Tipperary veteran hoping for hat-trick of birthday triumphs

FOR ONE spectator at Sunday’s All-Ireland hurling final there will be a guaranteed cause for celebration even before the ball is thrown in. Larry Ryan from Cashel will be 80 and hoping history repeats itself.

When he was just seven his father brought him to the 1937 final between Tipperary and Kilkenny, played in Fitzgerald Stadium, Killarney, as the original Cusack Stand was being constructed but was 11 months behind schedule, leaving Croke Park unusable for the hurling final.

The counties had each won 11 All-Irelands at that stage and the six previous final meetings had been evenly shared. But Tipperary were a younger team, which was to be a significant advantage on the vast new playing surface (180 x 100 yards) in Killarney.

An ageing Kilkenny, for whom the great Lory Meagher made his last appearance in a county jersey, went down to their heaviest All-Ireland defeat, 0-3 to 3-11.

“The special train left Cashel for Killarney on the morning,” Ryan recalls. “There was a branch line there. Although we were living in Cashel my father’s people were from Bishopswood, near Dundrum, out Clonoulty/Rossmore country. I had four uncles on the Bishopswood team that narrowly lost to Tom Semple’s Thurles Sarsfields in 1904.”

When Tipp next faced Kilkenny, Jim Devitt, a neighbour of the Ryans on Cashel’s John Street, was playing and again Tipperary won – a trend that stretched from the early 1920s until eight years ago.

“It was an article of faith with us growing up. We assumed that we would beat them,” he says.

“I have one flashing memory, a Tipperary goal as I looked down from what seemed to me very high up,” he recalls of the afternoon, which had started alarmingly for him.

“There was mayhem outside the ground and the crush was immense. It must have been quite dangerous. In the movement of the crowd I was separated from my father – I remember him calling in the distance.

“A great big man picked me up and passed me overhead from one person to another, like a rugby ball, until I reached my father. I’d imagine my father was more frightened than I was.”

There was an estimated 50,000 there that afternoon and Killarney was swarming with visitors.

There wasn’t the same colour at matches in the 1930s: “The only colours were the crepe paper hats that always ran in the rain,” he remembers.

“We went to a restaurant afterwards and shopped for souvenirs to bring home.”

As an adult, Ryan went teaching English in the Christian Brothers Greenpark grammar school in Armagh in 1956 before moving to Belfast in the 1960s, where he has lived since.

Born on September 5th – just two days before his county recorded the famous 1930 All-Ireland win, becoming the first county to sweep the boards (senior, minor and junior) he has shared his birthday with a number of All-Ireland finals, and specifically a number of Tipperary triumphs.

As well as 1937, the county won the MacCarthy Cup on the same date in 1965, against Wexford, and by beating Kilkenny in 1971.

The Westmeath author John Weldon, better known by his nom de plume Brinsley MacNamara under which he wrote The Valley of the Squinting Windows, attended the final and wrote an account for The Irish Times, which concluded on an elegiac note.

“Later one mingled again with the crowds in the streets, they were moving out of Killarney now and going up against the mountains, which had begun to change their colours in the evening light. The scene had the timeless quality of a great painting.”