Blue bloods keeping it in the family

All-Ireland SFC Semi-final:The Brogan dynasty are so much part of the Dublin furniture you hardly notice them, writes Tom Humphries

The landscape of Gaelic games in Dublin is a crowded place but some sights are so familiar and recurrent that after a while they scarcely register. There was a juvenile camogie afternoon in Portmarnock in the spring of last year. The Dublin under-14 and under-16 sides played their counterparts from Kilkenny in Leinster championship games.

Laura Brogan was midfield for the Dublin under-14s. Her father, Stephen Brogan, was on the sideline as a county mentor. Aisling Brogan was midfield for the under-16s. Her dad, Ollie Brogan, was on the sideline mentoring the 16s. A towering skyline of uncles and cousins looked on.

Dublin teams and members of the Brogan family are by now so synonymous the phenomenon is commented upon as rarely as, say, the Dublin crest is.

Tomorrow afternoon some time after the final whistle blows in Croke Park there will be a large gathering of vaguely familiar faces on the little concourse behind the Hogan Stand on Jones's Road. The eight Brogan brothers will perform a quick post-mortem on Dublin's performance, good or bad, and a frank analysis of the performance of two of Bernard's sons, Alan and Bernard.

They'll move on, most of them to a family barbecue in Phibsboro for food and more post-mortems. Bernard and his wife, Maria, will maybe wander up to the Sunnybank hotel in Glasnevin, to which the Dublin team will repair after a swim, ice baths and a meal.

The Brogans won't look back any further than the preceding 70 minutes. They won't talk about 30 years ago when Bernard scored one of the most famous of scores, the drilling-for-oil goal into the Hill end to beat Kerry in the greatest game of all time.

Going to games, to the games of nephews and nieces, is the fabric of their lives as a GAA family. Thirty years ago is for other people to remember; now is the time for the next generation.

Back in the 1950s when Jim Brogan and Bridget Gilvarry moved from Mayo to Dublin and Jim became involved in the nascent local club Oliver Plunketts, such a dynasty was scarcely imaginable. Jim was a garda, and the fondest memories of his eight sons and one daughter all centre on childhood Sundays in Croke Park, where often Jim would be on duty.

Jim would scan the crowds outside looking for familiar faces or likely marks to lift one or two of his brood over the stiles. Sunday afternoons were spent scuffing around the grey old precinct of Croker. On big Sunday afternoons half the challenge was just breaching the crust of bodies clogging access routes up the concrete stairways to the terraces or stands.

Funnily, all the kids bought into it. Getting to Croke Park involved passing Dalymount. With respect they never felt much need to visit the church of a different faith. One brother, Ollie, had a wayward period where he asserted his individuality by playing soccer with Kinvara Boys. It wasn't viewed as heresy or an occasion of sin. The slagging revolved around the loudly expressed wonder at why Ollie would want to play a game he was so evidently poor at.

Ollie gave soccer a year or two, made his point and came home to the GAA. The Brogan DNA had Celtic crosses in it when you studied it under a microscope.

The eight boys - Jim, Bernard, Ollie, Kevin, Francis, Benny, Stephen and Aidan - all went to school in St Declan's CBS Cabra. By and large their kids who are old enough and of the right gender go there too: Bernard's three sons, Jim's boys, and so on.

The Brogans wouldn't claim any credit for these things but Plunketts were a junior club in the early '70s and tomorrow they have four on Dublin's first 15. Plunketts would be many people's favourites to win the 2007 Dublin senior football championship.

St Declan's have become a powerhouse school on the Gaelic scene in the city, and from the Dublin senior scene, the two Brogans (Alan and Bernard), Barry Cahill, Graham Norton and Kevin Bonner all attended the school. Something is rubbing off somewhere.

Back when the eight Brogan brothers were active, the age differences separating them and the county involvement of Jim and Bernard (Kevin and Ollie got handfuls of games for Dublin too back in the '70s) meant nobody can remember there being more than five Brogans on a pitch for Plunketts in any one game.

Bernard was the pick of the bunch athletically. An underage international basketball player, a fine high jumper and sprinter, and a fine hurler too. He married a Kerrywoman, Marie Stack-Keane, to whom he had been introduced by Jimmy Deenihan. That was quite a lot to pass on through the genes. His sons have the right make-up and the right history.

Bernard was spotted in 1973 up in the old Plunketts grounds in Kinvara Avenue, off the Navan Road. He was invited to make his Dublin debut against the Combined Universities and marked John O'Keeffe. The stock of Dublin football was so depressingly low at the time that Bernard was underwhelmed by the invitation. It was Kevin Heffernan who was asking, however, and Heffernan never provided a box a player could tick if he meant NO.

Jim had some prior involvement in a blue jersey. He can recall being selected for a trial in Islandbridge back in 1972 and managing to get onto the Dublin junior team that year. They played Louth in Dundalk and then Offaly, a game in which he was replaced at half-time by Alan Larkin.

Taking his place on the sideline he said pointedly to a selector, "But my man didn't touch the ball."

The answer was short and cutting: "Neither did you."

By 1974 they were both on board for the magical mystery tour of the Heffernan era. Bernard was shaping to be the team's full forward but twisted his left leg at Christmas. He came back in time to play as full forward in the championship against Wexford but was surprised to have to make way the next day to permit the return of a portly full forward from St Vincent's called Jimmy Keaveney. For the next six years the Dublin number 14 jersey was Keaveney-shaped.

Bernard's athleticism found another outlet. He came back in and played against Offaly in the Leinster semi-final but twisted his right knee that day. The cartilage operation required a two-week stay in hospital, weeks in plaster, and then a nine-month lay-off for rehab (Bernard's son Alan had the same operation a few years ago: keyhole surgery; in and out the same day. Nothing makes a man feel old in quite the same way as progress does.)

Bernard and Jim were on the podium in 1974 when the final whistle went. Bernard's progress would be more relentless thereafter. He played on Pat McCarthy in the 1975 final against Kerry and was taken off as Kerry won.

The following year he played on McCarthy again. That day the Kerryman was taken off. Bernard went home with a winner's medal.

By then the Dubs were a phenomenon, as they have remained to this day. Bernard and Jim remember their brother Ollie for instance coming to Croke Park wearing a big flag, which he used to tie around his head, and a Dublin shawl around his shoulders.

A couple of years ago when a friend, Brian Connick, died they were surprised when talking to Ollie to learn he could remember not just every game from the era, but where he sat or stood at each game and who he was with. A short few years on, with Alan and Bernard public property, they are starting to know a little of that experience.

If a Brogan makes a mistake on the field tomorrow their father and his seven brothers scattered around the stands will hear the criticism vented with varying amounts of spleen. The men will play every ball the boys play, feel for them every time they make a mistake, pump their fists every time they achieve.

"It's a tense time," says Jim Brogan, "far more for those of us watching the game than for the lads playing it."

That tension is something they live with. Early this summer the clan gathered in Parnell Park for another landmark evening in their history. First a little background.

Oliver Plunketts live almost cheek by jowl with neighbours and rivals St Brigid's. In recent years Brigid's have exploded. They have a county senior title, a full-sized artificial pitch and good grounds to call their own.

Plunketts, despite the incredible energy of their club, still depend on Corporation pitches. Jim's son James went to primary school in Scoil Bhríde, Blanchardstown, and was part of an incredibly successful set-up there; the school played in eight Croke Park finals in hurling and football in four years. Having experienced playing against his friends and classmates a couple of times he decided he wanted to switch from Plunketts to Brigid's.

It was a huge decision for a boy to make but Jim and his wife, Aileen, decided the decision was their son's; he wasn't to be burdened by the family history. There was disappointment in the club that they didn't intervene but James and then his brother, Phillip, moved to St Brigid's. Jim started mentoring his boys' teams and they spent 10 happy years with the local rivals.

Time passed though and Alan Brogan and Bernard Brogan and their brother Paul were all playing senior with Plunketts. Last year James (who had a successful underage career in the sky blue) and his brother Phillip realised the thickness of blood surpassed water. They transferred home to play with their cousins.

And so this summer, almost inevitably under the circumstances, Oliver Plunketts drew St Brigid's in the second round of the Dublin senior championship. Another of the injuries which have hampered James's enormous potential kept him out that night, but Phillip, a late developer but now a fine goalkeeper at 19 years of age, played in goal. His cousins Alan and Bernard played in the forwards and their brother Paul, whose excellence and flinty competitiveness must surely soon be rewarded with a Dublin call-up, played wing back.

Plunketts won. Grown men cried. The Brogan brothers, sitting in little knots in the stand in Parnell Park, embraced and left quietly.

That's their style. Without dominating the landscape of Dublin GAA they are part of it, integrally and necessarily. Jim's daughter Caroline has played underage football for Dublin; three of her cousins have played camogie in the sky blue; her brother James has played county underage; and Phillip has the potential still to do the same.

The story keeps rolling on and spreading out. The eight brothers have become scattered geographically and are involved in clubs as far apart as Raheny and Lucan. There are Brogans still being born and still being enrolled in mini-leagues.

Back in the summer of 1977 Bernard scored a goal which 30 years later still hasn't been forgotten. His professional life as an engineer saw him mix stints living in Cork (one year, training with Dolphin and Nemo), London (six months, training with Hitchen rugby club) and Kilkenny (commuting to Parnell Park) with a serious career as a Dublin footballer.

That summer he had been working in New Ross on the building of a rig to operate in the Kinsale gas field. For the final phase of testing the rig was moved to France. Bernard went with it. He missed the Leinster final but got free for the defining game of the era, that All-Ireland semi-final with Kerry.

In that stunning crescendo to an incredible game he was fed by Tony Hanahoe as he came loping through from the middle and Micheál O'Hehir ensured his immortality by noting that Bernard Brogan, who had been drilling for oil, was now in Croke Park drilling for goals. And the net rippled.

It was a key moment in GAA history. The defeat girded Kerry to become the greatest team of all time over the next decade or so. The victory, Dublin's last over Kerry in championship football, was the pinnacle for the game in the capital.

Bernard Brogan could have fed himself for a lifetime on that goal, varnishing the story of it. Instead he stepped back into the lifetime of enjoyment that the game brings. He played football with Plunketts for another 13 years and often tells with quiet bemusement the story of his final involvement with the Dubs.

Still a young man, he was asked back to the fold for the league of 1983/1984 to finish his career where it had started, as a full forward. He played three games before getting creased against Kildare. He was carried off unconscious and taken to Blanchardstown Hospital.

He was well tended there and when he was leaving he gave the nurse the Dublin jersey he had been wearing when admitted. He never heard anything again from the Dublin set-up except to get an exasperated couple of calls looking for the jersey back.

Years later his brother Jim, continuing a lifetime of quiet service to the sky blue, had become a selector for the Dublin senior footballers in 1990. The following year Bernard was carrying his young son Alan on his shoulders out of Croke Park after a Dublin game and was approached by a man who asked if he wasn't Bernard Brogan. He said that he was and expected to hear another tale about what the drilling-for-oil score meant to yet another Dub.

Instead the man said he had Bernard Brogan's last Dublin jersey - a nurse who had moved to Australia had given it to him. "Well," grinned Bernard, "if you have it the county board are looking for it."

Typical not to enlarge the moment into an occasion for self-glorification. The family trait has been passed on. Alan has been part of Dublin set-ups since his early teens, when he was sucked into the first wave of Dublin development squads. He has been an integral part of Dublin football all the way up through the grades. Very few Dublin supporters have even heard him speak.

"For us Brogans," says Jim, "in terms of our cultural or social activities, whatever you would call it, our fun, the GAA is the heart of it all. You couldn't measure what we have got out of that. It has been fantastic.

"Great for us in every sense. Everybody in the family supports everybody and attends their games, big games and small games, school games, club games, county games. It has given us so much."

What the GAA has gotten back is never mentioned, much less audited.