Its a contentious one… Particularly in smaller clubs where the same group end up playing football, hurling and soccer. There is a feeling that lads become a jack of all trades and a master of none. The there is the issue of pitch slots as yet another group try to carve out pitch time.
That said, variety is the spice of life and lads can make up their own minds.
You left out international paddle boarding
One of the Galway posters might clarify if Sylane is pronounced Sylawn?
Depends where yer from. Most commonly pronounced Sylaan
That’s how I’d pronounce it, but I’ve heard the other version too.
Like the baddies in buck Rodgers
Sigh-lawn is how I always heard it.
which are?!
Battlestar Galactica
Don’t let that Loftus stat fool ya. Still nowhere near county standard and got skinnier if anything.
I don’t think KH is on here mate, though you’d never know.
If he is I beg him to give Ja Man another go
Me too.
How long ago since Richie Cummins was the next great white hope?
Very sad news of the passing of Bevin Sice the wife of former Galway footballer Gary Sice. Bevin passed away after a long illness. Keep her family and friends in your thoughts and prayers at this extremely difficult time.
Has anyone an indo subscription that could copy & paste please?
FRANK ROCHE
NOEL LARKIN, an All-Ireland winning selector with Galway five years ago, and now an incoming Dublin selector with Micheál Donoghue, is not here to talk inter-county hurling.
He’s here to speak about his native Meelick-Eyrecourt, and their neighbouring clubs in east Galway; and, by extension, GAA clubs throughout the length and breadth of rural Ireland.
Shuttered businesses; migration to the cities or, worse, emigration; government policies (or none); dwindling school numbers . . . all these factors are fomenting into a potential perfect storm.
As Larkin surmises, it has ravaged places like the one he calls home. And the collateral damage to GAA clubs in the line of fire?
"They will cease to exist. I’m 100 per cent convinced of that,” he warns.
"Tommy Walsh spoke about it a couple of years ago; he said, ‘In ten years’ time I worry for hurling.’ I do worry for rural GAA clubs, because you’ve seen Shane Walsh going to Kilmacud. Will his club recover from that?
"We lost Niall Corcoran ourselves because he went to Dublin, to Kilmacud, in a coaching capacity, a full-time job.”
But such transfers are merely a symptom of a much deeper problem: what could be described as the slow death of rural Ireland, or at least those parts too far removed from commuterville, and its corrosive impact on the GAA heartlands.
Already we have seen countless amalgamations at juvenile level, but Larkin fears many clubs will be "extinguished” completely.
"I think it’s fast coming down the track, if it keeps going the same trend,” he says.
"People will go to the bright lights, big city, because there’s nothing else for them. And if there’s nothing else for them, they either give up hurling or they transfer.”
This article sprung from a conversation with Tony Kilkenny, a two-time All-Ireland winner with Galway in the 1980s. The original theme was famous clubs fallen on hard times; in his specific case Kiltormer’s decline from the dizzy heights of All-Ireland glory to the basement rungs of Galway intermediate hurling.
As it happened, on Friday of last week, Kiltormer won a pivotal group match against Castlegar’s second team, the current generation holding on manfully to win by 2-18 to 3-10. Relegation play-offs averted, survival assured - for one more year at least.
Even if the result gladdened Kiltormer hearts, it cannot airbrush the bigger debate about their long-term future and that of their adjacent rivals - in that pocket of Galway "out east”, Kilkenny says, paraphrasing Páidí Ó Sé’s famous "out wesht” line about the Dingle Peninsula.
You could not find a place more steeped in hurling history - ancient and modern.
The GAA was officially founded in 1884; earlier that same year, Michael Cusack’s Metropolitans Hurling Club travelled from Dublin to Ballinasloe, there to face Killimor in a challenge match duly halted by Cusack because of the alleged roughness of the opposition (who happened to be leading at the time). This particular east Galway stronghold were initially slow to embrace the nascent GAA - they even published their own ‘Killimor Rules’.
A few years later, the inaugural All-Ireland hurling final of 1887 - hosted by Birr in 1888 - featured a Thurles team representing Tipperary against Meelick of Galway. "Another one we lost!” Larkin quips.
Fast-forward over a century, to 1992, when Kiltormer became the second Galway club to lift the Tommy Moore Cup as All-Ireland SHC champions.
At the time, Portumna could only dream of county championships, let alone loftier goals. Yet between 2003 and 2013 they won six out of 11 Galway SHC titles; then on St Patrick’s Day, 2014, they became All-Ireland champions for a fourth time.
Crisis, what crisis?
Yet Portumna lost a county final in 2014 and haven’t been near one since. At the end of 2020 they were demoted to Senior B.
At least they still have a theoretical shot at this year’s Galway SHC title, having won all three group games to make the knockout stages.
Joe Canning has led by prolific example in all three - but, fast approaching his 34th birthday, Joe won’t be around forever.
What’s clear is that Killimor, Meelick-Eyrecourt, Kiltormer and Portumna, in their own different ways, are struggling.
"Nothing went wrong with us. Nothing. All that happened was numbers,” Kilkenny insists.
"I guarantee you,” he adds, "you go down to the heart of Kilkenny, the heart of Wexford, the heart of wherever . . . we didn’t just pop up, there’s places like us.”
KILLIMOR
Mike Gohery (36), served his time with the Killimor intermediates (their habitat since the late 1980s) and now he’s chairman. His own underage career was invariably spent in the ‘A’ grade, while Killimor’s run to last year’s county IHC final might convince some casual supporters that the club "must be going okay”. But dig deeper, into the underage scene, and you’ll spy trouble ahead.
"We’re hurling B1 or C and, in old money, that’s way down the order. We never play a Clarinbridge or an Athenry or even an Oranmore at this stage. Basically we don’t hurl those clubs anymore.”
Like everywhere else in Galway’s changing landscape, location is key.
"We’re probably about 20 minutes too far away from the motorway,” Gohery reckons.
"From Loughrea into the city, any of those clubs are fine and they’re actually thriving.”
He recalls a club meeting a number of years back, discussing a potential underage merger with Kiltormer. The proposal "came out of left field” and was shot down quickly; he was among the majority who felt they should "fight it out on our own two feet.”
Subsequently Kiltormer joined underage forces with Mullagh. Cue another big decision, in advance of 2021, about a juvenile link-up with Meelick-Eyrecourt: this time there was no resistance.
As Gohery explains: "In the space of three of four years, the penny really had dropped that we’ve absolutely no choice. We either do it or we don’t field.”
The two clubs currently coalesce, from U-15 to U-20, under the Fr Joe Walsh’s banner.
EYRECOURT
Eyrecourt’s last publican standing is a reluctant one; he was already busy enough employing around 50 in Noel Larkin Carpentry. But then its sole surviving pub closed with the Covid lockdown and never reopened.
The premises is undergoing renovations with the view to a Christmas reopening.
"I bought it solely because I can’t go for a drink in my local town,” Larkin explains. "I never had any ambitions to own a pub . . . but if I didn’t buy it, someone else would buy it, take the licence and leave another dilapidated building in the town.”
In rural Ireland there used to be three pillars - church, pub and GAA club, a holy trinity of social outlets now under siege.
For Eyrecourt, according to Larkin, "emigration is the big thing, because people from farming backgrounds are finding it very hard to get planning on their own land for their kids to build houses. If you don’t come from a farming background, trying to buy a site, to get planning is near impossible.
"We don’t have a council sewerage scheme in the town; they don’t want to give planning. There are still some houses in the area with no access to water schemes. There’s nothing being done from a broadband point of view that people can work from home.
"We’re 45 minutes from Galway, an hour from Limerick, and hour-and-a-half from Dublin on the motorway . . . like, it’s a no-brainer (for young people) to live here as opposed to paying extortionate rent and house prices in Dublin and Galway.
"But there has to be something to incentivise people to move back to rural towns. I think the Government are killing us.”
He recalls growing up in Eyrecourt when you had seven pubs in the area, six in the village alone, all family owned.
"There was four groceries, a shoe shop, hardware, petrol station, sweet shop, post office, butchers - it was a thriving town. And now we’re down to one pub currently being renovated, a grocery shop and a chemist.”
You can surmise how this erosion impacted on the GAA club. Demoted from senior in 2006, Meelick-Eyrecourt are enduring their longest ever spell in intermediate. They face a quarter-final against Abbeyknockmoy next weekend.
Larkin recalls how in a two-year window during the last recession, around 2011-'12, they lost between 15 and 20 junior or intermediate players to emigration. Most went to Australia, yet to return.
"We’ve lost a whole generation, and signs are on now - my own brother being one of them,” he reveals. "We’re missing out on their kids coming through the schools now and ultimately feeding into the GAA club to keep the numbers strong.”
PORTUMNA
Eoin Lynch loved those big days out in Croker. He started all four victorious All-Ireland finals for Portumna - in 2006, '08, '09 and '14. For the latter, against Mount Leinster Rangers, he was ‘Man of the Match’.
He’s retired now but still immersed in the club, training the youngest of wannabe Joe Cannings, mostly aged between five and seven.
Their highest number ever at training was 21, but 12 to 14 constitutes a good day and it has dipped as low as six.
"When we get to U-11 and U-13, it’s not as if we can just magically drop in players,” he reflects.
"So it is going to be a real challenge to get 15 players, or to get 18 to 20 players. There’s great work being done, it’s nobody’s fault. It’s actually just a case, in the last few years, there’s been a plethora of girls.”
With its idyllic Shannonside location, Portumna has lots to offer but it’s still a parish of less than 1,200. "We’ve wonderful amenities - I always say we live in a resort!” says Lynch. With one caveat: its only hotel burned down in 2011 and was never rebuilt, and any town with serious tourism aspirations needs a good quality four-star offering.
"They are also just a tad too far away from big population centres like Galway, Limerick and Athlone.
According to Lynch, the offspring of traditional hurling families are still playing but some others who moved into the area have not taken up the sport.
"I coach the underage rugby, the same group essentially, but we attract much bigger numbers because it’s not based on the parish. We can attract them from north Tipperary, some from east Clare, and then we get them from other neighbouring parishes as well.”
Rugby isn’t the only threat; local soccer facilities have also improved. Hence the risk that if they can’t compete and retain the interest of those younger players who show huge potential, "we are in danger of losing them to other sports”.
For all that, Lynch points to some green shoots - a recent Galway Community Games title, another U-13 success.
"We have that identity, so I’m still very confident that Portumna will compete,” he maintains.
"But for us to be successful again, you’re relying on maybe four, five or six different age groups so there would be a dispersion of maybe 12 years between players at senior level.”
Can he see a day where Portumna might ever compete for a fifth All-Ireland?
"You might think we’re maybe dreaming a little bit, but I certainly still can.”
KILTORMER
As he talks, Tony Kilkenny can see Castlegar GAA club on his right - flanked by two cranes climbing in the skyline.
Here, on the outskirts of Galway city, another slew of housing units are being built, "so they’re going to become Castlegar”.
This is no slight on a rival club, merely a comparison to underline the plight of Kiltormer.
"Our population has absolutely gone into atrophy,” he states, bleakly. "Six years ago, I was chairman of our club and I did the demographics of our area. We’ve three schools; we had 92 kids in total.
"We were getting beaten off the face of the earth at that stage, at the lowest level of juvenile,” he adds.
"I looked and I said, ‘Oh my God. This is ridiculous’ . . . even from a child welfare perspective, you couldn’t condone what was going on.”
So, what’s the solution?
Does one even exist?
During his time as chairman, Kiltormer took the first step: they joined forces with Mullagh - "probably our worst enemy” - at juvenile level.
It was a necessary step but "this is still not solving the problem,” he admits, adding: "This thing of joining the neighbour may not necessarily be the solution, because the demographics and the numbers in Mullagh are no good either.”
All of which has convinced Kilkenny that more radical solutions are necessary for the GAA to still thrive in places like east Galway.
He’s talking about bigger, bolder mergers.
"There has to be a template put in place. Nearly something you can buy from the GAA,” he suggests.
Listing out a handful of Galway clubs in the Shannon hinterland, he adds: "There’s a little group there, and really the GAA needs to look and say we need to harness some kind of integration, co-ordination, whatever word you put on it, and work with these.
"Because otherwise we have no chance, there’s not a notion that we can ever have another game on the same field as the likes of those boys (Castlegar).
"If you keep playing with lower levels, that’s the level you’ll be. But we also have a duty of care to produce. In my time we used to call it county minors, now it’s ‘A’ players.”
The next logical step, he agrees, is that you could eventually end up with an East Galway team competing at senior level.
"There’s a wrong fear out there, that those lesser players will get lost in the bigger (entity) - they won’t,” he insists.
"If we’re able to join two clubs that hate one another, and we managed, most definitely, I have no problem sitting with anyone and saying five of our clubs can join together and we’ll have an A team, a B team, a C team and whatever.”
And while it would be "a pity” to lose the Portumnas and Kiltormers of the earth, he adds: "We’re blessed. We got on the alumni list. Portumna would have absolutely franked that, but we sit in the same sentence as them.”
For many, these ideas may read like heresy . . . but as Kilkenny points out, he is a "diehard of the GAA in the bigger picture, I’m not a diehard of Kiltormer”.
Clubs like his own are "going through a grieving process” but there is a will to "stay at the table. GAA clubs don’t go away. They’re trying to survive.
And the only way they’ll survive is if they join up with others.”
Thank you
East Galway is steeped in GAA history and laden with All-Ireland club titles. Why, then, are some famous clubs stretched for numbers and facing an existential threat?
Brendan Dervan of Kiltomer, Kenneth Kelly of Meelick-Eyrecourt, Eoin Lynch of Portumna and Killimor Secretary Sinead Dervan at the Portumna GAA pitch. Photo: Don Moloney
The way it’s going unfortunately. The hurling clubs in far south east Galway and the football clubs in far north east of the county seem to be the hardest hit. They are too far away from Galway to be in the commuter belt. Stagnant or dwindling populations. Nobody bar themselves seem to care while the GAA is throwing money at urban centres.