GAELIC GAMES/ALL-IRELAND FINALS SPEAKING FROM THE HEART:The GAA is rare, as an institution, for having ritualised the All-Ireland winning captain's speech. RICHARD FITZPATRICKlooks at some memorable ones
GALWAY HAD waited a long time for an All-Ireland hurling win by 1980. It was said a priest, enraged at his parishioners leaving mass early to go to a hurling match in Dublin, had put a curse on them – that they’d never again win an All-Ireland.
But they did, overcoming Limerick, who they had also defeated when they won their last crown 57 years earlier. Joe Connolly, Galway’s captain, was only 23. It took him about 10 minutes to carve a path through his county’s ecstatic supporters and get up the steps of the Hogan Stand to receive the Liam MacCarthy Cup.
He’d nothing prepared for his speech, but people have been talking about it since. Indeed, when Prof Richard Aldous, the UCD historian, put together a collection a few years ago, entitled Great Irish Speeches, Connolly’s speech was the only sports one to be included in the 50, taking its place alongside broadsides from Daniel O’Connell, Éamon de Valera et al.
Hitherto, All-Ireland winning speeches had been plodding, unforgettable affairs, but Connolly’s speech lit up a grey sky. His decision to speak in Irish, his native tongue, struck a chord, as did his remembrance of emigrant family and friends, a decade before Mary Robinson began speaking of the Irish diaspora.
There were people back in Galway and there was joy in their hearts, he said, “Ach freisin caithfimid cuimhneamh ar dhaoine i Sasana, i Meiriceá, ar fuaid na tíre. Agus tá said, b’fhéidir, ag caoineadh anois i láthair.”
He concluded with an English phrase, paraphrasing John Paul II’s words a year earlier at a youth mass in his own county. “People of Galway,” said Connolly in perfect, halting mimicry of the Polish pope, “we love you!”
It drew an infectious cackle of laughter from Micheal O’Hehir, commenting, as ever, on RTÉ television. Within seconds, a moustachioed Joe McDonagh was, in his own words, “ordered” by team coach Cyril Farrell to sing a song. He belted out The West’s Awake, surrounded by the dignitaries of the day, including Charlie Haughey, and his team-mates, with Jimmy Cooney, the team’s corner back, cradling his hurley throughout like a mandolin.
McDonagh, who had been captain when Galway lost the previous year’s final, had been hesitant to get up and sing. As a future president of the GAA, he was well aware of protocol. Breaking into song was a new departure, as was, from living memory, Connolly’s decision to speak in Irish, although it was subsequently followed by several others, including John Fenton in 1984, the GAA’s centenary year, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, another Corkman, in 2005, and Dara Ó Cinnéide the year before. Their decision had huge resonance for many.
“It was more important,” says Ó Cinnéide, “for some people than the winning of the All-Ireland because most of the feedback wasn’t from Kerry. It was something that really struck home to me what the Gaeltacht meant. It isn’t necessarily a pocket of isolated community in a particular county. The Gaeltacht is as much a state of mind as a state of being.”
Croke Park broke with tradition for a couple of years at the turn of the millennium and conducted the speech in the middle of the pitch, but quickly back-tracked.
The experiment led to a rather listless experience, even though getting up to the podium for the winning captain, until the installation of a wall of Perspex on Hill 16 this year, could sometimes be a struggle.
“I got caught,” says Anthony Daly, Clare’s winning captain in 1995. “Jack Boothman, the president, was calling, ‘Anthony Daly’. I kind of got left outside in a big swarm. I remember saying to people, ‘Jeez, will ye let me through or they’ll give the cup to someone else.’ The steward John Leonard, a Galway bloke, whose job it is to grab the captain every year, went for Ollie Baker. I’ve often met him since and I remember saying it to him in ’97, of course, when we won: ‘Ah, you know me this year’.”
The GAA is rare, as an institution, for having ritualised the captain’s winning speech. The FA Cup in England, for example, or the Super Bowl in the United States, doesn’t have one.
The speech is preceded by a few words from the president of the GAA, although Michael O’Hehir wondered aloud “who cares about the president’s speech?” when Limerick’s Eamon Grimes waited to receive the Liam MacCarthy Cup in 1973.
There have been common threads through the speeches. The captain usually opens with cúpla focal as Gaeilge. The backroom staffs are praised and the manager, invariably, is singled out for special mention. There is a nod to the county board and the sponsors, with Kerry captains being particularly careful to applaud their patronage. The opposition gets three cheers, and occasionally the press come in for a bit of a dig.
“It’s normal at this time to slate the media,” said Peter Canavan in 2003. “I’m not going to be any different. They compared Tyrone to the British army – once we crossed the Border we had no power. I think we’ve a bit of power now.”
Last Sunday, Tipperary’s Eoin Kelly doffed his hat towards his team’s wives and girlfriends. There have been poignant acknowledgements of recent bereavements. Canavan spoke of how proud his deceased father would have been to see him receive the Sam Maguire in Tyrone’s breakthrough year, and also of how Paul McGirr’s “spirit still lives in that team”.
McGirr died following a collision in the semi-final of the 1997 Ulster minor championship. Another member of that minor team, Cormac McAnallan, having just taken on the captaincy of the Tyrone senior team, died in his sleep in March 2004. Both were remembered in subsequent speeches by Tyrone’s captain Brian Dooher.
Most captains seem to avoid preparing something in advance in case of jinxing themselves, although Jack O’Shea breached this observance in 1983. He took schooling from Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, who had been taking him for training in Dublin along with several other exiled Kerry panellists. After a crash course in Irish, he had two good speeches prepared – one for when Kerry won the Munster final and one for the All-Ireland.
The pair travelled down to Cork together for the provincial final. O’Shea bagged two goals in the game and remembers thinking, with a minute to go, that he would shortly “be going up to get the cup”. It wasn’t to be – Cork grabbed a late goal to snatch victory.
O’Shea’s team-mate, Páidí Ó Sé, went the whole way when he was captain in 1985. He spoke in Irish. It was a short, sharp shock. He began speaking reservedly, with his hands cupped behind his back like a schoolboy. As he picked up momentum, the hands came out and rested on his hips. Then, as he acknowledged the work of Mick O’Dwyer, he raised his fist in salute. Finally, in a crescendo, he picked up Sam and began swinging it wildly before departing.
The great speeches, such as Connolly’s, Daly’s in ’95, and Canavan’s, have come on the back of breakthroughs or the ending of a period of failure.
Indeed, the phrase “the famine is over” is bandied around so much it has entered into GAA lexicon. It was coined by Richie Stakelum, Tipperary’s captain in 1987 when they won the Munster hurling title for the first time in 16 years; 11 of those campaigns having ended in first-round exits, a bewildering predicament for a premier county.
Tipp lost to Galway in that year’s All-Ireland semi-final. Galway went on to win their second All-Ireland of the decade and their third a year later. But there’s been no wins since. Bogged down in another great hunger, it has left Connolly, a selector this year when Galway went down by a point to Tipp, the eventual winners, forlorn, and reluctant to rake over “old glories”.
“My only regret is that there’s no Galway captain going to do it this year. We’ll see if someone might add to it in the future.”
Anthony Daly (Clare 1995, 97)
“I wanted to say two things. The curse was finally off our back but there were a lot of great Clare teams that didnt get the break.
“The old line from the Waterford fella about sticking to traditional music had always stuck in my craw. In ’92, we were leading them by a point in a replay, but gave away two frees to lose. Your man that I was marking turned around and said, ‘stick to your traditional music, boy’.
“I was highly insulted that it had come from a Waterford fella. If it was from a Cork fella I would have put up with it, but Waterford? It wasn’t as if they’d been winning back-to-back All-Irelands.
“In ’97, I just said that we were absolutely thrilled, that it had confirmed what had gone on two years before. I thanked Tipp. I was pulling back a bit from the (‘No longer the whipping boys of Munster’) speech in Cork.”
Pat Fleury (Offaly 1985)
“The speech itself was totally unrehearsed. I remember somebody saying to me leading up to the All-Ireland, ‘what are you going to say when we win this thing’? I said, ‘we’ll worry about that if and when it happens’. I wasn’t going to try and put a jinx on the situation by spending a week on a speech you’d never get to deliver.
“I remember paying particular tribute to the supporters because they had been wonderful to us the year before in the light of the disappointment of ’84, and of course our old comrade Pat Carroll was in hospital at that stage and he had been playing with us up to and even part of the semi-final.
“Pat subsequently died the following March with a brain tumour. It was an emotional experience to think we were there and he would have been with us.”
Dara O'Cinneide (Kerry 2004)
“Every face directly in front of me was a Gaeltacht person – all family, friends, neighbours and team-mates.
“You’d start to get emotional then. I’d consider myself cool enough, but I was thinking ‘I’ll be struggling here’.
“It’s impossible not to be affected. I remember seeing the Kerry Golden Years video and you’d have seen Oggie Moran lifting Sam and Oggie was crying, or close to it.
“Tyrone had beaten us in ’03 and Armagh had beaten us by a point in ’02. When the talk turned to Kerry, it was that we were damaged goods; that we’d never get a hold of this new style of football. We were very hurt at that.
“The message I wanted to get across was we’d had a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in Kerry the last two years, but it was over now.”
Peter Canavan (Tyrone 2003)
“I didn’t have a speech wrote out, reason being there’s been some great speeches written out but nobody got to hear them.
“Of course, Id thought about it. My sister-in-law teaches Irish so she jotted down a few things as Gaeilge, from that it was just off the cuff, things that needed to be said.
“I didnt realise until I watched the tape again that I went on as long as I did. It irked some of the Tyrone players in the build-up to the game that, despite beating Kerry, the kingpins of Gaelic football, in the semi-final, that we still didn’t get the credit we deserved, and different jibes – that Tyrone can’t get over the final hurdle whenever they cross the Border. I mentioned it out of jest more than anything else.
“It was a speech of thanks to all those people that made it possible for us to get there.”
