Waterford may have exited the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship early, but supporters in the county will be glad to hear of a new book to fill in for the down time.
As part of this year’s Immrama Festival of Travel Writing in Lismore, Co Waterford, the organisers have lined up travel writer Conor Power to read from and discuss his latest literary offering – a novel set in the 19th century with the focus firmly on hurling.
That Power, a first-time novelist, should choose to make hurling central to his fictional debut should hardly come as a surprise. The son of famous Waterford hurling goalkeeper Ned Power, he grew up steeped in the lore of the game.
Ned Power was the goalkeeper on the 1959 Waterford hurling team that won the county’s second and last All-Ireland. He is perhaps best known to the hurling populace at large for Louis McMonagle’s famous photo from the 1962 Munster championship. In the picture, Ned plucks the sliotar from the sky to deny Christy Ring.
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But Power snr also went on to become a successful coach, prompting his son to focus on that aspect of his life when he wrote My Father: A Hurling Revolutionary, published in 2009. Appropriately, that book featured McMonagle’s photo on the cover.
“My dad was a schoolteacher in Tallow,” said Conor Power, “and because he was teaching all the kids, he had them all trained in the skills. He was a great believer in brain over brawn and he had them playing this kind of almost Barcelona-esque hurling at the time in Tallow and they won everything.”
As a somewhat indirect consequence of writing the book about his father, who died in 2007, Power came to write Hurling 1810, published by Menma Books. It is described as “a story from a forgotten time when the big houses controlled Ireland’s ancient game”.
“I wrote the biography about my dad and self-published it,” says Power, “and in the course of that, a lot of people wanted to talk about him. Among them was a Cork man, who had these laminates about the era of professional hurling when wealthy landlords fielded teams to play each other.
“Ireland was a bit of a playground for the idle rich [in the 19th century] and that’s when hurling really took off. Like the steeplechasing, it was being driven by gambling and because the stakes were so high, they began to codify it in terms of rules and regulations and hire people to play for them.”
According to Power, most of these games between landlord teams – 21 players aside – weren’t reported on unless the stakes were particularly high or there was a huge crowd or somebody was killed or seriously injured.
“Our knowledge is scant enough because there weren’t sports pages in the papers but around 1790, a visiting French diplomat, Charles- Etienne Coquebert de Montbret, wrote about these matches. It’s clear that it was codified and good players were paid good cash to go and play for their landlord.”
The failed United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 casts a long shadow over Power’s story, which is set in Co Carlow. The main character, talented hurler Sean O’Meara, is the son of a rebel who was killed in the fighting on Vinegar Hill in Co Wexford.
O’Meara leads a peasant life in a dilapidated cottage with his widowed mother Grace and younger brother Antoine. His prowess on the hurling pitch catches the eye of local landlord Charles Kavanagh, who recruits him to play for the team that he sponsors.
“I thought of the character Sean first,” said Power. “What would it be like being a young Irish peasant with maybe not much of a future and what if your father had been killed also in 1798? You would possibly have a calling to a certain plan of action, a violent one, a republican one.
“But Sean is a very good hurler and this landlord wants to keep the games going and he believes himself as Irish as the next man. Sean is quite conflicted because he is in this world where he is shown a certain amount of warmth and he can see what life is like in the big house.”
“I enjoyed writing it. I was doing it as a jobbing journalist, in my spare time, writing it over a long period of time, the bones of 15 years. It got better when my publisher got me to delve into the history of the era more, which increased the historical content and context.”
“It’s my first official outing with the book and to be honest, it makes me nervous,” he says of his upcoming appearance. “I grew up in Tallow but I went to secondary school in Lismore and I also worked in the Heritage Centre there. And of course, Lismore was home to the doyenne of travel writers, Dervla Murphy, so I’m a bit daunted.”
Conor Power will discuss Hurling 1810 at 11am on Saturday, June 13th, as part of the Immrama Festival of Travel Writing in Lismore, Co Waterford. For the full programme of festival events, visit lismore-immrama.com/festival-programme
