If you’re suffering from the January blues this week, get yourself down to west Kerry as quick as you can. You’re back at work and the kids are back in school and you’re moaning and groaning because Christmas is over. Stop. You’re doing it wrong. The decorations are still up where we come from.
Our club An Ghaeltacht are heading to Croke Park on Sunday for the All-Ireland intermediate final. The following week, it will be Dingle’s turn, our best friends and sworn enemies who have made it to the senior final. Two clubs five miles apart, both in All-Ireland finals a week after each other. That can’t have happened too many times before.
The tit-for-tat messing between the two clubs has been on the go forever. Every club has a few ultras about the place, the sort of lads you can’t really defend in polite society. Back in September, when we were on our way to the Kerry final against Fossa, a few of ours decided to have a bit of fun with a few of theirs.
That was how one of the biggest Dingle supporters around woke up one morning with a Gaeltacht flag planted in his garden for all to see. And a few others started appearing around the place too, including in front of Páirc an Ághsaigh, Dingle’s home ground.
Now, obviously there’d have to be retaliation. That sort of carry-on couldn’t be let go. Nobody knew where or how or what form it would take. In fairness to the Dingle lads, they put a bit of work into it – they somehow managed to get a flag up high on our goalposts in Gallarus in the dead of night. We had to respect the effort. Not that you’d ever say it out loud.
In west Kerry, you could say we basically have four strands to our identity. We have the scenery, we have the language, we have the traditional music and we have football. There’s a wildness to all four of them and we’re very proud of that. It’s in our DNA. Whether you’re in Dingle or Ventry or Lispole or anywhere else back west, some or all of it feeds into how people think of themselves.
That’s what has made this whole thing such an enjoyable way to pass the winter. We like to say in An Ghaeltacht that when you come down to our pitch, you’re in the last club before you hit New York. That’s how remote we are, away out on the tip of the last toenail on the map. For us to get to Croke Park is dream stuff. And sure isn’t it great for Dingle to be tagging along for the ride?
We were all below in Páirc Uí Chaoimh last Saturday for the semi-finals. The drama in both games was off the scale. We were lucky enough to rob the game against Sallins, Dingle maybe even more so against Ballyboden. The big thing that was in Dingle’s favour was that club games are only 30 minutes a half. I think if that first half had been 35 minutes, Boden would have been away and gone.
But we’re both still alive and both on a high that you’d nearly have to be in the middle of to get a proper sense of. An adventure like this only comes around once in a generation for small clubs like ours. We know how fleeting these things are – you have to take this chance when it comes around.
Put it this way. If a big professional Aussie Rules business like Geelong Cats can be made see how much it means to Mark O’Connor to win an All-Ireland with Dingle, that tells you how badly he and the rest of them want it to happen. They know well that it could be decades before they’re back here. They only have to look out the road to our club for proof of that.
I’m not a big man for regrets. I know that I was very lucky in my career. But even at the time, I knew that losing our All-Ireland club final against Caltra in 2004 would stay with me. We had beaten St Brigid’s of Dublin in the semi-final and it felt like the stars had aligned, which is the only way it can happen for a small club.
We had a good team but we knew it couldn’t last forever. It was the usual story – a few of us came through around the same time and we started making our way through the ranks. I was in school with Dara Ó Cinnéide, Tomás was in the same class as Aodán Mac Gearailt, Marc was a few years behind us. We had quality throughout the team; most of the other lads would have played for Kerry at one level or another.
An Ghaeltacht always had a tradition of football and would have been well represented on successful Kerry teams down the years. It went back to the likes of Batt Garvey in the 1940s, Tom Long and Micheál Ó Sé in the 60s, and then Páidí, of course, through the 70s and 80s. But our club had never won a senior county title.
We wanted to change that. We won the intermediate title in 1998, and got to a senior final in 2000, where Dr Crokes beat us by a point. But we came back and won it in 2001, beating the Stacks in the final. It was our first county title – and we celebrated like it was our first county title. Nemo beat us by a point in Munster and we all moved on.
But when we won Kerry for a second time in 2003, we all knew this was a real chance. We were experienced, we had done our share of losing, we had a core of seasoned intercounty players. You need everything to fall into place perfectly because you know you’re probably only getting one shot at this thing.
Caltra knew that too. They beat us by a point. I’d say there has never been a senior All-Ireland final with two smaller clubs in it. Gravity always gets clubs like that in the end. To this day, it’s the only time Caltra have won a Galway title and they managed to play it out all the way to the All-Ireland. I’ll always be a small bit jealous of that.
These things never last when you’re a small club. On the day we played Caltra in Croke Park, An Ghaeltacht had about 34 players togged out and ready to go. A fortnight later, we had a west Kerry league game against Lispole. Cinnéide and I were saying to each other, “Listen, we better make sure and turn up here because this thing could fall off the face of the earth very quickly.” On the night, we had 16 togged out. It goes away very quickly.
Within four or five years, we were back down to intermediate. The numbers started to dwindle, we all got old, the recession hit and the young people started to head off. We were in the doldrums for years. Funny enough, one thing that helped turn it around was Covid – remote working has brought people back to live in the area.
But numbers alone aren’t worth a damn without the people driving it. I couldn’t be happier for Ó Cinnéide, who has done every job in the club and has poured blood, sweat and tears into it for years at this stage. When we were growing up, there was a man called Liam Ó Rocháin who was Mr Ghaeltacht, who did everything and saw to everyone high up and low down. Cinnéide is that now. For him and my brother Feargal, who is managing the team, I’d be over the moon if we could do it on Sunday.
On the pitch, Aidan Walsh has made a huge difference. You can see the class he has as a former All-Ireland winner with Cork. I’d say he sets a huge example for the young fellas in the dressingroom, happy to give everything he has for 50 minutes and then come off without kicking up a fuss. We’re lucky that he found a nice Gaeltacht girl to bring him out west.
They’re the townie team, so for the rest of us in west Kerry it’s nearly worse than seeing the Dubs do well
In saying that, I don’t know how he understands the rest of them because everyone speaks as Gaeilge at all times. In the dressingroom, at training, on the pitch, in team talks – it’s just natural that everyone speaks to each other in Irish. I can see how he’d handle it at home all right – if the girlfriend is annoyed at him, he can just decide he doesn’t know what she’s saying. Maybe he just does his own thing on the pitch too. Whatever he’s doing, it’s working.
For both sets of supporters in Cork the last day, it was nearly hard to know how to feel. We were on first so the Dingle people would have been slow enough about showing up for it. They wouldn’t want us thinking they were too interested. At the same time, they knew we’d probably be staying on for the second game so they didn’t want all the good seats to be gone.
Dingle are a lot like us in 2004. This was their first Kerry title since 1948. Paul Geaney is 35. There’s no guarantee Mark O’Connor will ever get the leeway from Geelong that he did this time around. Drill a bit deeper and they’re actually struggling a bit for numbers at underage. Dingle is a thriving town but it has a lot of holiday homes and artists and probably not as many football-mad people as you’d think. So this is a chance of a lifetime.
We’ll support them. They’ll support us. A bit through gritted teeth maybe but it’s all in good fun. I played midfield with Tommy Griffin for years and had Diarmuid Murphy kicking the ball out to us. The Dingle people sat in school with the Gaeltacht people, they married into each other’s lives, they played for West Kerry and all the rest of it. You can’t fake that sort of connection or pretend it means nothing.
And the thing about it is, we might not want to shout it from the rooftops but Dingle’s success is feeding ours. I read a thing a few years back when Glen from Derry got to the final where one of their clubmen said that one of the big reasons they were on the up was because Slaughtneil had nearly shamed them into it. They couldn’t sit back and watch their near neighbours winning All-Irelands and have nothing to show for it themselves.
There’s a bit of that right now in west Kerry. Dingle have won Kerry, they’ve won Munster, they’re in the All-Ireland final. We nearly can’t afford to be shown up by them.
They’re the townie team, so for the rest of us in west Kerry it’s nearly worse than seeing the Dubs do well. Lispole and Castlegregory and Annascaul are taking notes as well. It’s like Hannibal Lecter says in Silence of the Lambs: “We begin by coveting what we see every day.”
After the games last Saturday, we stopped in The Mills in Ballyvourney on the way home. It’s always the last Cork stop before you hit Kerry so of course we wanted to rub a few Cork noses in it. We took our seats and gathered in and talked about the two games.
And though we were all happy for Dingle and said it was great to see them beat a Dublin superclub, it wasn’t long before one of our party checked over both shoulders to make sure the coast was clear and leant in close.
“Fair play to them,” he said. “But isn’t it just typical of the f**kers – they wouldn’t give us one day to shine on our own.”
Hopefully that day comes on Sunday.
An Ghaeltacht abú.
