minds but the foot-and-mouth scare. Everything else was secondary. And it was different to today. There wasn't as much movement of people and no way of moving animals except driving them along the road."

The 1941 epidemic came and went. In his definitive history of the GAA, Marcus de Burca passed this judgement: "It was almost two years before the war made any major impact on the GAA. Even then a serious cattle disease had a temporarily more disruptive effect on the events run by the GAA than the war had."