We gathered in Carlingford for the funeral. Seamie was my uncle and godfather, my late dad’s brother. They were separated by 14 months and looked alike, although Seamie kept his hair for longer. He left Monaghan in the mid-1970s, joined the Gardaí and pitched up in the greenbrown folds and hillocks around the foot of the Cooley mountains. He did 30 years in uniform and then he retired to do everything else.
He worked for An Post. He drove a van for LMFM. He was a director of the Credit Union. He took teams with Cooley Kickhams and was treasurer of Glenmore Athletics Club and sat on committees and did his bit in the parish and kept a few hens and lived a life. Cancer came and colonised his last 4½ years, as cancer will. He warned my cousin against a eulogy, on the basis that he “didn’t want anybody up there talking shite”.
We waked him at the house. In my teens, I used to decamp there for a couple of weeks in the summer to hang with my cousins. The field where we played headers and volleys during the 1994 World Cup was a makeshift car park for the week. I looked over the wall on Monday and remembered diving headlong one time and shouting AMUNIKE! as I met one perfectly. Google him. Mine was exactly like that.
The crowds came and came. From all around, from the back of beyond. Though Seamie left Emyvale in his 20s, it never left him. And so there was a Monaghan crowd to go with the Louth crowd and an Everywhere Else crowd mixed in. We stood and took tea and smalltalked about the disappointment of the rugby and the sadness of Stephen Kenny.
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Eventually, fellas started telling the sorts of stories where they’d be careful to take a look over both shoulders first. One uncle told me about a game my dad played in the 1980s for St Davnet’s, the psychiatric hospital in Monaghan where he was a nurse. They got to a couple of All-Ireland finals in the Psychiatric Hospital League – yes, it was a thing. Not only was it a thing but the finals were often played in Croke Park.
Anyway, in this yarn there was this one game where St Davnet’s were under the cosh and the men on the sideline decided something had to be done. So at a break in the action, they snuck on an extra player. They were rumbled before long, whereupon the referee came over and informed management they had one too many on the field. “Ah, don’t pass any remarks on that gossoon,” came the reply. “He’s one of the patients.”
On and on we went. Old games, old stories. A cousin of Seamie’s buttonholed me at one stage and brought up a question that had been percolating since my dad’s funeral in 2016. “Did you ever find out why Ollie played a few games for Scotstown?” Dad played for Emyvale and Monaghan Harps but seemingly moonlighted for Scotstown for a while in the mid-1970s and nobody could come up with any good reason why or how it might have happened.
One of my aunts thought it had something to do with a lack of an under-21 team somewhere along the way but that didn’t sound right. She did remember the two brothers playing a game against one another though, Seamie for Emyvale, Dad for Scotstown. “The Jack McCarron of his day,” cracked one of the cousins.
Poor Jack. He plays in his first Monaghan county final this weekend, having transferred to Scotstown over the winter from his boyhood club Currin. Scotstown are playing in their 11th successive senior final, Currin won one game out of five in the junior championship. By moving across, he has essentially climbed a ladder from the bottom row on the board right to the very top. Fair to say it has not gone down well.
Currin objected to the transfer but got nowhere with it. McCarron was able to switch clubs because his father, the stylish former All-Star forward Ray, was a Scotstown player in the 1980s. Jack doesn’t live in the catchment area – he doesn’t actually live in the county, come to that – but he has family there and Monaghan is one of the few counties with a bylaw allowing a strong family connection to be enough for a switch.
And so, even though this is a player who has been an All-Star nominee himself for the past two seasons because of his displays for the county, McCarron has endured a fairly torrid year among Monaghan people. Wisecracks at funerals would be the least of it. Famously a county of few clubs, it’s also a county of predominantly small clubs. To go from one of the very smallest to basically the only superclub hasn’t sat well.
Thing is, nobody knows for sure why he made the move. Everybody has their own theory but McCarron has kept his counsel. It might well be Occam’s Razor – a simple case of him wanting to win a county medal. For all their recent dominance in Monaghan, Scotstown have a fairly wretched record in the Ulster club championship so maybe that’s in the mix as well.
Maybe he lives too far away now and was always going to move and it was just a question of where he’d land. Or maybe, somewhere at the back of it all, he fancied playing for his dad’s club. Naive and soppy of me to go there, maybe. But it was that kind of week.
Fathers and sons. Cousins and uncles. Everything gets layered on top of everything. The generations turn over and over until one day you’re standing at a wake laughing about a match that happened the best part of 50 years ago and imagining them going at it. And, most of all, wishing they were still here to tell the story themselves.
Sleep well, Seamie. Sorry for the shite-talk.
