In the Blood E-Book

Pat Spillane

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 414

Beschreibung

Pat Spillane is one of the best-known sportspeople in Ireland. Selected for the GAA's Team of the Millennium and winner of eight All-Ireland senior football medals, he is one of the greatest Gaelic footballers ever. Yet that isn't half of the Spillane story. He has also been one of the most controversial GAA pundits of all time, driving the agenda on The Sunday Game and in the Sunday World for thirty years. His analysis and criticism have been headline news everywhere Gaelic football is discussed, and the terms he coined, such as 'puke football', have entered the Irish lexicon. Here, Pat reveals the sadness of his childhood when his father died; his dazzling football career and encounters with other immortals, from Mick O'Dwyer onwards; the reality of life as a pundit under pressure from managers; and the huge stress of dealing with the machinery of government in the aftermath of his spell with CEDRA, the state advisory group on rural affairs. Like the man himself, In the Blood is uniquely frank, witty, honest and revealing – and a must-read for GAA fans everywhere.

Leseprobe

IN THE

BLOOD

My life in and out of football

PATSPILLANE

with MICHAEL MOYNIHAN

GILL BOOKS

This book is dedicated to the most important people in my life – Rosarii, Cara, Shona, and Pat Junior

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1 Family Matters

Chapter 2 Templenoe: The Home Place

Chapter 3 Living Next Door to the Bishop

Chapter 4 Stopping the All Blacks in Their Tracks

Chapter 5 The Klondyke of Seventies Ireland

Chapter 6 Learning the Ropes

Chapter 7 Unbeatable

Chapter 8 Rats and Rehabilitation

Chapter 9 Bonus Territory

Chapter 10 Football: How the Past Informs the Future

Chapter 11 Dwyer

Chapter 12 The Men in the Dressing-Room

Chapter 13 Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect, Perfect Practice Does

Chapter 14 The Sunday Game: Apologising to the Nation

Chapter 15 The Sunday Game: Everyone’s a Pundit

Chapter 16 Reality and Rural Ireland

Chapter 17 Under the Microscope

Chapter 18 The People Who Count

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

Photo Section

INTRODUCTION

I called it a day on The Sunday Game when Kerry beat Galway in July 2022 and I surprised people when I cried live on air.

I surprised myself. I’m a private person though I’ve been in the public eye for 50 years. I certainly didn’t plan on shedding a tear in front of a million TV viewers.

It wasn’t because I was leaving The Sunday Game after 30 years. The send-off was great, but there were also times I had to be hidden in cars and smuggled out of stadiums to get away from angry supporters.

It wasn’t because I was saying goodbye to Croke Park. Half a century before that last TV appearance, myself and a classmate from west Kerry, Páidí Ó Sé, wandered into the old ground late one night when the gates were left open and pretended we were playing an All-Ireland final and the memories only got better after that. We were on teams that brought Sam Maguire down Jones’ Road eight times.

It wasn’t because Templenoe had four players on the Kerry selection, though that was a fair part of it. I could remember the likes of Timmy Clifford senior, who gave his life to Templenoe, saying to me, ‘We’ll keep it going, Spillane,’ when we were struggling to field 15 players from a small rural community. The likes of him would have been bursting with pride to see so many of his clubmen winning an All-Ireland with Kerry.

It wasn’t because two of my nephews, Adrian and Killian, won All-Ireland medals that day, though that’s coming close to it. Adrian had 64 written on his gloves for the game, and as I said on television, my father was a Kerry selector for the 1964 All-Ireland defeat against Galway.

He dropped dead two days later of a heart attack, so he never saw me and my brothers, Mike and Tom, play for Kerry. He missed his sons bringing 19 All-Ireland senior medals into his house. He didn’t see his two grandsons win their medals. That’s why Kerry and Galway in an All-Ireland final will always mean 1964 to me.

All the threads were drawn together in that minute or two after the final whistle. My father. My family. Templenoe, a small country place. Kerry, a proud county. Croke Park.

Playing football. Talking football.

I said that day on television: it’s in our blood. And in our tears.

CHAPTER 1

FAMILY MATTERS

The Spillanes have lived in Templenoe for generations. My grandfather Pat Spillane had the bar first, and in due course, my father, Tom, took it over.

There were two families in the one house at one stage, which must have been a strange set-up – two families that literally lived in one building. In one part you had Jerome Spillane and his family, and on the other side was Pat, my grandfather, and his children. Jerome’s grandson is Brian Spillane, who played rugby for Ireland – that was the connection: they’d be cousins of ours. There was Tom, my father, but there were plenty more. There was Dode, there was Gene, there was Paddy, and there was Kathleen and Nuala and Rose.

Long before my father took over the bar, he was sent to school – sent away by my grandfather – in St Brendan’s in Killarney. On the first day in St Brendan’s, he made great friends with a man called Jackie Lyne. And Jackie introduced his sister Maura to my father several years later, and eventually Maura married my father.

Of course, the Lynes were royalty when it came to Kerry football. Denny won All-Ireland medals and captained Kerry in the All-Ireland final played in the Polo Grounds in New York in 1947 (which Cavan won, unfortunately for us). Canon Michael Lyne was chaplain of Glasgow Celtic for years. He had a couple of All-Ireland medals himself and was actually prevented playing in more All-Irelands; because of the clerical rules of the time, he wasn’t allowed out of Maynooth to play. Jackie Lyne not alone played for Kerry but managed the county when they won All-Irelands in 1969 and 1970. When I say royalty, I mean it.

The Lynes were cattle jobbers, cattle dealers, and that’s a race of men who know the time of day. They drove a hard bargain, going around the cattle fairs of Cork and Kerry and further afield, buying and selling cattle, and they were very successful. They knew the value of a penny, never mind the value of a pound, and that was an outlook that probably rubbed off on my mother.

When she married my father around 1952, it must have been like going from the first world to the third world for her, coming out to Templenoe. She was moving from Killarney, which was well developed for the tourist market even then, to a place where there was still no electricity, literally. The ESB hadn’t yet made it out the road and wouldn’t get to Templenoe until around 1954, so that was a fair difference compared to the literal bright lights of Killarney that she was used to. It must have been one hell of a culture shock. She was busy, at least. My father had the bar but he was also a hackney driver, and there were petrol pumps and a shop there as well.

I didn’t know that much about my father because he died at such a young age, but I do know that he was the man that drove everyone when they had to emigrate, which was a significant job then. Emigration was rife in the fifties in Templenoe and the surrounding areas, and because he had the local hackney car he was the man who brought the emigrants on their journey. That became a feature of life for me later, the amount of people that year after year came back to tell me about those journeys. During the summer they’d come back from all over England and America and appear at the bar. After a drink or two, eventually one of them would say that my dad had driven them to Shannon or down to Cobh for the boat.

And they’d go on and tell me all the details of the journey, telling me all about themselves and their parents crying in the car, looking out the windows at Ireland for the last time as they went. Once they were on the boat or the plane, the parents got back into the car, and then they cried all the way home to Templenoe.

My father would have told me a little about that before he died: the experience of delivering people to the emigrant ship, how sad that was for him. Some of those people went on and made a huge success of their lives, but not all of them. Some of them left Ireland and never saw home again. Maybe that’s why emigration has always resonated with me, people leaving home and families being broken up, the countryside becoming deserted and the breaking of communities. It’s always struck a chord with me and made me ask why those communities have to be broken up, and what can we do to prevent that.

For my parents it was a tough living. Were they wealthy? Absolutely not. I’d say they just about kept their heads above water, and it didn’t become any easier for my mother when my father died, shortly after that All-Ireland final in 1964.

One thing about The Sunday Game was that it defined me as a person: to the vast majority of the population I was this person on the television. I only spoke, on average, for a little over three hours per year. Yet, those three or three and a half hours of talking defined me as a person in the eyes of so many people. Perception-wise, I was seen as loudmouthed, outspoken, cranky, negative: I hate this, I hate that.

It’s something that bothered me but it was also something that I couldn’t do anything about. I suppose we all do it; I certainly do it myself. I watch somebody on television and I like him or don’t like him, but the truth is I don’t know the person at all.

When you’re appearing on The Sunday Game you might have a sound bite or two prepared, but not much more than that. On that last day in 2022 I had nothing prepared because it was my final appearance on the programme, but at the end of the game I started crying on television. That wasn’t premeditated. At all. I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t do crying in public. I’ll cry, but I’ll cry privately and cry quietly. If you don’t cry in public you’re not going to start by doing it on The Sunday Game before about a million people.

It was my last day on The Sunday Game but that wasn’t why I cried. We had four Templenoe lads winning All-Ireland medals, which was fantastic, but that wasn’t it either.

The big thing was family, because family means a lot to me. Contrary to what people think, I’m not that fellow on television, I’m actually a very private person. I don’t go to bars at night. Why? Because if there’s one drunk on the premises, he marks me for the night. I like to keep very close to family and a few friends, that’s it. I rarely go out. We’re all very close as a family. Very close. Maybe that’s because my father died so young, that the four of us kids bonded together even more, but we’ve always been very close.

And on that day, seeing my nephews Killian and Adrian win those medals was great, obviously, but the real significance of the day was that those medals were won when Kerry beat Galway. That’s because, to the day I die, Kerry v Galway means only one thing. It was Kerry and Galway who played in an All-Ireland final two days before my father died.

* * *

My father worked hard. He didn’t drink, and he was a big strong man who played club football up to 1963, the year before he died, just to keep the club alive. The following year, he was a selector for Kerry when they faced Galway in the All-Ireland senior final. The night before the game, Kerry were staying in the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street, and that evening my father had a pain in his chest.

He was out for a walk with one of the players and said as much, and the player said to him, ‘Tom, you need to tell the doctor about that.’ He refused, because that would have been his way – my father didn’t want to miss the game the following day. It would never occur to him not to be on the bench as a selector in Croke Park.

The match was played on Sunday and Galway won. On the Monday night, he came down from Dublin, and on Tuesday night he dropped dead of a massive heart attack.

Because of that, to me, Kerry v Galway has always meant the day my father died. And now I think that the day of the 2022 All-Ireland final was the first-ever time I actually grieved for my father, that I had an opportunity to do so.

I was eight when he died, and I was the eldest. Tommy was the youngest, two years of age, and back then youngsters wouldn’t have been brought to funerals. That’s not to say I don’t have memories of that period. I have very sharp memories of it. I can remember being in the room next to my parents’ room, upstairs that Tuesday evening, eight years of age, with Tommy and Mike probably in the room as well. And I can still hear the sound of voices outside the door of the room. To this day, I can hear the thudding of feet walking fast, over and back, and remember not knowing what had happened.

I can’t remember my mother ever bringing us together as children to tell us he died, though I do have a vague memory of someone saying the coffin couldn’t be brought down the stairs. I think it eventually had to be brought out through the top window of the bar.

The day of the funeral, we weren’t brought to the graveyard. We were brought over to the O’Sheas, our neighbours, whose farmhouse overlooked the Templenoe church. I can still remember how it felt, standing up on a rock on the O’Sheas’ land, hearing the bell ring as my father’s funeral procession left the church. I could see glimpses of the crowd in the churchyard, but that was it. All of that came flooding back to me that day in Croke Park. I don’t know if we do grieving that well in Ireland, but we certainly didn’t at that time in our history.

I haven’t watched that Sunday Game clip back. People have asked me if I have, but I’ve never revisited it because it was a very painful moment. It was a release of whatever had built up over the years.

There were two things about it. First of all, it made people realise who I really was. I wasn’t Pat Spillane the outspoken pundit but Pat Spillane the family man, the son who had lost a father.

Since that day, it’s amazing the number of people who have come to me and have helped me to piece together everything about my father in the build-up to his death. Pete Hanley was his great friend, and the sub-goalie on that Kerry team. Pete travelled with him over and back to matches and training sessions all the time, and he’s told me since that all summer my father had been complaining of pains in the chest but was putting it down to indigestion. Because of that, he was taking Rennies, but obviously it was his heart all the time. He was a very heavy smoker, and the pain on the Saturday night before the All-Ireland final was another warning signal.

On the Monday night, after the final, Pete told me they had gone to a funeral home to say a prayer for the father of Galway captain John Donnellan, who had actually died during the game. They paid their respects and then came down to Killarney. As my father walked over to his car, which was parked in my uncle Jackie Lyne’s place, he got another pain in the chest. He leaned against the wall with the pain and it took him a good five minutes before he felt well enough to drive.

Driving home that night, they met a gang of fellows from Sneem whose car had gotten a puncture. They had no jack, and Tom, being the strong man he was, lifted the car to help them replace the tyre, which couldn’t have been good for his heart.

On the Tuesday night, he was working in the bar and Jack O’Sullivan Dandy was there with his brother, who was home from England, the last two people left in the place. My father walked out to the yard with Jacko and his brother, said goodnight, and that was it.

So, that Sunday Game moment was a special one, and it was probably my moment of bereavement, of release. It was my way of dealing with his death, something that I had never dealt with. And it’s amazing that I’ve learned so much about him from so many people.

He was a wonderful man, but I have very few clear memories of him. I have a faint memory of him playing with Templenoe the year before he died just to make sure Templenoe had 15 fellas out on the field to keep the club alive. He was responsible for developing the pitch below where I live now, and he served as the chairman of the club. I remember he brought me on in 1963 in an U14 game over in Sneem. There were no organised games at that time, but he’d set up a challenge game and brought me on as a sub. I was seven years old and was probably brought on because he was the team manager.

I can remember literally nothing else about him, just what he looked like and that he was a fair and honest man. A great GAA man and a great Templenoe man. A good man. I suppose that his legacy lived on through his sons on the playing fields, and now through his grandsons.

I got a huge reaction after that episode of The Sunday Game, not just from people getting to realise what I was really like, but also – and this was probably the biggest reaction – I encountered many other people who had suffered bereavement, particularly the deaths of their fathers. The number of people that I met who said, ‘I cried when I was watching you,’ and I’d say, ‘But I don’t know you at all?’ That moment touched a raw nerve with a lot of people, and how perhaps they’d never grieved properly, or they’d never enjoyed time with their fathers properly.

His passing meant our world was suddenly turned upside down. My mother was left with a bar, a shop, a couple of petrol pumps, a hackney car and four young kids to rear. No widow’s pension, no state assistance of any kind at all. The first thing she did? She sold the car because she couldn’t drive.

She reared the four of us and ran the business. That business, when my father died in 1964, was only okay, but in the next 15 to 20 years my mother built it, particularly the bar part, into an absolute success, a huge, huge business that made a lot of money.

She was a great woman. We all like to say of our mothers that they’re the greatest mother of all time, but my mother really was. The death of her husband at a young age obviously made her a hard person. I’m not saying that she wasn’t a loving person, because she was, but life was hard on her. She lost both of her own parents and both of my father’s parents in a very short time, a span of three years in the early sixties, so life had already been very hard on her. She never complained, though. She just got on with it. She never showed emotion. Did I ever see her crying in front of me? No. I told someone that Mam never gave out to us, which she never did – but she didn’t have to, because she had ‘the look’. And that look was enough for her.

But she spoiled us and because I was the eldest I was particularly spoiled. My wife, Rosarii, recently reminded me of all the bad habits that she inherited because of what my mother did for me. An example? My mother didn’t just clean my football boots, she polished them. The woman was trying to run a business, but three big galoots – me, Mike and Tom – would come in from training and my mother would take the boots, wash the boots, clean the boots, polish the boots. She’d wash all our gear, dry and iron it, and put all our gear out, with the holy water sprinkled on it, for games.

During the summer when we’d be training for Kerry, all through the seventies and eighties, we would be sleeping in until one o’clock or two o’clock to get rest for training or for a game. So, when my mother handed me over – reluctantly – to Rosarii, those were part of the instructions. For instance, I never cooked in my life, so Rosarii had to do all the cooking as well.

Clearly, she gave us bad habits. Like a lot of other people learning to drive, I tipped and dented the car a few times. I’d have to explain to her that there was a panel scratched or a bonnet busted. You know what she’d always say? Cars can be replaced. She never gave out. Even if I was in the wrong, her philosophy stayed constant: cars can be replaced.

But Mam didn’t do hugs. She wasn’t one for wishing the best of luck in games. There was little outward display of affection, but she was our rock. Mam parked her life to raise us, and because there were four kids depending on her and on the business, she looked after herself. She fed herself well and was a woman of faith. She knelt at the kitchen table after she locked up the bar and brushed and polished and washed the place. At one o’clock every morning, Mam would be kneeling on the chair at the end of the table saying a full half an hour of prayers.

She worked hard. Never took a day off. Never had staff. Never complained. Ever. Because of that, she never saw us playing football in her life, even as youngsters, and the football pitch in Templenoe is only half a mile away from the house. No distance at all. But she never, ever went to the football field to see us. She watched us if the games were on television in the latter years, but did she wish us luck before the game? Nope. Did she say well done after the game? Nope. She blessed us with holy water on the way out to the game, and all she’d say was ‘Just remember who you are.’

I remember the only time she changed her message. You’d have to have a handle on the local rivalries in Kerry to appreciate it. My mother was from the Legion club in Killarney, because she was part of the Lyne dynasty, and their arch rivals were, and are, Dr Crokes. Always.

The only time – and I mean the only time – my mother ever came into our bedroom the morning of a game was the morning Kenmare District played Dr Crokes in the Kerry county final. She said, ‘Do this for me.’ And the following morning, after we’d beaten Crokes, she came in and hugged us. That was one of the few times we got a hug.

She worked every day in the bar but a door opened from there into the kitchen, so when she cooked she’d have the door open. If somebody wanted a drink, she went through to the bar from the kitchen. She had her own dinner and supper at the kitchen table with the door open. From the time when we were able to do anything at all, we were behind that bar, so from nine or ten years of age, we were working there as well.

And she ran a great bar. In those days, the early to mid-sixties, there was no such thing as tourism as we understand it now. In terms of trade, there was one church nearby, so Sunday was a big day for the bar, but it was just the local population. Maybe one or two people came out from Kenmare the odd time, but that was about it.

She was a very decent woman. When it came to Christmas, there were a lot of big families in the area, and that meant a lot of struggling families. From the late fifties and into the sixties, the area would have been fairly impoverished, and when it came to Christmas and the Christmas box, my mother would put half as much again into the order: food and drink, free, gratis, for people with big families.

She had a book at one stage and there were a lot of people on tick using that book, but there were a lot of people who never paid – never paid to this day. She didn’t chase them down. With funerals, and the free bar for a couple of hours afterwards, there were many times she wasn’t paid. Did she ever go looking for payment? No. That was my mother – kind, caring and generous.

There were old people in the area living on their own, and she looked after them – and she did it because she wanted to do it. Every day without fail, I’d be sent over to an old woman nearby delivering dinner for her made by my mother.

Johnny Bán O’Sullivan was our best customer, one of those fellas who came to the bar every night and who had his own stool. He was my mother’s best friend. She’d send up dinner to Johnny, and she’d send us to town to get his messages for him.

People can talk about bars, and we’ve lost so many of them now, but the bar at that time was the community centre. It was the focal point. Spillane’s, with the bar and the shop and the petrol pumps, was the hub of the community, and she made sure she looked after the people in that community.

* * *

The big day was always the 15th of August because that was the pattern day in Kenmare, the feast day that’s also a gathering day of all the emigrants. They’d all be home for the 15th of August.

It was also the day we dreaded because it was the one day, invariably, that from six or seven o’clock on, there’d be a fight. Or two or three. It was terrible. I remember, as a ten-year-old, standing with my mother as she separated two fighting farmers. That was a regular occurrence. She was a brave woman and she never backed away from them, but their carry-on was selfish. I can see now how horrible it was, and because of rows like that, the 15th was a day we never looked forward to. These were arguments that were like two bald men fighting over a comb – ‘Hold me back’ and all that. But my mother would be the one standing there in the middle of two big old galoots who should have known a lot better.

The other fair days were good days but those were days for fighting as well, because people didn’t come out that often. The farmers only came out for the fair days once a month, and the cattle buyers came once a month, so they wouldn’t be that used to drinking. Because of that, every cattle fair had a row of some description. The sheep fairs were probably worse again, because they were even rarer. The sheep men weren’t drinking twelve times a year like the cattle men and were even less used to alcohol.

Christmas was amazing because that was our next big time. That was when the immigrants came home and, Jesus, they drank and they drank and they drank.

* * *

One of the most famous people in Ireland at that time in the sixties was a big industrialist, Jefferson Smurfit senior, who had a house in Rossdohan, near Tahilla, just ten miles back the road from us. He and his partner were great customers of my mother’s, and they’d drive down from Dublin and stop in my mother’s for an hour or two’s drinking, then get a box filled with whiskey and beer and whatever.

I was the petrol pump attendant and can remember him arriving in the purple Rolls-Royce, which had two tanks in it. At that time, the petrol pump went as far as 10 pounds. So, if you had a car that was taking over 10 pounds (there weren’t many of those at the time, except for Jefferson’s purple Rolls-Royce) you went with the pump as far as 9 pounds 11 shillings and 11 pence, then stopped and started again. To fill the two tanks of Jefferson Smurfit’s Rolls Royce was about 11 pounds in the late sixties.

I remember another number from that time. He said to my mother one time, ‘If you have any money to spare, Mrs Spillane, you should maybe invest in my company.’ Sadly, she didn’t. I remember reading afterwards that if you had £5,000 invested with Smurfit at that time, 20 years later it would have been worth half a million. There you go.

* * *

In the late sixties, the English tourists started to come. We got a great calibre of tourists. A lot of them came to the Great Southern and Parknasilla hotels nearby, and my mother had loyal English tourists who’d visit every year, and they were the kind of tourist that, whatever amount of money they brought with them, they spent every penny of it before they headed home. They had a pre-lunch drink, a pre-dinner drink, drink during dinner, after dinner, all evening. They were really good people and she nurtured that trade. She was very, very popular and she ran a good pub – but no after-hours.

By 1969, nine in ten cars passing by were GB-registered. Unfortunately, when the Troubles broke out, that finished more or less overnight. That was disappointing, but she never complained.

There were other tests. At one point, two guards came out two or three nights a week and parked a squad car behind the bar. They’d go into the kitchen and drink eight or nine pints while my mother would be up and down bringing pints to them, at no charge, as well as looking after the customers out in the bar. In later years, I asked her if they were taking advantage of her, but she said they were protecting her. That was the climate at the time: she thought they were doing a great job. I thought they were just hungry freeloaders.

* * *

When eventually my mother did retire, she retired back to our house. That was progress. In retirement, arthritis hit her, not surprisingly, given she had been 40 years on her feet, but in her eighties, she got her knee replaced and never looked back. My sister Margaret minded her in the latter years, and when I used to come home from teaching I’d visit her in Margaret’s house over in Kenmare. For the last year or two, there was a certain amount of dementia. She’d know you one day, and she wouldn’t know you another, but one day I arrived in and it looked like she was dead.

Myself and my brother-in-law were there, and we didn’t know how to work out for sure if she was dead. We ended up taking out a mirror to try to see her breath but that didn’t work either. We couldn’t figure it out even when we rang my sister, who’s a nurse, for advice. Mam would have laughed away at us – two eejits.

That day I did something that I’d never done before. It came back to me that I’d heard, somewhere along the line, that the sense of hearing is the last thing to go in a person who’s dying. I remember sitting by the bed, and I held her by the hand and said, ‘Mam, I love you.’ I don’t think I had ever said that before to her, but it hit home: she was gone, after all she had done for us.

* * *

After the 1984 or 1985 All-Ireland, I came home with my fourth or fifth All-Ireland medal and a man of the match award under my arm. I should have been back in Templenoe on the Monday night, and when I landed in the door at about seven o’clock on a Wednesday, I was fairly full of the joys. Instead of giving me a hug and congratulating me and saying how proud she was, she just said, ‘You should be home on Monday night, get down to the bar now.’ Winning All-Irelands, working full-time – but still on duty in the bar.

That’s the great thing about Kerry and the great thing about my mother. She kept you grounded. ‘Remember who you are’ was always the last message. Until the day I die, that’s her message to me, and it has carried me through life. That’s the legacy of my mother. That’s who she was, straight down the line.

Her influence remains with me. The way she conducted herself with us as a family but also within the bar, with regular and occasional customers alike, and above all with the community in Templenoe.

CHAPTER 2

TEMPLENOE: THE HOME PLACE

How to describe Templenoe?

As you travel the country, you’ll often see the sign ‘Drive Slow Through Village’. Someone amended the one near Templenoe: ‘Drive Slow (or you’ll miss the) Village’.

Templenoe is a narrow coastal area between the Macgillycuddy’s Reeks and Kenmare Bay, stretching from just outside Kenmare to Blackwater Bridge. There’s a big hinterland behind it heading up towards the mountains, but that’s very sparsely populated. It’s a beautiful scenic area with the Reeks on one side and beaches on the other, and the people of the area are lovely, straightforward, honest and hard-working.

Nearby is Dromore Castle, which was the home of the O’Mahonys. Harold Sigerson O’Mahony from Dromore Castle was the winner of a Wimbledon title and of an Olympic medal in tennis. The O’Mahonys were different people: in the Church of Ireland graveyard here, all the headstones are facing east except for the main headstone of the O’Mahonys, which is facing west. An O’Mahony had always to be buried facing over their estate. Harold probably put us on the map as a tennis champion, though legend has it he came to a bad end after a day’s drinking in Glencar, but that’s another story.

Templenoe might never have figured too prominently on any maps, but it’s a typical rural area on the western seaboard of Ireland, a peripheral location on that seaboard. There’s no village, no employment as such. What do we have at the moment? We have a shop, a pub and two churches, but as of July 2023, the churches closed for mass.

In the sixties, the Templenoe GAA catchment area, to put it that way, had five national schools. But in the last 20 years, nothing. Only for the GAA club, Templenoe wouldn’t have an identity, Templenoe wouldn’t have a future and Templenoe wouldn’t have something to live for.

It annoys me when I hear people say rural Ireland is doing well now. Rural Ireland in certain areas is doing very well. Rural Ireland close to the big cities and big towns is doing well; elsewhere rural Ireland is struggling because there are no jobs, no employment, and the young people are leaving. Templenoe is a good example of that.

I’ve always said that GAA clubs don’t get the credit they deserve. The GAA club everywhere – but particularly in rural Ireland – is the glue that keeps communities together. The GAA’s manifesto sums it up well.

We all belong here. In this place. At this time. We belong not because of who we are or where we come from. Being here means belonging. Belonging means knowing you’re part of a community, a community that has a place for all. Where potential is nurtured, where individuals become teams who honour the legacy of those who went before and strive to build a legacy of their own.

Some of us play. Some of us used to play. Some of us never played. We all belong. Belonging means having a voice, means being able to say what you think is right, being listened to.

Belonging means respecting each other, means being there for each other on the pitch. Off the pitch. Belonging means rolling our sleeves up and doing what needs to be done. We all belong, whether it’s our first day or our hundredth year. We all belong here because this place belongs to us all. Our GAA. Where we all belong.

Add in the old AIB quote ‘You don’t choose your club, you inherit it’, and even if you’re not a GAA person, you get the idea. It’s about identity. Charles Kickham made Knocknagow and the honour of the little village famous. That’s Templenoe too, a GAA club maintained and driven by families who pass the love of the GAA from one generation to the next. But at underage level, we have to amalgamate with other places nearby, like many other clubs.

We’re lucky that we have a senior team. We went to the senior club final in Kerry in 2022, which was a fantastic achievement. Will we be a senior club team in 20 years’ time? Or in 10 years’ time? Probably not, because for little areas it’s cyclical – it’s about population first and foremost. At underage level for U14, U15 and U16, we amalgamate with Tuosist, Sneem and Derrynane. If you go from Tuosist into Kenmare, it’s 20 miles. From Kenmare to the end of Derrynane, it’s another 20 miles. So that’s a 40-mile journey to get one team at each age group, and that’s the reality of a lot of places all over rural Ireland. When you take a step back, it means that south Kerry, an area almost the size of County Louth, is producing one team to play U17 – and playing 13-a-side at that. The GAA club is always the barometer. The canary in the coal mine. Where you see a GAA club struggling to field a team or amalgamating with neighbours to field a team, you know an area is in trouble.

But Templenoe is just a great area. It’s an area of small farmers, an area that the young have always had to leave to get work. But it’s a place with good people who never let you rise above your station, good people that keep you grounded, and I think the GAA club has a lot to do with it. It put Templenoe on the map, and so did the Spillane brothers years ago. Now it’s on the map with my nephews, and Tadhg Morley, and Gavin Crowley.

That’s important. When you come from such a tiny area in Ireland, particularly in the peripheral regions, the automatic thing when you’re asked where you’re from is to name the biggest town near you and say you’re from that area. But we can say we’re from Templenoe and know that people have heard of it, and we’re proud of that.

The late Paudie Palmer, the GAA commentator with County Sound in Cork, was a Templenoe man and a good friend of mine. He always tells people that we brought Sam Maguire eight times to Templenoe but that there was never a bonfire lit when the cup was brought, because you do it and get on with it.

Are there any statues or plaques or any fields named after us? Have we ever been recognised for our achievements? No, but that’s just the way – you shrug the shoulders, keep the head down and keep it going. But at least we can say in our own different ways that we helped Templenoe in some way and we’re proud to be from here.

Templenoe wasn’t a successful club, but if there was a prize for socialising, we’d have won the county title every year. It’s a cliché, but there’s a reason it’s a cliché: it’s true. The club is where you’re with the lads you grew up with, the lads you went to school with – the GAA club is a full cradle-to-grave service. The lads you’re with when you make your first communion will be there in the guard of honour when you’re being laid to rest.

I didn’t have a lot of close friends on the Kerry team I played with, because Kerry’s such a big county, and everyone is spread so far apart. Killarney is the nearest big town and there was no one from Killarney on our team, so it was an hour and a quarter up the road to the Tralee gang, two hours to Páidí Ó Sé out west, and so on.

That meant that after a Munster final in Killarney, I was in Charlie Foley’s with the Templenoe lads or, in Cork, down in the Imperial with the Templenoe lads or, after an All-Ireland final, in McGovern’s or the Cat and Cage in Dublin with the Templenoe lads. They’re my friends.

People often mention Kerry victories to me, but the club victories meant more to me, in all honesty. That’s because of the relationship our family had with the club for decades. My father helped to get the club’s first pitch and was chairman eventually, and in time I was chairman myself.

The monthly meeting of the club was always held in the kitchen of the pub, so from the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper I was around the meetings, listening to what was going on. The AGMs could have a touch of Mrs Doyle in Father Ted about them. There was a certain amount of ‘go on, go on, go on’ when it came to the various jobs in the club, and it only ever became mildly contentious when it came to choosing selectors for the Kerry teams. Even then, Templenoe had a simple rule of thumb when it came time to vote: we always voted for the selector who lived closest to us on the basis that he might look after the Templenoe lads. Not that he might be the best football brain for the sake of the county, but he might be the best option for us. One night, that debate became very technical, and there was a sudden outbreak of geography when a debate got stuck on which was closest to us: Brosna or Lispole. Google Maps would have come in very handy that evening.

I was secretary of Templenoe long before becoming chairman, all the way back in 1978 and 1979. (In those years, while I was sorting out club registrations, I also won two All-Ireland medals, two All-Stars and a Footballer of the Year award.)

I organised tours of London while I was secretary. One particular memory is of our bus breaking down in Knightsbridge, outside Harrods. There’s a photograph somewhere of the lot of us pushing this bus, which has a banner draped over it: ‘Templenoe Football Tour of London’. Harrods is clearly visible in the background.

On that tour, we played a game on a pitch just outside Wormwood Scrubs, and the inmates took a great interest in the game. Or an interest in shouting at us, at least.

‘Go home, Paddy, someone’s screwing your wife,’ and so on.

‘Whoever it is, it’s not you, you bollocks,’ was the usual response.

When I retired from playing, my 30 years with The Sunday Game meant I couldn’t give the commitment to train a team full-time. I trained juveniles, but that was a mistake, particularly when my son Pat was involved. I was too loud, too caught up in the whole thing. Once, as part of a checkup, I was put on a blood pressure monitor for 24 hours. When the nurse checked the reading she said, ‘For 23 hours, your blood pressure was perfect, but between 7 and 8 yesterday it was very high.’ I was training the Templenoe U12s for that hour. That was the spike in blood pressure.

When I became chairman of Templenoe, I learned about a different kind of pressure, one GAA club officers everywhere are familiar with: fundraising. The irony is that I should have been better at that, because the best example of all time, the greatest networker I ever met, was one of my best friends: Páidí Ó Sé.

If you were with a crowd of fellas at a bar counter, Páidí would come over and tap you on the shoulder and say it straight out: ‘Is there anyone here I should know?’ As a networker he couldn’t be beaten. Never missed an opportunity. The greatest example of that was the U2 meeting. The two of us were in a restaurant in Dublin, having dinner with a man who was fairly well-connected himself, when Páidí spotted his prey at a far table.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Bono and The Edge. I’d love to meet them.’

The man we were with – who shall remain nameless – knew Bono to say hello to, so he said he’d make the effort, anyway. He went over to the lads’ table. After a minute, he looked back at our table and nodded. Páidí was over like a shot with the hand out, ‘How are you doing?’

When the pleasantries were over, Páidí arrived back at our table. I could see his mind ticking away still, though, and eventually he piped up again to our go-between: ‘Would there be any chance of a photo with the two lads, do you think?’

Our man groaned. ‘Ah, I don’t know, Páidí, that might be going a bit far. And anyway, we’ve no camera.’

This was before smartphones, so we were stuck. Until Páidí solved the problem by hurling out of the restaurant and coming back with a camera.

To be fair to Bono and The Edge, when our man went back again to see if there was any chance of a snap, they said ‘No bother’ and came and stood in with Páidí for the picture.

I was looking on, shaking my head, when I heard Páidí: ‘Listen, lads, if ye ever come down to west Kerry call into the pub, we’re in Ventry …’

‘We will, we will,’ said Bono, who was clearly on his way out the door for home at this stage of the evening.

‘Look,’ said Páidí, ‘why don’t you give me your number there and I’ll let you know when I’m home if you want to call in?’

I then heard Bono say, ‘Yeah, it’s 087 …’ and he was gone.

Páidí then sat down to finish his dinner, having met Bono and The Edge, having gotten them into a photograph to be put behind the counter of his bar, and having tapped Bono’s mobile number into his own phone for some point in the future when it might come in handy.

At times over the years, I thought the likes of Colm O’Rourke was a good networker. One of his teammates said one time that he’d slagged him: ‘Rourkey, aren’t you lucky that all your pals are multimillionaires?’ But he was in the ha’penny place compared to Páidí. Nobody could network like him. I certainly couldn’t.

* * *

When Catriona McKiernan was running in the London Marathon one time, and going for the world record, I was sent a cutting from an English newspaper which described a press conference she gave beforehand. She was asked who the sportsperson she most admired was, and she gave my name.

The man who sent me the cutting was Arthur Ryan, the head of Penneys in Ireland, and we became friends. We’d meet in the Berkeley Court regularly, and his vision for the business used to amaze me. If I met him on a Saturday evening in the Berkeley Court, he’d have visited four of his stores that day and walked around for an hour in each one, observing what was going on. The reason I mention him is that when Templenoe got their first set of sponsored jerseys, Penneys sponsored them. He was my sole networking contact. I was chairman of Templenoe by then, in the early 2000s, because I wanted to give something back.

We were struggling. We had a pitch with sheep grazing on rushes in the middle of it, with bad drainage, and I felt embarrassed by that. I wanted to do something about it.

I had some great people with me, which is always the key if you become chairman of a club. We were struggling at underage, so we set up a Bord na nÓg within the club that would bear fruit eventually with the senior team we have now, and we started fundraising to develop the pitch. We put in a stand and installed floodlights and eventually got a second field.

The fundraising we approached in two ways. We decided we wouldn’t sell tickets or go door-to-door to collect money; we’d organise a system where you’d become a patron of the club for €1,000 – but you could do so as an individual, a family or a group of families. Or you could become a sponsor for €500.

At the monthly meetings, I’d read out the names: ‘Johnny Murphy became a patron this week …’ and I’d say we ended up shaming a lot of people into becoming patrons.

We also had Jackie Healy-Rae holding the government to ransom at the time, so our timing was good. And he became a patron of the club himself for €1,000, good going for a Kilgarvan man. Jackie was instrumental in getting us lots of Lotto grants. We had a meeting once with the then sports minister, Jim McDaid, which Jackie brokered, and we got a grant of €50,000 out of it.

We got a second grant afterwards, which was great, but to top it all we went looking for a third grant, which was unheard of. What encouraged us was that our constituency had the man holding up the government (Jackie) back the road, and it also had the man who was sports minister (John O’Donoghue, who succeeded Jim McDaid) a bit further back the road.