ah yeah. There should be a jump now in attendances for everything next year
I don’t have a whole heap of wishes in my life (if you seen all the birds I’ve ridden, you’d probably say fair enough) but one real and longed for event was for the old man to witness another victory, having attended all since '73.
Amazing.
And you know what, he’s still occassionally bringing up a controversial 3 month ban on a Limerick hurler before the 74 or 80 or some other time, which he is still seething about.
The process of re-learning what it is to be fulfilled will probably take him a while.
A last point. One of his pet hates is “drink bans”. Regularly mentioned.
This year, no drink ban, 99s all round, win AI. That’s sports science.
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Whoever wins the county title this year I hope they are beaten in the first round of the Munster club and get a rest.
Could we send out Cappamore or Ballybrown?
Harsh but that’s the way it’s gone now …
Ah lads, there’s such a buzz about the place, this is fucking dacent.
We are All-Ireland champions. Class.
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The buzz. The absolute buzz. Everyone in good form. All other worries forgotten about for the time being. The excitement as the cup is about to visit every club, parish, school, nursing home, hospital, pub and shop in the county.
Magic. Just pure magic.
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Lovely to have it. In Crokes it’s nearly an inconvenience to have Sam Maguire brought along each year as it impacts training but it’s a nice way to see how much the kids have grown over 3 years.
they’ve grown a bit in 45 years…
Kieran Donaghy tells a story about calling up a school one of the years telling them he had Sam, if they wanted him to bring it down.
They told him that they were fierce busy, that they had it last year and could he bring it in next year instead.
Where would you start with that.
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Serves the cunts right if they don’t win it for another 20 years
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Think it was 07, as they’d have won it in 06.
Lost in 08 then. Can’t remember to who.
It wasn’t us anyway or ye.
Wrote this in 2009. Now that Limerick have picked themselves up off the floor, I thought I might as well throw it in here.
- LIFTING THE TREATY
PULLING HURLING IN LIMERICK CITY OFF THE FLOOR
“There’s such a culture in Limerick of settling for second best, it’s f****g incredible. It’s just so, so frustrating. “
Changing a culture takes time. But Pat Culhane might just be the most passionate hurling man in the country. As the man entrusted to lead the revival of hurling in Limerick City, he has to be. On the morning I ring him, he’s driving the 125 miles from his home in Ahane, just outside the city, to Croke Park, for a coaching conference. Not many people would consider a 70 minute chat (hands free, of course) about how to pull Limerick hurling out of the doldrums while driving across the country as having shortened their journey. Culhane does. When we start talking, he’s passing through Offaly, the county which, 15 years ago, inflicted the most bitter of defeats on the Treaty men.
“I was on the Hill in ’94 and I was standing just behind a sign called “Yabba Dabba Dooley” with the sun blazing down on top of me, I was 14 years of age at the time.” “I’ll never forget it. I don’t think there’s any other county in the country that have been so close on so many occasions and have just let it slip through their fingers .”
Limerick City has traditionally been a hurling stronghold. But hurling has fallen away over the years. The current county senior team has only one city man, Brian Geary. Only two clubs in the city, Na Piarsaigh and Claughaun, currently play senior hurling. It’s against that background that Culhane was appointed to the new position of Limerick City’s Hurling Development Administrator, in late 2005.
Culhane’s home parish of Ahane is the real heartland of Limerick hurling. Mick Mackey, considered the greatest hurler of all-time bar Christy Ring and the man who led Limerick through its greatest period of success in the 30’s and early 40’s, is its most famous son. But just a few miles down the road in the city, it’s largely a different story.
Limerick has always been a city where rugby was very popular, the only place in Ireland where the game was deep rooted amongst a working class population. The advent of the All-Ireland league in 1991 brought huge success to the city through the victories of Shannon, Garryowen and Young Munster. When rugby went professional in 1995, attention began to focus towards the provinces. The newly formed Heineken Cup provided a platform for Munster and Limerick rugby to shine on a European stage. But nobody could have envisaged the extent to which rugby’s popularity would skyrocket.
Munster has become a phenomenon, and Thomond Park and Limerick is the epicentre of it. Go to Limerick when Munster are in the semi-finals or final of the Heineken Cup and you will find the city bedecked in bunting. Flags are everywhere. “Good luck Munster” signs greet motorists. A giant Munster jersey hangs from the front of a building on O’Connell Street. A giant screen was erected on O’Connell Street for the Heineken Cup finals of 2006 and 2008. On both those days it appeared as if half of the city’s population had gathered on O’Connell Street while the other half was in Cardiff.
As the runaway train of rugby gathers speed, it feels like hurling has been left stranded on the platform. The Limerick GAA story in modern times has been one of false dawns. Two All-Ireland hurling final appearances in 1994 and 1996 yielded only bitter disappointment after defeats to Offaly and Wexford respectively. Three successive All-Ireland under-21 hurling titles between 2000 and 2002 failed to bring the expected senior success. Only an All-Ireland final appearance in 2007 where defeat to Kilkenny was once again the county’s lot brought any hope. But since that final, the team’s form has been dismal.
“If you go back to the mid-90’s, Limerick was pretty much the first word on the edge of your lips in terms of conversations you’d have in work or on the street about sport”, says Pat Culhane. Everyone knew who Mike Houlihan and Ciaran Carey were, they were the heroes of the mid-90’s even though they didn’t win an All-Ireland, they won two Munster championships. But, they were the popular team at the time, Munster is the popular team now.”
“Everyone wants to support a winning team and it’s absolutely exploded, even clubs outside of the city like Bruff and places like that have had increased participation levels as a result, everyone wants to play rugby, they want heroes and they have heroes to look up to. Thomond Park has been done up, it’s an absolute icon of architecture, and a symbol of culture in Limerick, both sporting and otherwise and they are the team to follow in Limerick at the minute because they’re the winning team at the moment.”
Noel Hartigan is another man immersed in the culture of Limerick hurling. A South Liberties man, his uncle Pat is a revered figure in the county, full-back on the last team to bring the McCarthy Cup back to Shannonside in 1973. Hartigan is now at the coalface of trying to revive the fortunes of the game in the city.
Hartigan believes that the lack of regular fixtures for the club player is one of the biggest problems the GAA faces. He cites an example from his own experience playing in the Limerick intermediate championship with his club South Liberties a few years ago.
“We played the first round of the championship on the June bank holiday weekend, and we got to the final and it was played on the October bank holiday weekend. Now we had no draws and obviously no replays , so we had six matches to play but it took us June, July, August, September, October. Five months to play six championship matches.”
“It kills clubs because, at the moment now the championships in Limerick are on hold and no one knows when they’re going to be playing the next round. Claughaun, inside there in Limerick City, are senior, Na Piarsigh are senior, then you’ve Monaleen and Mungret who are intermediate and (Old) Christians who are junior, St. Patrick’s would be junior. But the intermediate and senior teams don’t know when the next championship match is. They haven’t been told yet. You could be playing on say, the 11th of August, depending on how Limerick do the previous week, and that’s not going to promote it because fellas don’t go training, and it becomes, I don’t want to use the word haphazard, but you train when you know you’ve a match, it’s very hard for a coach or player to keep going if you’re only going training. So definitely, the club player isn’t getting the games, and it has contributed.“
But rugby is not the real problem. “The biggest downfall of the GAA is the GAA itself, it’s not soccer, it’s not rugby, it’s not drugs, it’s the inability of coaches to coach the game properly to children”, says Culhane. “Limerick City is a unique monoculture of sport and constantly the hurlers on the ditch, they blame soccer, they blame rugby. Rugby and soccer will always be around, they’ve always been around, I mean hurling was strong at a time when rugby was strong, when soccer was strong.”
TREATY SARSFIELDS’ DEMISE
The decline has been slow and has been spread out over many years. The disappearance of Treaty Sarsfields, a strong club with seven county titles to their name, was an early pointer to the decline of hurling in the city. Treaty Sarsfields were centred around an area known as the Island Field, and the estate of St. Mary’s Park, and also took in Thomondgate. St. Mary’s Park was one of the first housing estates built in Ireland back in the 50’s. There was a strong population in that part of Limerick City at the time of Treaty Sarsfields’ dominance during the 50’s and 60’s but the suburbs became more built up and people started moving out into suburbs and the population dwindled to some degree. Many of the houses there ended up as social housing.
“Some of it was just down to the change in demographics” believes Pat Culhane. “ I suppose more houses were being built in the suburbs of the city. A lot of the population had spread out at that stage. Other GAA clubs were set up in the 1960’s, the likes of Old Christians, and I suppose the competition for the better hurlers inside in the inner city, I suppose they had more to choose from. That’s one of the major reasons why Treaty Sarsfields collapsed. And there was a lot of people moved in there on social housing schemes and a lot of other people moved out, either directly or indirectly as a result of that.”
SEXTON STREET CBS DECLINES
But the decline of the city’s most famous hurling nursery also symbolised the decline in the game in the city. Sexton Street CBS were traditionally Limerick’s powerhouse of schools hurling. “They would have traditionally been the only school to go to”, says Pat Culhane.
The CBS won three Harty Cups, the Munster Colleges championship, in the 60’s, with a team containing Eamon Cregan, Pat Hartigan, and others who played on the 1973 All-Ireland team.
“That traditionally would have been seen as the breeding ground, right in the heart of Limerick inner-city, of hurling. But if you look at, in more recent times, the students that were actually on reasonably successful teams, they won the Harty Cup in 1993 and they got to the final again in 1998, but it’s pretty much died out there since”, says Culhane.
But even the success in the 90’s masked the reality. “Although the school is based in the city and is a symbol of hurling in Limerick City, most of the players came from outside the city. If you look at inner city clubs and you look at that team in 1993 from Sexton Street CBS, there was very, very little involvement of city players .“
“Probably in one way it’s a surprise how Sexton Street has slipped down the ranks”, says Noel Hartigan. I suppose there wasn’t the influx of students from the country going to the CBS that there was before, it became more convenient for parents to send kids to schools that were nearer to them, they were more easily accessible. “
“What happened was Castletroy College came on the scene in the east side of the city, and a lot of the students from Ahane and Murroe-Boher and these places started going there, and a lot of people from the likes of South Liberties started going to school in St. Enda’s College which is on the outskirts of Southhill, it was more commutable, it made more sense for them to go there. In the likes of Limerick City, the population, and the enrolment numbers in the school there have dropped dramatically. They’ve still been building teams there over the last number of years, but they’ve been struggling, because the players are coming from the inner city clubs, the likes of Old Christians, Ballinacurra Gaels, and those players were never on the successful teams to begin with.”
Despite the decline of Sexton Street, Ard Scoil Ris, the alma mater of Paul O’Connell, have now taken up the mantle of Harty contenders, with two Harty Cup semi-final appearances in a row in 2008 and 2009.
“Ard Scoil would have always had a good few hurlers coming in from Parteen, Clonlara, and more coming in from Patrickswell and Adare and now they would be seen as the hurling school within the city”, says Hartigan.
Not far up the road from Ard Scoil is Moyross, an area known across the country for all the wrong reasons. Noel Hartigan, along with John Landers, a GAA youth officer, set up a new club, LIT Sarsfields at the start of 2006 to cater for one of the country’s most disadvantaged areas.
“Moyross is relatively new, I think it was the early 80’s it was built. They didn’t have any club, then there was three or four teachers in the school there, Tony O’Gorman, Liam O’Gorman and a couple more of them, there was a Fahy guy there, they set up a club but then it died for a bit”. The key reason why previous attempts at setting up a club in Moyross failed, Hartigan believes, was down to an absence of local volunteers. The new club is trying to rectify this.
The idea was that the club would also cater for much of the old Treaty Sarsfields catchment area, and be able to have full use of facilities at LIT, hence the name. LIT Sarsfields fall into the “regeneration area” drawn up by the Sports Council back in 2000. A dedicated GAA Develoment officer for the Northside of the city is helping the club set up coaching structures.
“The club is mainly based in the Moyross and St. Munchin’s area of Limerick City. The first year up there they were grand, they kind of lulled a bit in the second year because they were relying a bit on outside help but now they’ve got more local people involved and that has helped them.”
“The good thing this year is that they have local people in the key positions, the chairperson and secretary are local which is a big help because it’s very hard to run something if the people involved are outsiders. The great thing about having locals is that they’ve a greater knowledge of what’s going on on the ground and exactly what needs to be done. It’s grand for someone like myself or Pat (Culhane) or whoever to come into it and say you should be able to assist in this, but we may not be aware of the total demographics or actually what’s happening from day to day there, so that’s where the local people are a help.”
COMPLACENCY
Many in Limerick believe that the GAA has rested too much on its laurels in the city over the years.
In April, Tom Ryan, manager for the two All-Ireland final defeats in 1994 and 1996, was typically blunt in a radio interview. “Hurling is dead in Limerick City, absolutely on the floor. We hardly have a senior team there now, a lot of our clubs can’t produce underage teams.”
“I do think there has been an element of complacency there”, says Pat Culhane.
Monaleen, a suburban city club with a huge catchment area, have not fielded a minor team since 2004. Culhane knows the only way to stop this happening again is by hard work.
“When I started my job, people said to me, Monaleen have no under-16, no minor team, what are you going to do about it? Well, I said, I’ve two options, I can sit in to my car, knock at every house in the whole parish of Monaleen, whatever amount of thousand people live there, and I can try and scrape some kind of an under-16 or maybe a minor team together, and we’ll try and compete, or I can do nothing. The person who asked me that question, I think he thought I was being a bit cheeky, but I was being completely honest, I mean what else can you do?
“Hurling was pretty much dead, inside Limerick City, three or four years ago. Absolutely, it was completely on its knees”. It goes back to grass roots underage problems. Club structures, for the most part, were weak.
“ The first thing I always look at and this applies to the inner city is the ability of a club, or the officials and administration of a club, to identify suitable volunteers, in many cases parents, to come along and take an active role in promoting and coaching and developing hurling in that area.”
“A lot of the clubs have incredibly weak structures, a lot of the clubs seem complacent in so far as they were willing to play their two or three matches in their under-12, under-14 divisional championship, maybe get a bit of success, maybe get a bit of silverware in the C Division, and that was deemed a success, whereas in all honesty, winning at C grade and playing two or three reasonably competitive matches in a year, with weak coaching structures, is a waste of time.”
That’s not good enough, believes Culhane. “Hurling, above all sports, needs to be a way of life, it needs to be played by children I would say almost on a daily basis, and if you look at the most successful clubs in the suburbs and out in the countryside, there’s very strong links with the local primary school. There are people physically going into those schools, getting to know the children, getting to know the parents, they’re pushing those children and their parents, in a very nice way, in the door of their local club, and they’re retaining them.”
“What’s at the root of it all – our biggest reason for dropout of hurling in any area but particularly in the inner city, is the lack of coaching structures inside in clubs, and the lack in the number of volunteers that are helping coach. There are too little people doing too many jobs and they get burned out, and they can’t devote enough time to properly coaching the children. Hurling, above all sports, you have to be able to hit ball off your left and right comfortably by the age of 10 or 11. And if you go to some of the Cumann na mBunscoil finals, the under-12’s, divisional finals over the last number of years, even under-14’s, the standard of hurling there is atrocious, it’s absolutely atrocious.”
So, what needs to be done? “We need to put a benchmark in place. We need to go actively knocking on the doors of a school, get to know the principal, get to know the teachers, build up relations with the school, promote the club through the school, run blitzes. If there’s somebody available, which is quite possible in these recessionary times, identify a volunteer to go in and maybe coach the school two or three times a week. That bridge has to be gapped, and until that bridge is gapped in the city, the clubs are pretty much at absolutely nothing.”
LIFTING THE TREATY
It’s funny how things turn out. Culhane now counts the Limerick man who was in charge of Offaly that day back in 1994, Eamon Cregan, as one of his closest friends. Despite overseeing Limerick’s downfall 15 years ago, Cregan is a still a legend in the city, part of Limerick’s 1973 All-Ireland team. After Offaly’s miraculous comeback in that “five minute final”, the victorious manager looked as if he’d just come from a funeral. A city man who played for Claughaun, Cregan has collaborated with Culhane, Noel Hartigan, Eibhear O’Dea, a young and progressive coach, and others on a plan to rejuvenate hurling in the city. “Lifting the Treaty” was successfully steered through the minefield of GAA politics and ratified last October.
“Essentially what it is, is a vision that will take Limerick, over the next ten years to a position where we’re able to compete with the other counties at the highest level”, says Pat Culhane.
The upshot of “Lifting the Treaty” has been a streamlining of the underage administrative structure. Where there were six different bodies with responsibility for various geographical areas and age groups, there are now just two. Limerick Coaching and Games is in charge up to under-12 level, and then the County Bord na nOg takes charge from under-13 up to under-16. Divisional structures at underage level have been abolished in favour of a county-wide structure. It means that underage players will now get a regular programme of games at levels that are appropriate to them. The influence of Kilkenny’s successful underage structure is there in Limerick’s new system.
“It’s working very well up to under-12 so far, and at County Bord na nOg up to under-16, again there’s a good bit of work to be done there, but going forward, things are looking very bright.”
But while the new programme appears to be working well so far, Noel Hartigan warns agAinst complacency. “Eamon Cregan does a lot of work with the county under-14 teams and he says that some of the under-14’s that come in, they have to be re-taught the skills of the game, which, if our development squads were running correctly , by the time the lads are coming out of development squads, Eamon should be able to say to lads ‘this is the style we’re playing ‘and not have to teach them to how to play the game, how to hook a fella, yes that part of playing, but you shouldn’t have to go back to teach it.”
Given that the basic skills of hurling need to be mastered very young, it may even be too late for some of those under-14’s, at least in terms of reaching senior inter-county standard. So the focus on getting those basics right is now more important than ever.
Hartigan explains how they are doing this. “We run these under-10 academies, we call them “Go” hurling centres, where we get clubs and schools to send in between three and six of their better players, and give them four or five weeks training, and last night they came into the Gaelic Grounds to play, and Pat (Culhane) was telling me, the buzz and the atmosphere and the amount of parents that were in there we reckon there were over 170 kids in there – it’s up to us to make sure that all 170 , that in eight years time, 30 of them are on the minor set-up, and you might say, eight years is a long time, but that’s the thing with coaching, there’s no quick fix for tomorrow.”
A lot of it goes back to that old chestnut, getting regular fixtures. “At a rugby club on Saturday you would hand out a fixture list to the parents, tell them this was what was happening. And we felt in the GAA, that wasn’t happening. I could hand you a fixture list, but in a month’s time, I could be ringing you in a month’s time telling you those four matches are gone. What we’ve done now is make sure that ‘there’s the fixture list, and these are the days that you’re on. It goes back to the games programme. No matter how much training you do, kids want to play matches.”
Passion is something Culhane believes can drive Limerick forward, but it needs to be harnessed with the correct structures. “We have seriously passionate people. I suppose every county does, but Limerick has a reasonable population, and there’s enough people with the ability and the drive to want to change things in the city."
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Will be back down at the weekend. I ended up buying a car yesterday 
so we’ll be down on Saturday to collect it. My first ever L reg:clap:
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Great article Sid. The club situation (lack of games) called out here still no closer to resolution
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I thought when we won the Club AI in 2016 was unreal but Sunday is just simply on another level completely. I think the buzz will last the whole winter. Peter Casey has 4 All Ireland medals at the age of 21😲. Just shows how much we have won over the last few years.
Was that the exact same three players in FB line that won the 21s final in 15?
It was Casey was in the corner and English was full back. Byrnes Hegarty Lynch O Donovan and T Morrissey started as well. P Casey came off the bench.
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Also had Pat Ryan, Malachy, Barry Nash, Barry O Connell, David Dempsey from that team on the panel. Phenomenal mining from one team.
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