Alright-Sort of the year - 2021

Things
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‘Are you David Brady?’

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Fucking hell. That’s who the Mayo caller was. My mate said he reckoned he did some telly stuff and was called Danny and I couldn’t figure it out

My mate would have a basic knowledge of Tipp hurling and no other sport beyond that

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Brady and Alan Brogan have been at it the past few weeks

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Brilliant. Just dug up this tweet and sent it to my mate

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He just confirmed Tom is the neighbour @myboyblue

[01/05, 11:16 p.m.] : Dave Brady was the guy yeah
[01/05, 11:16 p.m.]: He hooked up the Bonner

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David Brady

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Brady spoke about this on an Off The Ball podcast about 2 weeks ago. Well worth a listen. The tweeness is off the charts but it’s very good.

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It was very good. Brady is a bit of an eejit but a nice old devil id say behind it all

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It’s a time for tweeness mate. We all have to get through this somehow.

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Governor Cuomo

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Brother Chris Gault

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Brady, in action for Mayo, was wondering how he could help during the pandemic

DAMIEN EAGERS

Michael Foley

Sunday May 17 2020, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times

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It began with a random tweet on Easter weekend from a man called Kevin to David Brady, chancing his arm. Kevin’s father, Tom, was an elderly Mayo man in Wicklow, cocooning and struggling with the silence. Could David ring him? Maybe talk football a little bit?

Brady rang him. They talked football and cattle and everything in between. Both of them put the phone down feeling good. Better than good.

“Coming into this I was wrecking my head, saying I want to do something. What can I do? How can I volunteer? How can I give my time? I work in the pharmaceutical sector around oncology. I have friends on the front line, doctors and nurses. I felt a little bit useless until this came to me. Once I had that phone call with Tom in Wicklow, I said that’s it. That’s how I can do my bit.”

Brady threw up a tweet with the hashtag #GoodToTalkGAA, offering his time to call any elderly relative or friend who might need a chat. Brady reckons he’s made maybe half a dozen calls every day since Easter Saturday. Some days it’s climbed to eight. By this evening that will amount to the guts of 250 conversations. None of them last less than 15 minutes. Many of them amble easily along for three-quarters of an hour.

“I rang a man the other day,” he says, “I says ‘Michael, how are you doing?’ he says ‘David, how are you keeping?’ ‘I’m not too bad, Michael,’ I said. ‘You know what,’ he says, ‘you’re some man ringing back checking on me’. I’m thinking I thought I was ringing for the first time!”

Others have followed. The Monaghan football team made themselves available, some GAA people in Wicklow as well. Johnny Doyle, the great Kildare footballer, offered his time. Eoin Liston sent out word from Kerry that the lines to some of the greatest footballers of them all were open. “When I saw the Bomber opening up the Bomberline,” says Brady. “I’d nearly have asked to be rang too.”

He begins every conversation with the same introduction: “I’m David Brady, I played football for Mayo for 14 years and I’m just ringing to see how you’re keeping and maybe chat a bit of football.” Like his introduction, that only skims the surface. GAA, Brady says, is merely the fossil fuel for any conversation.

People have taken him back down the decades through the halls of their lives. They have shown him pictures on the walls: their sons and daughters, husbands and wives. Some dead. They haven’t been afraid to talk about that either. “Maybe it’s our own generation that are afraid to talk about loss,” he says.

One day Brady sensed a man on the line getting emotional. “His words to me were ‘I don’t know did I tell her I loved her this week’. His wife had gone into hospital two days previously, this was at the peak of the virus. She went in with gallstones. He says ‘I don’t know will I ever see her again.’”

Brady checked on him after that. He did.

“If I was to put all the negativity I’ve heard into a bucket, it’d be a very empty bucket. That’s the constant. Everything else has been positive and looking forward to the grandchildren, looking forward to meeting friends for a game of cards. It’s looking forward.

“I’ve heard fear. That’s a very important thing to know as well. That poor man whose wife was gone into hospital, he had fear but I wouldn’t see it as negativity. I’m listening to people talk about good times, good communities, good deeds. Things people are just doing in their life, not because it’s lockdown or Covid. It’s inspiring.”

He thinks of the man who told him of a visit one day from people down the road he didn’t know, offering to get his shopping for him. “That was my worry,” he told Brady. “The food.”

The neighbours left the shopping on his front gate. He left an envelope for them with the money in it. “The man who continues driving cancer patients to their appointments,” says Brady. “We were talking about conversations. I was saying we’re having a very personal conversation now. ‘I have them too in the car when I’m driving people. They’re strangers when they get in the car but they’re telling me things they wouldn’t say at home.’

“That’s what I love doing, being there listening to people. Someone you’ve never met before tells you something about themselves. That’s what I call therapy. I’ve had it reflected to me and back.”

He rang Paddy Prendergast one evening, the last surviving member of Mayo’s cherished All-Ireland winning team from 1951, 94 years old now and living in Tralee. As a child in Ballina, Brady was reared on stories of their adventures, the names stitched into his memory. He had met Prendergast at a few games. “I didn’t know whether to shake hands or bow to him,” he says.

Brady was full of questions. What did it feel like, winning an All-Ireland? What was the homecoming like? Tell us about the players, what made them great? Prendergast’s answers steered him down a different path. “It’s about family and friends,” Prendergast said. “Not All-Irelands. That’s what it is. That’s what carries you forward.”

They finished up with Prendergast wishing him well. “Aren’t you awful good to call,” he said. “And I’m going, I’d have given my left arm to make that phone call,” says Brady.

His conversations have taken him to foreign lands, some friendly. Others hostile. There was Christy the Dub. “I hear you’re a true Blue, Christy,” said Brady. “With that accent you’re definitely not,” Christy replied.

When Brady introduced himself the line went quiet, like the eerie silence between the great artillery barrages of the First World War and the men being sent over the top. “Well let me tell you first David,” said Christy. “What you did in 2006 taking over the Hill was wrong. I just want to say that.”

“I got both barrels straight down the line,” says Brady. “Twenty-five minutes later we were having great crack.”

He got talking last week to a Clare man exiled to Galway. Hurling was his game, not football. Henry Shefflin was the man. When Brady finished the call, he dropped Shefflin a line. Shefflin rang him Wednesday evening.

“If you’re a hurling man in your eighties,” he says, “and you’re in the house on your own. And the King himself, who’s won 10 All-Ireland medals, Henry [rings]. He brought him back through the decades. That’s the ripple in the pond. Henry took time out to ring and I can guarantee you Henry got out as much as that man did. If the likes of Henry Shefflin can pick up the phone and ring a man for a conversation about hurling, that, for me, is contagious. That cures more than you could imagine.”

What next? Brady will keep making calls as long as people keep asking him. A couple of weeks back he received a letter from President Michael D Higgins, just to thank him. “TarraingaĂ­onn scĂ©al scĂ©al eile,” he wrote. One story leads to another. Something about all this feels too right to be let go when this is over.

“What I find is people get lonely and isolated, even in the best of times,” says Brady. “Sometimes it’s you and the clock ticking in the background for a lot of hours in the day. How can we, as a society and individuals, stir up that murky water?”

For now he is listening and learning, bringing light and hope where darkness and despair might gather. “I’ve been hearing that book of life since Easter Saturday,” says Brady. “And what life really means.”

Same for those on the other end of the line

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Ah lads :clap::clap::clap::clap:

Thats fucking brilliant in fairness. Fair play to Brady. He was great on off the ball talking about it, knew when i heard it wasn’t just a stunt that he was actually enjoying it.

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That’s superb.

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Daniel O’Donnell

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Lenny abrahamson

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Hook number 7 immediately.

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Oh and, further proof that goalies are idiots.

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I was thinking as much no interest in defending left him run through like that

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O Meara’s sliotars.
I ordered a dozen championship ones there, as the kids have them lashed into every back and front garden on the street. Arrived to manc three days later with a nice little note. Lovely feel to them and outstanding value.
Seamus* the note was from.

  • Actually Sean.