GAA
Seanie McMahon and Gary Kirby recall a golden era when Limerick and Clare were high kings of Munster
Denis Walsh
Sunday June 05 2022, 12.01am BST, The Sunday Times
McMahon, left, and Kirby were among the figures who came to define the intense rivalry that once existed between Clare and Limerick
INPHO/BEN BRADY
The referee Willie Barrett threw the ball in to start the 1994 Munster final and stood back from the blast. Christy Chaplin pulled; Gary Kirby flicked the loose ball into his stride, and whipped; John O’Connell stopped it and then missed it with an anxious swipe; Mike Galligan tried to pick the ball up and it scurried away; Andrew Whelan made a tentative stroke, as if addressing a downhill putt, and the ball moved just six paces; Chaplin had another go; then Mike Houlihan planted his feet and flaked the bewildered ball.
After 12 seconds of being trapped in the space between the two 65s, and without being touched by a hand, the ball was finally released into the wild. The crowd roared for every swing, wound up and wired.
Around that time Clare and Limerick were a headline act, liberated, at last, from a submissive role in other counties’ triumphs. By then, Munster finals had been in existence for over a century, but before 1994 only four of them had been decided between Clare and Limerick; then along came another pair of finals, back-to-back and coupled.
“Clare came in that day with nothing only murder on their minds. Our milkman still talks about it”
INPHO/BILLY STICKLAND
By the time they met in the 1996 Munster semi-final, on a hot, delirious day in Limerick, both of them were front runners for the All-Ireland: Clare as defending champions, Limerick as their vengeful assassins. It was the final game of a trilogy that still stands as the golden period in their blistering rivalry.
Tens of players appeared in those three games, but only Seanie McMahon and Gary Kirby lined up as direct opponents in all of them: centre back and centre forward. In those days, when hurling’s tactical compass didn’t deviate much from north and south, what happened between the number six and the number 11 was a hinge on which games swung.
In 1994, McMahon was a 21-year-old rookie in his breakthrough season; Kirby was the Limerick captain and had been their best forward for years. For individual battles between backs and forwards the win-lose equation was easily deciphered in those days: did he score? How much? “I definitely remember thinking going out, ‘Keep him scoreless,’” says McMahon now. “That was gone after about 40 seconds.”
That day, McMahon was tied to the rack and pulled in every direction. By half-time Kirby had landed a couple of points from play, and at the break the Clare management blinked and switched him to the wing. Galligan delivered his best ever performance for Limerick in that Munster final, and five of his seven points came on McMahon’s watch in the second half.
“I wasn’t physically strong enough, and I wasn’t fast enough, and I wasn’t aggressive enough,” says McMahon. “At that level, its kill or be killed. I’m not talking about dirt, but you do what you have to do, or you’re going to be blown away. That’s what happened to me, with Galligan in particular. I got an awful scalding. Limerick walked that game. I was lucky to play for Clare again.”
Everything has a context. Clare were humiliated by Tipperary in the previous year’s Munster final, and as soon as the draw pitted them against Tipp in the 1994 championship it was their only focus. The straight knock-out championships were a a fertile breeding ground for obsessions. “That was my first year,” says McMahon, “and the day we went back training we started counting the weeks – 25, 24, 23.” The Munster final didn’t occupy their minds all winter; there wasn’t room.
Limerick had their own demons. For four years in a row, at the turn of the decade, they lost to Tipperary by an aggregate total of 40 points. Kirby was at Kinsale point-to-point races with his wife on the day Clare beat Tipp in the 1994 championship, listening to the game on the radio. As soon as Tipp were eliminated, the clouds parted.
In the early Nineties, ever before they started meeting in the spotlight, Clare and Limerick spent a lot of time squatting in each other’s personal space: League games, pitch openings, challenge matches. “Looking back on it, if truth be told,” says McMahon, “we didn’t like each other [Clare and Limerick]. We were playing each other so much, and you might have the odd stroke here and there. They just had to happen.”
In November 1994 they met in the League at the Gaelic Grounds and, at one stage, all hell broke loose. Jim McInerney from Clare and Declan Nash from Limerick were both sent off and given three month suspensions.
In Unlimited Heartbreak , Henry Martin’s account of Limerick’s long quest for an All-Ireland, Stephen McDonagh said it was “the dirtiest game” he played in. “There was serious belting,” he said. “Clare came in that day with nothing only murder on their minds. It was lethal. Our milkman is still talking about it.”
“The rivalry didn’t really hit until then,” says Kirby.
Eight months later, they met again in the Munster final. Limerick slayed the Tipp dragon in the semi-final; of Limerick’s 16 points, Kirby scored 12 and was carried shoulder-high from Pairc Ui Chaoimh. McMahon watched from the stand, nursing a broken collar bone from Clare’s semi-final win over Cork, a fortnight earlier.
He was in a race against time to be ready. “The first training session I did was on the Tuesday before the Munster final,” says McMahon. “That time it was all drills and I must have hit 100 balls. I couldn’t lift my shoulder after it. I thought, ‘Gone — haven’t a hope.’”
“It’s kill or be killed. I’m not talking about dirt, but you do what you have to do”
RAY MCMANUS/SPORTSFILE
On Thursday the Clare manager Ger Loughnane arrived into the place in Shannon where McMahon worked and told him he was being sent to a “shoulder specialist in Cork [that evening]. It was Dr Con Murphy [the Cork team doctor]. I went into Con and I did about four press-ups. I don’t think I could have done a fifth. He kind of brushed off me, and he said, ‘You’re bang on for Sunday.’ It was probably all I needed, some kind of re-assurance.”
On the Friday night Clare trained behind closed doors, finishing with a short game of backs and forwards; every puck-out was landed on McMahon and PJ O’Connell, his marker. “I was eating a bit of food with PJ afterwards and he said he was told, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go near him.’”
On match day, Kirby had different instructions. “I was told, ‘You know he has a weak shoulder, don’t be holding back,’” says Kirby. “I was never that type of player, but it was mentioned to me before the game, and I won’t say it wasn’t.”
In the event, it was Frankie Carroll who rattled McMahon with a high tackle after about 20 minutes; the Clare captain Anthony Daly went straight in to jostle Carroll, then Kirby followed Daly in to equalise the jostling. “A real flare-up here,” said Ger Canning in the RTE commentary. “It was a dangerous tackle by Frankie — head high,” said the co-commentator Eamon Cregan.
A few minutes later, Kirby was in bother again. Davy Fitzgerald marched up field to bury a penalty for Clare, but before he could get home Limerick had taken the puck-out and Kirby caught it, 50 yards from the Clare goal. Immediately he was surrounded by three Clare players. In the footage you can see Fitzgerald sprinting past, just as Ollie Baker flattens Kirby with a drive-by shoulder into the chest.
“A full frontal attack,” said Cregan. “It looked ugly, and it was,” said Canning.
“It was Ollie’s way of letting me know, ‘You’re not going to get it easy today,’” says Kirby. “That was the huge difference between ’94 and ’95. We definitely took them seriously in ’95, but because of what happened the year before you had this thing in the back of your head, ‘We’ll take them.’ We were chilled out going down to Thurles. We were relaxed, there’s no point saying we weren’t. Maybe a bit too relaxed.
“But we weren’t able to match the intensity they brought. We weren’t ready for a physical battle. All of a sudden, we were getting hit, whereas the year before we weren’t getting hit.”
In Unlimited Heartbreak the Limerick manager Tom Ryan accused Clare of “timbering” his players that day. Neither Kirby nor McMahon accept that characterisation. “I would never say they were dirty,” says Kirby. “It was physical. They bullied us.”
“That was our third Munster final in a row,” says McMahon. “We’d lost the League final as well [that year]. There was no way we were going to be as passive as we were the year before. We’d have done whatever we had to do to win that game. We’d have gone to the bottom of the well because we couldn’t afford to lose.”
“It hasn’t been a classic,” said Canning in commentary, “but if you’re from Clare, who cares?”
Clare manager Ger Loughnane celebrates after Clare beat Limerick
INPHO/TOM HONAN
That day, Clare won their first Munster title in 63 years. Pandemonium.
Back then, things were done differently. Some stuff was looser. In the dressing room before the 1995 Munster final, Kirby remembers team-issue polo shirts being thrown to the players by the county secretary, almost as if he had suddenly remembered. The Limerick players used to travel in their own cars, too, jousting with the match day traffic. Before one game in Cork, Kirby remembers driving for a stretch on the wrong side of the road, with Ciaran Carey in the passenger seat and young Barry Foley in the back.
Clare only started using a team bus in 1995. Before that Munster final they checked into the Cashel Palace Hotel, miles from the match day frenzy, and took a morning nap. A year later, for the Munster semi-final against Limerick in the Gaelic Grounds, they took a team bus for the short journey from Ennis, too.
“It was an unbelievable day,” says McMahon. “I remember coming in on the bus from the Coonagh roundabout, and once you got to the top of the hill all you could see was about 20,000 people. You couldn’t see a square inch of road.”
Limerick were waiting. For 11 months, Clare had been tattooed on their minds. All the while, the duel between the Clare centre back and the Limerick centre forward continued to climb in market value: McMahon went into the 1996 championship as the reigning Hurler of the Year; Kirby had been the All-Star centre forward for two years in a row. Not an inch.
Just before half-time Kirby broke through for the only goal of the game, but deep in the fourth quarter Clare were in command. McMahon scored Clare’s 15th point to put them three clear, and in a low-scoring game, on a scorching day, it seemed like a winning lead. In the live TV coverage Tomas Mulcahy was asked for his man of the match and he gave it to Brian Lohan, the Clare full-back.
But in the space of a few convulsive minutes, everything changed. With time up, the teams were level. Fitzgerald screwed his body into a Clare puck-out and landed it on the Limerick 45; Carey caught it, and took off. Fergal Hegarty chased him, and chased him, until he stumbled. By the time Hegarty fell, Carey was in McMahon’s neighbourhood. The emergency response was muddled.
“I always would have thought, as a back, if there’s someone with the guy [chasing] you hold,” says McMahon. “If I went out to meet Ciaran, he would have popped it straight over my head to Gary, and it would have been a guaranteed score. The mistake I probably made was that it got to a certain stage where I probably should have gone. Michael O’Halloran [Clare corner back] was telling me afterwards that he was roaring at me to go, because he was going to come out [and cover]. But I couldn’t hear him. Then it went too late. Hego slipped at the last second.”
“At that stage,” says Kirby. “I don’t know where Ciaran even got the energy to hit the ball.” On the run, off his hurley, on his bad side, after 71 minutes of mayhem in the pulverising sun, Carey scored one of the greatest winners of all time.
They didn’t meet in the championship again for ten years. Kirby was long retired by then; McMahon was in his final season. In a mid-summer qualifier in Ennis, Clare crushed them by 17 points. The Limerick manager Joe McKenna resigned after the game. A week later, Richie Bennis took over the team, with his nephew Gary Kirby as his first lieutenant. The cycle continued.
Previous Limerick v Clare Munster finals
1918 Sept 15, Thurles: Limerick 11-3, Clare 1-2
1955 July 10, Limerick: Limerick 2-16, Clare 2-6
1974 July 28, Thurles: Limerick 6-14, Clare 3-9
1981 July 5, Thurles: Limerick 3-12, Clare 2-9
1994 July 10, Thurles: Limerick 0-25, Clare 2-10
1995 July 9, Thurles: Clare 1-17, Limerick 0-11
Played 6, Limerick 5, Clare 1
• 24 years since Clare won their last Munster hurling title
• 4 straight Munster titles — Limerick can achieve this for the first time
