Joe’s son
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Wasn’t Eamon Cregans father from Newcastle west? I think he hurled county too.
He is yeah. His father Tommy played soccer with Limk united and a bit of senior for the balbec around mid 80’s.
Ned Cregan. Yes, hurled with Limerick. I thought it was Monagea he was from.
Monagea is part of NCW when it suits them
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Darragh Donovans father scored a penalty against kerry in the 1991 munster football final
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A very quiet man who would be too modest to mention things like that
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A very quiet man who would be too modest to mention things like that
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A bit late but I’d like to wish all Limerick TFK Gaels a happy Christmas and New Year.
As some of our neighbours know, a two-in-a-row is difficult to achieve. To win 3 on the bounce puts them in a pretty exclusive club. That’s what you call Hall of Famers.
We go again in January. We’ll keep following the process and see where it takes us.
Savage work put in fundraising for the holiday, I hope they all have a lovely trip.
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NCW and Casey’s in the 21s final as predicted. Casey’s put up a fine score on @ciarancareyshurlingarmy today
Can anyone put this up
A New Year and an old story that still resonates. January will mark the 50th anniversary of when it all started: not in a Limerick lecture hall, but in a Tralee hotel that became the temporary home to a class of ambitious freshers hoping to conquer the world, or have the craic, or maybe both.
When the National College of Physical Education opened its doors – via a one-term detour to a neighbouring county – it kick-started a radical shift in the evolution of Irish sport. It’s just that no one quite realised it at the time.
More fundamentally, it transformed the world where education and physical activity collide. From now on, running, jumping, kicking and catching would be part of the curriculum.
The NCPE would soon morph into Thomond College. In time, it merged with NIHE to form the modern-day behemoth that is UL. But back in January 1973, this had yet to unfold. The Irish sporting public knew nothing of the imminent revolution about to transform Gaelic football, fomented by Kevin Heffernan and Mick O’Dwyer. It had yet to encounter the force of nature that was Brian Mullins; or the blur or movement that was Pat Spillane.
Mullins was part of the initial class that started in Tralee. By then, Jimmy Deenihan was a second-year veteran: one of a dozen Irish male recruits who, in September ‘71, had started in Strawberry Hill, London, to be joined a year later by female PE students from Sion Hill and Lyng, and who now all came home to a not-quite-finished Plassey campus in January ‘73.
The following September, a class containing a young Spillane and a future GAA president from Cork via New York – Larry McCarthy – enrolled in Limerick. These are just some of the household GAA names at the centre of this story. Scroll through the NCPE/Thomond teams of the mid-to-late ‘70s and you’ll spy countless more. But like so many sagas immortalised in sepia-tinted newspaper clippings from that era, there is poignancy, too, as Thomond hits the half-century.
In late September, aged 68, Brian Mullins succumbed to illness. Most remember him as Dublin’s ultimate midfield colossus; others salute NCPE’s third football captain, following in the wake of Galway’s John Tobin and Kerry defender Deenihan. Just a few weeks ago, another noted alumni, Brian McSweeney, passed. The Corkman was centre-back and the youngest starter on the Thomond team that won the 1978 All-Ireland club senior football title. In 1980, he skippered Thomond to their second Limerick SFC success.
Their coach? College lecturer Dave Weldrick. Sadly, he too is no longer with us, having died after getting into difficulty while swimming in Kilkee Bay over three years ago. As multiple interviewees testify, Weldrick, a Dublin native steeped in soccer, was the central figure in Thomond’s rapid ascent into a GAA powerhouse. And maybe, by extension, one of the more significant if lesser-known personalities to shape the evolution of Gaelic football from its old catch-and-kick roots.
STRAWBERRY HILL TO TRALEE
You want a snapshot of how that formative first decade of NCPE/Thomond shaped Irish sport and not just the GAA? Well, in no particular order, try this for a roll call …
Eddie O’Sullivan, Fran Ryder and Brian Talty. Messrs Deenihan, Mullins and Spillane. Liam Moggan, Liam Hennessy and Niall Moyna. Rory Kinsella, Tony Ward and Dave Mahedy. Hugo Clerkin, Pat Roe and Pat Critchley. Larry McCarthy, Paul O’Kelly and Brendan Hackett.
What’s fascinating is that many on this list of qualified teachers took different career paths, be it in international rugby coaching, athletics, sports psychology, business enterprise, or the higher echelons of Irish sports administration and politics.
When Westmeath’s Mick Scally, the college’s first GAA club secretary, was about to go on teaching practice, he approached Larry McCarthy one night and asked if he’d help out. “I said sure. Then I evolved into the role – and loved it. But for that, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” says McCarthy from his Croke Park office.
So much has changed since Deenihan – before winning five All-Ireland medals and long before becoming a Fine Gael Minister – arrived at St Mary’s College in Twickenham to study PE, among the latest cohort of 12 Irish scholarship students.
It had “really good lecturers” and an array of Olympic coaches – among them Joe Jagger, father of Mick. And several years ahead of the freshman Deenihan was Dave Weldrick.
Deenihan’s class always knew they’d finish out their degrees in Plassey. What he didn’t realise was that Weldrick would later join him as a lecturer and coach. From a GAA perspective, he was the biggest influence, introducing concepts like power endurance and shuttle running, even though his background was in soccer.
“There was an individual called [Allen] Wade who wrote the script for the 1966 England win in the World Cup,” Deenihan explains, “and he adopted his practices – small-sided games, shuttle running and drills – to Gaelic football. Then we took all those ideas out with us to the schools and the clubs. It changed the whole approach to training and coaching of Gaelic football – and hurling.”
At the time, NCPE boasted some quality hurlers (such as Limerick’s Paddy Kelly, while Wexford’s Rory Kinsella was an early captain) but lacked the critical mass of numbers.
Paul O’Kelly was part of the Tralee invasion 50 years ago. His close friendship with Weldrick stemmed from their respective wives, who were best pals in college … but first, he got to know Brian Mullins, with whom he shared a hotel room for the first few nights in college.
Decades later, O’Kelly was a Leinster-winning Offaly selector under Tommy Lyons, and then manager, too. In his youth, he was mad about football, but Edenderry hadn’t won an Offaly SFC title since the 1950s and so there was “almost no Gaelic games in my DNA at the time”. And although he excelled nationally at badminton, his local secondary school had “zero sport” and no facilities.
Somehow or other, an application form for the new NCPE came to his school; he went for an interview and physical tests in Rathgar that summer, and was chosen in a class of 80, split roughly 50pc male and female.
Only one hitch: the new facility wasn’t ready. Initially told they would start in Limerick that January, they were then sent to Kerry instead.
On checking into the Mount Brandon Hotel, O’Kelly and Mullins were designated the same room for the first few nights – and because the latter had cousins living just outside Edenderry, “we immediately had that connection”. It would last through the decades, right up to their dual involvement in planning their class’s 50-year reunion before illness struck.
“He was the type of guy that – in my case – I’d trust with my life. Because there was something about him that had a real generosity and kindness, even though he was as hard as nails when you went out to compete with him,” O’Kelly recalls.
He recites all those familiar Mullins traits: determination, grit, ability to motivate, high expectations, a radiant energy. “If you saw him playing football, you might get the impression he’s just a No 8-type rugby player. But in the fine motor skill things that we did [at college], anything that required a lot of footwork, he was actually very, very talented.
“The thing was, when he passed the ball, he didn’t pass the ball to a man – never. He passed the ball to the place where the man should be going at full speed to receive it … he had all that computed somehow in his brain.”
ALL-IRELAND DREAMS
John Tobin, future manager of his native Galway and Roscommon and later Connacht GAA’s first provincial games manager, was already a county senior footballer when he enrolled in Tralee. When they decamped to Limerick after Easter and met up with Deenihan’s classmates, the college’s GAA club was born – with Tobin their first captain.
“Jimmy Keane was a crane driver in the college,” he recounts. “Jimmy was a great character, from the Wolfe Tones club [in Shannon] and they decided to play us in some challenge games.” Unofficial fixtures, perhaps, but the touchpaper was lit.
The fledgling college won a Higher Education Division 2 league title in the 1973/’74 season. A year later, they added the Division 1 crown. But they couldn’t enter the Sigerson Cup, then the exclusive domain of Ireland’s established universities. In response, the non-university colleges established their own championship, and in 1976, a team led by Mullins won the first Trench Cup. Under Spillane’s captaincy, they retained it a year later.
Meanwhile, they had to settle for bragging rights when an annual showdown between the Sigerson and Trench winners was launched in 1976. NCPE hammered Maynooth in Croke Park to win the inaugural Hodges Figgis Trophy. A year later, under the Thomond name, they overwhelmed arch rivals UCD.
Even before then, the college had decided to enter the Limerick county championship. UCD had won back-to-back All-Ireland club titles in ’74 and ’75 – “and that was half the reason we went into it,” Larry McCarthy explains, “because we were beating UCD in the league and colleges competitions, and we weren’t allowed to get into the Sigerson.
“We had a little bit of a chip on our shoulder to that extent. I remember coming back from a coaching course in Gormanston as a student, and I got a lift from [Kevin Heffernan] and Heffo was trying to figure out why would we want to be in the All-Ireland club championship at all? And I said, ‘Well, because we can win it’. UCD had done it, so why wouldn’t we do it?”
This brings us to one of those rare blemishes on the future Uachtarán’s CV. Back in Cork, McCarthy had been taught PE by Billy Morgan. He wanted to work in sport and this new college in Limerick offered a pathway.
He went on to become club secretary, playing the odd game in goals “when badly stuck”, but “my contribution to that outfit was always off the field. I was the chief cook and bottle washer”.
As secretary, he negotiated their way into the 1975 Limerick SFC. So far, so smooth. They duly reached the final by beating St Kieran’s. Cue an objection.
The club itself had been properly registered, but not the individual players. “That’s the responsibility of the secretary,” McCarthy explains. “Any time Jimmy Deenihan sees me, he says, ‘You’re the reason I do not have a complete set of All-Ireland football medals!’”
Long story short: NCPE lodged a counter-objection, a replay was mooted by the county board, then Treaty Sarsfields (awaiting in the final) contested this decision to the Munster Council … and both teams were out, Sarsfields declared champions.
Around that time, objections were a common Thomond theme. “The degree programmes had teething problems in terms of their acceptance. Initially, we were getting our degrees from the National Council of Education Awards – and then the Minister decided we were going to be under the jurisdiction of the universities, and that meant terminal exams at the end of the year, and we were continuous assessment,” McCarthy recounts.
“There was a huge hullabaloo about that, and we went on all sorts of strikes. We went down to Cork and occupied the office of the president of UCC for a week or so! We went on protest marches in Dublin … there’s a great photograph of one of our fellas climbing up on top of Daniel O’Connell on O’Connell Street.”
Then, in 1977, Thomond embarked on one more on-field crusade. Through all those years, their biggest local obstacle was timing: matches fixed for high summer when students were back home or on J1 escapades.
But they cruised to a maiden Limerick title in ’77, then launched straight into a Munster semi-final against Austin Stacks, defending All-Ireland champions. It took four epic battles traversing December and January to find a winner, after which they eased to eased to Munster glory (against Nemo) and the ultimate All-Ireland prize (against St John’s of Belfast).
For team captain Pat Spillane, Thomond/Stacks was Meath/Dublin without the cameras. His brother Mick was a team-mate, as were Galway star Talty and the late Richie Bell of Mayo.
“We were the first professional team to arrive on the GAA scene. We were at a level of fitness and tactics and preparation and video analysis that was so miles ahead of everyone else,” the Kerry legend proclaims. “Take away Kerry and Dublin, and we would have beaten any county team!”
John O’Halloran, an All-Ireland hurling medallist with Cork in 1966, was by then a Thomond chemistry lecturer and GAA club chairman. He recalls one horrible night at training in Garryowen RFC. Standing in darkness behind the goal, he watched as Weldrick finetuned a tactic that entailed Spillane, his full-forward, taking possession and offloading to the right or left half-forward, sprinting in at full speed.
“They came too soon or came too early, but he made them do the move 20-25 times, roaring at them. I was phenomenally impressed, and the number of goals we got from that …”
O’Halloran suspects Mick O’Dwyer learned from Weldrick in turning Eoin Liston, a midfielder from Beale, into Kerry’s new full-forward weapon in 1978 – with wing maestro Spillane feeding off ‘The Bomber’.
THOMOND’S LEGACY
Weldrick, who became one of The Sunday Game’s early pundits, took a back seat from coaching Thomond in the early ‘80s. “It was a rough transition,” recalls Brendan Hackett, a student who ended up as manager. But in ’82, he steered them to a higher education clean sweep of league, Trench Cup and Hodges Figgis. They won the city club final in Limerick but then were “done with the curse of August”.
In 1987, Hackett became the country’s youngest county manager, taking over Longford at 26. The Monaghan native then moved on to Offaly, facing Meath in ’91 after their four-game saga with Dublin. Offaly’s pre-match routine may have been “one of the first warm-ups seen in Croke Park”, he surmises, recounting one withering newspaper remark: “Offaly played their best football before Meath came on the pitch.”
That cynicism would eventually fade as those early Thomond graduates spread the new gospel. One that brought planning and structure to training and preached the benefits of sports science in all its facets.
“You might look back and say, well, the courses weren’t very sophisticated. But we got the vocabulary and we got enough knowledge to be able to hold our own in the next level of education beyond third level,” says Paul O’Kelly, who left teaching to find his career niche in consultancy.
“Someone said, if you could just fire the curiosity and give people a taste of something, they end up getting hungry for it. And that’s what happened for us.”
Hackett’s eclectic career is typical of several Thomond graduates: he taught briefly before becoming a business owner (with Motions Fitness) and also served as the first CEO of Athletics Ireland. But he also went back to UL for a Master’s in Sports Psychology and has filled this background brief with 15 county teams.
“It’s 25 years since I wrote the book, Success From Within, which was kind of an introduction to or demystifying sports psychology. You know, when I started working with teams, I was hidden in Croke Park, in the dressing-room.”
All has changed in so many ways. Half a century on, that is Thomond’s enduring legacy.
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I hear one of the bold boys is being left at home for the holiday.
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Who had Ambrose lads??
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3 PMs already from the boys 
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Fair play to you, you always have the ear to the ground when it comes to Limerick GAA
No prizes for guessing anyway.
Swift action taken by Kiely and Big Joe. They dont fuck about them boys. Manners and lesson learned. They go again.
Eleven days later, must be a record.
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Another brexit benefit