It was about 8pm last Saturday, and I was in the Croke Park Hotel trying to make sense of what I’d seen across the road for the previous four hours. Kilbrittain had won a thrilling All-Ireland Junior Club Hurling final, beating Easkey of Sligo by a point, and Tipperary’s Upperchurch/Drombane had beaten Tooreen of Mayo after extra-time in the intermediate final.
I was with TG4 analyst Jamie Wall, brother of the Kilbrittain captain Philip, when a man came over to speak to him (everyone wanted to speak to Jamie on Saturday evening). He was from Glenullin, who were going to have their big moment in the intermediate football final the following day.
We were all, I suppose, trying to put words on what makes the club finals so special. But our friend from Derry was telling us about the moment his dad had just had a couple of hours earlier, as he was checking in for the night. He had walked out of the hotel, stared across the road at the looming Hogan Stand, and tears came to his eyes. His club had made it to the Big House.
We tried to form the words or the feelings, but the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t really make sense. Last weekend the 10th-best football team in Kerry were playing the 17th best team in Derry in the intermediate football final, which is a more immediately-unfair-looking imbalance than the best hurling team in Sligo playing the 49th best team in Cork.
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But it all works. The wonkiness of the structures (including allowing senior champions in weaker counties to enter the intermediate and junior grades at All-Ireland level) might even be what gives them their appeal. Former GAA president Seán Kelly is often credited for his work on abolishing Rule 42, but as a legacy to leave behind after a presidency, these junior and intermediate finals are eternal.
The imbalances are obvious, but the fact that no one hangs around in these grades for any longer than a year means that those idiosyncrasies have failed to gain any real traction, with the possible exception of Kerry’s dominance in football. Even at that, getting a constituency of people together to force Kerry to change their grading system has proved elusive, and so they have 12 All-Ireland winners in the junior grade, and eight in the intermediate grade. But Kerry winning football competitions is hardly anything new. We’ve already accepted it, for better or worse!
Easkey and Tooreen are the exceptions. As habitual county champions, they were here before in 2023 and were back again this year. They had one thing that very, very few clubs at this level have – prior experience – but they both lost in devastating fashion. Easkey lost by a point, having had their best player, Andy Kilcullen, wrongly sent off. Tooreen came even closer, having been a point ahead with time up, before being taken to extra-time and losing by three.
Contrary to most teams and most seasons in these grades, Jamie and I were able to say to a Tooreen man we met afterwards that there would always be next year. But he reminded us of the restructuring in the Galway club championships that would have knock-on effects for both them and Easkey.
In 2025, the Galway hurling champions at intermediate and junior were the 25th and 41st-best teams in the county. In 2026, because of the demise of the Senior B championship and reshuffling further down the pack, Galway will be represented by their 17th and 33rd-best teams respectively. Tooreen and Easkey will still be well able to compete, as they showed so bravely on Saturday, but it will be more difficult.
Their entry to these competitions is indicative of what it’s all about – giving teams games at their level.
So much of the development of hurling is based around a simple idea; find teams of a similar quality to play against each other and cultivate that as much as possible, regardless of grades or county boundaries.
Easkey and Tooreen are neighbours by the standards of hurling geography, but they are over an hour away from each other. Neither of them have had it their own way in their own club championships, but the pool is small. The idea that they both have the opportunity to come up and play in Croke Park, and perform so creditably, has opened up an entire new vista for communities like them in other non-hurling counties, as well as in their own. The GAA created a level for them, and they’re thriving. Circumstances in other counties will change and will have an impact, but the carrot will always be there.
Kilbrittain are the first team from west Cork to win an All-Ireland hurling title. The club championship restructuring the Cork county board went through has given the vast majority of clubs in the county a realistic chance of a county title, as well as a full programme of games. Galway’s reshuffle was driven by that same motivation. That work shouldn’t go unnoticed either.
As Jamie prepared to leave the Croke Park Hotel and join 400 of his fellow parishioners at the team hotel, there was a moment to take it all in. “I’m going from Croker to an All-Ireland victory banquet ... for Kilbrittain. It’s not even a dream you dream.”
And yet there he was.
