Same as rugby players here.
Media, Coaching, Corporate events etc
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Another headshot for Parkinson 
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Oh hes mugged wooly right off there 
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Give generously lads 
I’d say there might be a few people in the world that have a higher opinion of themselves than the pretentious cunt that is “PM” but I doubt it.
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The day when a leaving cert Hughie Emerson went above and walked all over the cunts.
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Can someone post this please, Colm was a lovely lad 
Here you go bud
The ties that bind
25 years after tragedy struck the Maher family, memories remain vivid of how Portarlington rallied around in support of their own
DERMOT CROWE
It didn’t take long for Martin Dempsey and Colm Maher to hit it off. They were already good friends when they played on the Laois side beaten by Meath in the Leinster final 30 years ago this summer. Dempsey, a few years older, first made the championship team in 1985 while Maher was still in school. He came from farming stock and played for St Joseph’s. Maher was a town boy, from Marian Hill, a row of 22 houses in Portarlington, right on the border with Offaly at the north east end of the county.
Dempsey was a hardy, no-frills full-back and Maher made his reputation as a fast and diminutive forward. But despite their differences they clicked when Maher was brought into the Laois panel by Richie Connor. "Sure everyone loved Colm,” says Dempsey. "If you didn’t get on with Colm Maher, you would get on with no one. That’s the way he was.”
A memory flashes. "We had a match against Portarlington in Timahoe. As usual we ended up in the pub after. I had to go home and milk the same evening. Colm said he would come and milk with me. Sure Colm wasn’t built for milking cows, his arms were too short. We went back anyway and milked the cows and towards the end he says to me, ‘Are you not going to milk the brown cow?’ He was talking about the bull. He was serious.”
When the Laois squad went away on a foreign trip, the two players roomed together. They were soldiering in the same trench in Navan when Laois shocked Meath in the 1992 Leinster Championship and shared their last county campaign in 1995, after which Dempsey retired. Later the same year, Portarlington beat St Joseph’s in the county final.
"I remember Colm catching a ball off one of our bigger players near the end of the game,” says Dempsey. "I remember thinking he shouldn’t be catching that ball, you know, he was so small. As a footballer he had a huge engine, for a small man he could stay going all day. He’d never stop, be popping up all over the place. His attitude in training was great. After matches he was always a great character, he enjoyed himself.”
In 1996, the same clubs met again in the county final, St Joseph’s winning this time, but their world had irrevocably changed. In June, Colm Maher died after a house fire that also killed his mother, two of his brothers and three sisters. The eldest of 11, he died trying to save members of his family, heading back into the flames. He survived for a few days with severe burns before dying on June 5, aged 27.
"I know exactly where I was,” says Martin Dempsey. "I do a bit of hire work. I was in a field not too far from Athy. Sure we were stunned. I knew the family as well, from meeting them after matches. You couldn’t meet nicer, terrible friendly, full of chat. Hard to believe.”
Marian Hill is located near the River Barrow that runs through Portarlington. The Mahers lived at number one, the end house nearest the busy Edenderry Road. Alo Maher worked for many years just a short walk away in the local ESB station until it closed. In his younger years he played football with Portarlington before focusing on work and rearing a large family. His wife, Breda, came from the Offaly side. The first eight children were all boys and then Joanne arrived, to much delight, the first of three girls.
Niall Slevin was a friend of Colm Maher from as early as he can remember and lived a few minutes away. He spent much of his time in the Maher home, a small three-bedroom dwelling. "Whenever any of my sisters were getting married, I would always bring Colm to the wedding,” Slevin says, laughing. "He was my social partner at three or four of my sisters’ weddings.”
They played football all the way up as juveniles, but in adulthood Colm moved on to a different plane. In 1988, Portarlington won their first senior title since 1959, with Colm Maher introduced as a teenager late on in the final against Timahoe. He won his second medal in 1995 and became an established county forward.
Like all talented players he seemed in a hurry to achieve things. "We won all the championships in Laois in 1983 up to minor,” says Niall Slevin. "He was under 14 with me. He also won under 15 seven-a-side, 16s, 17s, he was in goals for the under 17s, and he was sub goalie for the minors.”
Slevin speaks warmly of his time spent in the Maher family home. "You were always welcome. I was up there for years and years and never a cross word. They were the happiest people I’ve ever come across.
"I have to tell you this story. We were about 18 at the time, I will never forget it. At the time nobody went into maternity wards. They had eight boys at this stage and we were in the house when Alo ran up, to John Whelan’s, to get the phone call. Breda was in having a baby. It was Joanne, the first girl. It was a Saturday afternoon. And when he came back down to the house and shouted that it was a girl, it was like Laois winning an All-Ireland, everybody went berserk, I swear to God, I’ll never forget it. There were things being thrown up in the air, it was unreal.”
On June 2, it will be 25 years since the tragedy, in the early hours of Sunday morning. Breda (48), her sons Mark (23) and Barry (12), daughters Joanne (9), Fiona (6) and Martina (2) died in the fire. Colm, seriously injured, was taken to hospital in Tullamore along with two other brothers for treatment before being moved to St James’s in Dublin.
Alo Maher (48), and his sons Vincent (17) and Dominic (11) survived the fire. Three other sons, Alo junior (24), Paul (21) and Brendan (14) were not in the house at the time. On the following Wednesday, six of the family were laid to rest in Portarlington. Two days later Colm Maher’s funeral took place.
Local curate PJ Byrne hailed the footballer’s courage at his funeral Mass. "When you picture Colm’s last moments, scripture comes alive. No greater love can a man have than to lay down his life for his brother.”
The GAA got behind the fundraising effort that followed but they had help from every quarter. Several thousand pounds was donated by Portlaoise prison officers. The Leinster Council of the GAA contributed £10,000. By the time of the funerals, £50,000 had come in. There were numerous private donations from people all over the country and abroad, small amounts with messages of sympathy. "I would say it was a Herculean effort,” says Joe O’Dwyer, a long-time Portarlington GAA volunteer and former chairman, who was involved in the early fundraising efforts. "The generosity was phenomenal.”
In a couple of weeks the fund was up to almost £300,000. A committee of local trustees was established to look after the fund and safeguard the family’s interests. Left homeless by the fire, the surviving family members had to be found temporary accommodation until, before Christmas that year, the family moved back into 1 Marian Hill, a new home having been built.
"The whole town was devastated,” says Niall Slevin. "There were people lining the streets and we carried Colm’s coffin the whole way up the town, in relay. At that time Port’ had probably only 4,000 people in it, now there is around 9,000. There wasn’t anybody that wasn’t affected in some way by it. He was very popular with his Laois teammates. The GAA is an unusual thing in that it looks after the people, it looks after everybody. It is like the older brother you haven’t spoken to for a couple of months. You never lose the connection.
"In hard times, GAA clubs are brilliant, any GAA club. You’ll fall out, you won’t talk, and yet when trouble comes to your door, everybody rallies around. They will always look after you, no matter what.”
Initially there was hope that Colm Maher would pull through. "We had been at a wedding on the Friday and went out then on the Saturday night,” says Slevin. "I went home a bit early and Tom Garry called very early on Sunday morning. That was it really. Myself and Tom went over to Tullamore to see him, but we couldn’t get in. I went up that Sunday night (to Dublin) and they let me in.”
Tom Garry is from the Gracefield side of the border, where the allegiance is to Offaly, but many of his friends are Portarlington people. "He was extremely good fun,” says Garry. "He had an infectious personality, he would have everybody in a good mood. One of these guys that would walk in and light up a room. Now he didn’t suffer fools either. The whole town was numb for months after it. Me, personally, it affected me big time. I was in the hospital with him for a few days.”
Different groups of footballers from Laois and Portarlington carried the coffin to his final resting place in St Michael’s cemetery on the following Friday. "I remember standing beside (Laois player) Pat Roe in the graveyard,” says Martin Dempsey. "We were a long way from the priest but you could hear every word. There was complete silence.”
Alo Maher died in February 2006 at just 58. Everyone said the tragedy had taken its toll. By then Paul Maher was in Australia. He came home for the funeral, went back for a few months and then returned for good. He is now married with five young children and lives a short distance outside the town.
Alo junior, a year younger than Colm, is also settled locally and married with four children. He won county intermediate medals in 1990 and '91. He describes Colm as "small but hardy”. Only 11 months separated Alo and Colm. "We were Irish twins,” says Alo. "He was February '69 and I was January '70. Mark was next. He was 23. Then Paul. Then Vincent. Then Brendan, Dominic, Barry. Then the three girls.”
After Alo senior died the family continued to live at Marian Hill, before it was sold and they moved on with their own lives. Alo senior lived long enough to see Paul win a county senior medal with Portarlington in 2001. It was their first win since 1995, when Colm played, and made all the more memorable because Paul had fallen away from the GAA, playing mostly soccer. In 2000, Tommy Smith, the Portarlington and Laois footballer, lured him back. The similarities to Colm’s style were obvious: he was a small and pacey forward. In his second year back they won the championship.
"I’d have known everyone,” says Paul Maher, "the players Colm played with. The house, growing up, was great, our home place because of the memories I have of Colm playing county football. You had the likes of [Martin] Miley Dempsey coming to pick him up, the Roes, Tommy Gorman from Spink, because Colm didn’t drive at the time, they’d be coming to collect him. They’d come in and mam would have sandwiches for them after training. All this coming and going, that’s my memory of Colm, all these great players coming in and having the crack with them.
"And my mam did great fundraising for Portarlington. Of course mam and dad followed Colm everywhere, every match. There would always be someone from town going. My father didn’t drive. Denis Lalor was a good friend of Colm’s, too. The two of them were very fit. The two of them could do a lap in Portlaoise in under a minute. No one would get near them.”
That championship win in 2001 is the club’s most recent, but the current team reached last year’s semi-finals before the competition was held up due to Covid. Some of them weren’t born when Colm Maher died and most have no memory of him. But in 2005, the club officially opened the Colm Maher Memorial Stand at McCann Park, the local GAA grounds. Alo Maher senior was present to witness the event.
Kieran Leavy, a friend of Colm Maher’s, was club chairman when the stand was officially opened. "I was honoured,” he says. "It meant an awful lot to me, an awful lot. The one thing I would love to see coming out of this story is for the young lads in our club and the county, who never knew Colm Maher, to know what this man did. He died trying to save his family.
"The GAA people of Ireland, not just in Portarlington, they were great. When you see what happened that week, my club meant 10 times more. Does that make sense? It meant so much more after that.”
Apart from Paul and Alo, Brendan, who has a daughter Chloe, and Vincent, who has three children, are also living locally. Dominic is in Australia.
Paul remembers bringing his father to the 2003 Leinster football final when Laois won for the first time in 57 years. He asked for low altitude seating but the tickets placed them up near the roof, no help to his father who had a fear of heights. The day was a mix of euphoria and trepidation until they got back down to ground level. The last time Laois had been in a Leinster final, 12 years earlier, Colm Maher was playing.
"We tried a bit of counselling,” says Paul of the time after the tragedy. "We sat in front of a counsellor, there were the five of us there, and he said, ‘I actually don’t know what to say’. He was a grief counsellor. He did two sessions. Some of the others might have had sessions over the years but time is a great healer and we were blessed to be living in Port’. It is such a close community and the GAA background was huge.”
Only four months after the tragedy, Portarlington faced St Joseph’s in a county final. "It must have been very strange for Portarlington, to be going on without him,” says Martin Dempsey. "I am sure they were trying to win it for him. It was still very raw at that stage.”
David Murphy played for Port’ that day and is now club chairman. His family had a business on the Main Street, Murphy’s Chipper, and Breda and Alo were regular customers. "They’d come in every weekend. Breda was heavily involved in selling lotto tickets for the club at the time. They were big fundraisers for the club. They were at every match and huge supporters of Port’ GAA. It took the whole soul out of the town.”
By the time of the '96 county final in October, the Maher family were in Canada on an eight-day break. "We have relations in Canada,” explains Paul Maher, "we rang home to listen to the county final because we all had an interest. The relation we rang put the phone to the radio so we could all listen in to the commentary. They lost by a point to Joseph’s.”
We drive from McCann Park over to Marian Hill. The same strip of green they all played on as children is still there. Paul Maher says his father didn’t want to go anywhere else but back there once it was possible to do so.
By degrees the pain became a little less overwhelming. In the early years, the birthdays were hard. They would find it difficult to go to the cemetery, weary from grief.
He remembers the hot day in Navan when Laois beat Meath in 1992. In the second half, in a pivotal moment, the goalkeeper Tony McMahon went up the field to goal from the penalty spot. "Colm went back in the goals,” says Paul, smiling. "He was tiny in the goals, if a high ball came in . . .”
Coming back here in later life, everything seemed smaller than Paul Maher imagined, as it does when you get older. The patch of green they all gravitated towards appears narrower. There is more traffic and fewer children. But that green space was their paradise. All those times when they threw down their jumpers as goalposts and started to play without a care in the world.
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The tears came at this point. A great man, that funeral will stay with me til my dying day.
Thanks.
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Very nice article
I was surprised, you don’t see that sort of article much, it knocked me back to see it pop up, it’s nice to have him remembered. He was a great bit of stuff.
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The lack of games means they have space for articles.
That legendary half time team interview when he declared Laois had better footballers than Dublin was when I knew we’d a serious renaissance man on our hands
A gas man.
David Sweeney did some boxing of lads in the tunnel there at the start. Now a referee above in Dublin.
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Was that the day his buddy in midfield got a boot in head and Dubs were reduced to 14 ?.
96?
Yep…Leinster final went to replay I think …Laois won replay with a bit to spare…thought Dublin lost a lad for giving Delaney an old fashioned shoeing …