Memory and bloodlines still proving a conundrum for Martin Carney

You’ll see him working in the shop behind the main stand in MacHale Park this evening, handing out the teas and coffees; a smiling man who looks familiar. It raises a few quid for the club and it’s good fun.

Older generations of Mayo and Donegal supporters will, of course, remember Martin Carney on the field as a thrilling emblem of their yesterdays.

But the younger crew, with the trackies and the fades, lost in tech, will have no knowledge about what the man handing them crisps and Fanta means in this whole pageant.

They won’t realise that he played 10 years for Donegal from the age of 18; not that he won provincial medals in Ulster in 1972 and 1974 before moving, in 1980, to his father’s county and captaining Mayo to a 1981 Connacht championship, the August when they went to Croke Park to receive a lecture from Kerry.

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“We might as well have gone up and went to the zoo.”

He’s hazy on old games and dates – 20 years of inter-county ball will do that – and deeply uncomfortable anyhow in talking about his on-field exploits.

But ask any former Mayo or Donegal player from that time and they’ll tell you that Carney was exceptional; a classy, ball-playing forward and free-taker who would thrive in today’s game.

But you’ll find him in the kiosk there before throw-in, contentedly anonymous, handing the crowd their Dairy Milks and Tayto and he’ll gesture to where the milk containers and sugar bags have been laid out on the wooden bench across the crowded thoroughfare.

Jackie Carney is the one man in Mayo's GAA history directly associated with all three of its sacred years

And hundreds will say thanks and accept their change without at all understanding that this is someone whose bloodlines run back to what constitutes the origins of time in Mayo football.

So much is random. In the first decades of the 1900s, some 13 Carney children grew up in a house in the shadow of Nephin. Jackie, the third eldest, played on the Mayo team that won the county’s first All-Ireland senior title in 1936 and then trained, with Gerard Courell, the fabled 1950 and 1951 All-Ireland winning sides. So Jackie Carney is the one man in Mayo’s GAA history directly associated with all three of its sacred years.

“Jackie was my uncle and my godfather. And he was clearly a hero to my father,” Martin says now on a balmy Wednesday morning on the terrace of Breaffy Hotel, which is a stone’s throw from the family home.

“But Dad was a very silent, modest man in many ways. That period . . . was rarely referenced.”

Sprawling townhouse

Eoin Carney was the third youngest and was sent down to Limerick to help his sister raise her family, getting his schooling there and qualifying as an electrician, work that took him to Belfast and then Fermanagh.

Three other brothers, like thousands of sons of Mayo, emigrated. One of those, Dermot, fought in the second World War and was killed in North Africa on January 6th, 1943. He is buried out there.

Eoin, meantime, was working on the air-grounds in Fermanagh and then migrated across the border to Ballyshannon, to work on the construction of a hydro-electric power plant. Life happened; he got married and bought a sprawling townhouse up the Rock, an old landlord’s dwelling dating back to the 1830s. Martin was the eldest of five children. Eoin, too, had been a good footballer, winning a Munster junior medal with Limerick in 1939 and, it was discovered decades later, a Railway Cup medal with Ulster.

“Did we ever hear a word about it?” laughs Martin. “No. Maybe they were short players and Dad was brought along for the run, I dunno. But he never mentioned it.”

It took years, decades probably, for Martin and his siblings to gauge the extremes of experiences of their father’s family, from the mythology of Mayo football and Jackie to a telegram arriving carrying Dermot’s stark, tragic details from North Africa.

“It is crazy. It had to have been a profound thing for my father, yeah. And I often think, Martin, why didn’t you raise these issues with him. But, then, how do you? See, I remember Dad coming down the Rock from second mass in 1975 and being at the top of the stairs and saying, ‘Martin get me to the doctor’s quickly’. He was dead in 1984 on his sixth heart attack.

“Like I am older now than he was when he died. So those things I was becoming aware of, I never broached with him. Like, I’m not sure if he was at those Mayo finals in ’50 and ’51. If he did go, he never said it. I wouldn’t think he did. But he certainly never said it. I was born around then so it never really occurred to me to ask. Mammy came to one football match that I played in ever. The All-Ireland semi-final of 1972 against Offaly. She never went to a game before or after. She was appalled at the language in Croke Park! She couldn’t get over it.”

What he does remember is Jackie Carney travelling up from Mayo to see him play for St Joseph’s, a sort of crack-commando unit of a football team dreamed up in a brief if glorious entente cordiale between the football clubs of Bundoran and Ballyshannon, who for decades had enjoyed a mutual hatred.

Brian McEniff was, as ever, the architect of the union. Their success was instantaneous, yielding county, Ulster and All-Ireland honours. Carney was a kid on a team of men: under 11 stone and shoulder length hair that he kept out of his eyes with a head band. And he enjoyed having this famous Mayo uncle in the crowd.

Ulster titles

“Jackie was very outgoing and very encouraging. He was a business man; he had a shop in Ballina that was a mixture of grocery and hardware and he was used to meeting people and enjoyed it. The thing about Mayo footballers is that they are treated with reverence.

“I think that goes back to Jackie’s time when they crossed the Rubicon and won the thing in 1936. You go through the first roundabout now coming into Castlebar: the Séamus O’Malley roundabout. Who’s he? He was the captain of that team. So there are little references all around to link the people from that time with the present.”

Because McEniff was player-manager for Donegal and because Carney had been such a prospect with St Joseph’s he found himself elevated to the senior Donegal team.

“Maybe the thought was to throw in a load of these St Joseph’s lads and see what happened. Mickey McLoone and Seamie Granaghan would have absorbed the hits. I was thrown in for the crack. That time was remarkable. I went with Daddy in 1963 to see the first senior football final Donegal ever were in. When you think about it that way. You know, how far Donegal has come since then.

We won those two Ulster titles but were beaten in the first round every other year

“My hero then was Mickey McLoone. He was from the town I lived in near the park and I’d go up to see them practice. I loved his style – ebullient and so forceful and aggressive and fast. So I went to that game. But in my time playing for Donegal, we won those two Ulster titles but were beaten in the first round every other year. It was strange.”

And Carney himself was a kind of invisible presence. He was studying in UCG and worked in New York in the summer of ’72, flying back and forth to play for Donegal. When he qualified as a teacher and sought work, he had two offers: Swinford and Spanish Point.

“I got Swinford and that is where I spent all of my working life. I loved it there. And you know, you get married and you have four children and all of a sudden, this is home.”

He was possibly unfortunate that his peak years coincided with a time when his native and ancestral counties were on a slow burn. The journeys from Castlebar to Ballybofey became tougher. By 1980, he had met Gina Waldron through his friend Tommy O’Malley.

“We got on famously from the start,” he says of Gina. “We just clicked.”

So in 1980, with McEniff at loggerheads with the county board and in a funk, he made the decision to transfer to Mayo. A year later, he lifted the Nestor Cup for the green and red. There was no turning back after that.

“Gina is the person who got me to the county, really. She was a physiotherapist. And I got injured and Tommy O’Malley said he’d get me into see her. And it was at that stage that I realised that my future in terms of life was here in Mayo. The funny thing is we got married in 1982. And we went on honeymoon to Portugal. And we headed down to the swimming pool on our first day there. Just beginning to relax, the usual. The next thing, I hear this roar. ‘Hey, mop-head.’ I didn’t even have to look up. Because the only person who ever called me ‘mop head’ was McEniff. He was there with his wife and seven of the kids.”

Mayo-mania

By then, McEniff was back as Donegal manager and ’83 was his new obsession.

“So every day he’d come over to us at the loungers. Come back! Come back to Donegal! Gina didn’t know what to make of it all. I was lucky I wasn’t divorced before I got home. But that was the way Brian was about Donegal football.”

Carney played with Mayo through the 1980s. Liam O’Neill converted him from a playmaking half-forward into a corner back for the 1985 season, when Mayo came screaming out of the mid-century and into a glamorous and fractious All-Ireland semi-final with Dublin.

That was the summer when Mayo-mania returned to the west and it hasn’t really left since. He was a substitute for the All-Ireland final defeat in 1989 and retired quietly the following year. If there were grievances in either county about his switch, he never heard them.

“Naw. I know they may have given out behind my back and that’s fair enough, I understand why they would. Nobody ever accosted me . . . I am not really a pub person so maybe I was spared that. But I would perfectly understand that annoyance in Donegal. And here in Mayo: I think that maybe because I had Mayo blood softened it for me. It made the transition less problematic.”

The depth of Carney’s feeling for Mayo would become apparent after he finished playing. He worked as an analyst on the Sunday Game and for RTÉ radio and more recently his free-flowing commentaries for Midwest have allowed him to wear his heart on his sleeve.

“It’s not that you are allowed to,” he corrects. “You have to.”

He trained Mayo minor and U-21 teams to three All-Ireland finals, which ended in defeat and publicly took Páidí Ó Sé to task for saying he liked meeting Mayo because they played “nice football” when the counties met in 1995.

“I hated that kind of platitude. I would have said it publicly because it sickened me when people said that about Mayo. Like when we went up to play Kerry in 1981, we were so out of our depth. Just their football skills. I remember we used to hear that John O’Keeffe did weights. That was unfathomable to us. I was under 11 stone then. I was skin and bone.

“And you trained like a gobshite then. You ran yourself into the ground. I was just depleting myself. We hadn’t a clue. But we made progress. When I was training teams, I did love to see guys using a football and keeping the game expansively. But I found that [Ó Sé ’s comments] dismissive and wasn’t going to let it go. I knew Páidí. Did he mean it to be hurtful? I don’t think he did. But it said something about the attitude towards Mayo then.”

Inexhaustible quest

So like everyone in Mayo, he is locked into and riveted to the seemingly inexhaustible quest of this current Mayo team. He knows that their chances of closing in on his godfather’s achievements are dimming. But still. Here they are, on an August Bank Holiday evening, still driving on.

He’s an early riser still, a legacy of his teaching days. The Carney family lost Gina last October after a lengthy illness.

They have lit up the championship for the whole country, I think, every year since 2012

“Breaffy graveyard is just over that wall,” he says pointing. “I was over with Gina at half past six this morning. I come over here every morning.”

When he goes home to Ballyshannon, he often walks the town at the same hour on summer mornings, before there’s a soul awake because he still has a visceral connection with the place.

“To get a sense of what the place must have been like, before my time.”

So he has long ago stopped choosing between Donegal and Mayo, even if he has never quite escaped the feeling that he had somehow forsaken Donegal when he left.

“I’ve never fully reconciled that,” he admits. “Our children always say that I always go for Donegal when the counties meet. As a supporter. But this particular group of Mayo lads; my God. I would love to see them go and win an All-Ireland. They have lit up the championship for the whole country, I think, every year since 2012. I would love to see them succeed. Will they?”

He lets his question hang unanswered in the mid-morning as if to imagine his two counties going at it and an electrical storm running through the old stadium on Saturday evening. The places are intermingled now; memory and bloodlines. Could he even choose? Some things are better left unsaid.