Clonoulty have this
5/2 they were.
Hon the West 
Naynagh 
Fair play to Clonoulty, would have been some odds even a few months ago I’d say
Grand job
The West’s awake
Clutch scores from place balls today
John Devane will have to be one of Sheedy’s selectors now.
Clonoulty will tear the arse off it, they’ll be beaten a point a man against NAP.
Delighted for him, he had a bad day on the frees in 2011.
How long since Clonoulty won the Tipp SHC?
97 I think
Ballagh will be hopping!
Delighted for clonoulty. Well organised and by far the better team and should have won by more.
Some turnaround from the last couple of years. They hardly put a foot wrong all year.
A real triumph of good over evil. Clonoulty had John Devane as manager. An absolute stalwart who played for the club for the past 20 years before retiring this year and going straight into management.
Nenagh had Fitzgerald from Na Piarsaigh as manager, Droog from Na Piarsaigh as S&C, and Shane O’Neill as advisor in the stand. O’Neill must have ran up and down the steps to tell the rest of them what to do 20 times in the second half alone. It was a shambles for a finish.
GAA
Timmy Hammersley: ‘You have a responsibility to speak out for people who are being oppressed’
Former Tipp hurler has found his voice in helping many causes
Denis Walsh
October 21 2018, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
Playing on: Timmy Hammersley will play for Clonoulty-Rossmore in the Tipperary county final todayTOMMY DICKSON
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A few weeks after Timmy Hammersley was dropped from the Tipperary panel in 2013 he met Eamon O’Shea, the Tipperary manager. The good and bad from his time as an inter-county hurler were still swirling around in Hammersley’s mind, unreconciled. He was struggling to find the next beginning partly because he couldn’t escape the last ending.
“My real turning point [in life] would have happened when my hurling career started to fall down a bit,” he says. “My job was also in the GAA [as a coach], you got dropped from the county panel and you’re thinking, ‘Jesus, this is falling apart here. You’re a failure.’ I was absolutely burnt out, there’s no question. But I also had the wrong approach. I couldn’t get out of the attitude that you had to be thinking about it 24/7.”
What happens when your dream comes true and it’s not how you dreamed it? When Hammersley was 15 he couldn’t make the Clonoulty-Rossmore under-16 team. From there nobody could say how far it was to Croke Park. Who would be so foolish to ask? But when Tipperary won the 2010 All-Ireland Hammersley wore number 22 and for the next three years his lease on a jersey was renewed annually. How that looked, though, and how that felt weren’t the same thing.
“I didn’t feel I fitted in, for sure. I didn’t fit in I suppose due to my own anxiety or severe shortage of self-confidence. I would have been in awe of a lot of players there. I couldn’t get it out of my head that I wasn’t as talented as they were.
“I didn’t fit into the drinking culture either which would have been around the team while I was there. I wasn’t up for long nights out or drinking on the day after a game so you kind of weren’t included in things then. I know that might sound kind of minor but when you’re the kind of fella that wouldn’t have the self-confidence anyway it’s the kind of thing that makes you feel you’re not in the core of this squad.”
His conversation with O’Shea, however, didn’t dwell on the past. There is a pastoral quality about O’Shea that has endeared him to generations of players. They spoke about what could happen next if only Hammersley would let it happen.
“He probably doesn’t even realise it but he had a massive impact on me as a person. He would have been the very start of me going back into education and going on my current career path [working with young people]. He would have opened my eyes to the potential he saw in me outside of the GAA. He would have said to me, ‘You can go for anything you want to go for here now.’”
Hammersley already had a primary degree in sports management and a masters in sports psychology but when he looked again he couldn’t see himself on that path. So he went to California for six months and when he came back he enrolled for a masters in international relations in UCD.
In the middle of Hammersley was a social conscience. What he needed more than anything were meaningful ways to express it. A couple of years ago his attention was gripped by the refugee crisis at the French port of Calais. He was desperate to do something though he couldn’t figure out what. Eventually, in the autumn of 2016, he set off with a friend. The refugee settlement that had become known as ‘The Jungle’ was about to be razed.
“We said ‘we’d better go now or the place will be gone.’ In all of these things no one person has any chance of changing anything. You want to go and show people without a home that there are individuals around the world who actually care. We spoke to people who walked for half a year to get there. I would get involved in so many arguments about refugees. Everyone who was there were at the edge and they were being shut out.”
Beyond these shores his passion is Palestine. Three years ago he spent a couple of summer months in the West Bank to see for himself the people and the places in which he already felt immersed. During his visit he stayed with a family in Ramallah and became friends with Mohammed Mousa, a young man about Hammersley’s age. Two years ago, on the day when Hammersley was helping Clonoulty-Rossmore win the West Tipperary title, Mousa was picked up by Israeli police; for the next 18 months he was detained without charge and, by Hammersley’s account, without cause.
“Being an advocate for Palestinians is a very awkward thing to do. I would have suffered a lot of online abuse and it can be quite intense. But when you go there you can’t leave behind what you saw. You become friends with people. You feel you have a responsibility to speak out for people who are going through severe oppression. Look, as a person with no influence or power you’re just kind of saying, ‘I’ll do what I can here. I’ll get on to my local politicians and try to make inroads from there.’”
At the beginning of last year his name popped up on the letters page of the Irish Examiner. Bank of Ireland had closed down the accounts of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) and he was one of 29 signatories to an open letter of protest. Bank of Ireland said that IPSC’s account no longer met the bank’s “risk appetite.”
There were 29 names on the letter: academics, authors, actors, artists, activists, many of them well known. But there were only two sportspeople: Brian Kerr, the former Ireland manager, and Hammersley. He is convinced that GAA players have more power to influence change than they realise. He mentions Soar, the youth out-reach organisation founded by the former Clare hurler Tony Griffin and for whom Hammersley worked as a facilitator in its early years.
“I was very interested in what Tony’s journey was. You’re using the avenues you have to try to create positive change. I think that’s really strong. I was definitely attracted to it as well in terms of the struggles I would have had. Like, when I was a member of county panels I just didn’t think of anything else apart from hurling and it was a very unhealthy way of thinking.”
Last winter Hammersley was one of the leaders of the Gaelic Voices for Change movement. Among their projects was a sleep-out to add another chorus of raised voices to the homelessness crisis. It started with a meeting of 30 high profile GAA players, past and present, and radiated from there. Simply by their names they generated attention.
For the last 12 months Hammersley has worked for SpunOut.ie, a youth information website. His job is to listen and to relate. Perfect. “We don’t tell young people anything as such. They tell us what they want and they tell us how we can impact other young people around Ireland.”
The organisation is based in Dublin where Hammersley lives now. In an everyday sense it is a parallel universe. His workmates are not GAA people. They don’t understand the stuff that used to consume him. They don’t know it exists. This afternoon he will play for Clonoulty-Rossmore in the Tipperary county final while 100 miles away Oliver Plunketts, the team he coaches, will contest the Dublin senior B hurling final. By any measure it is a unique day in a GAA life.
But tomorrow a two-day conference on gender violence hosted by SpunOut.ie will open at the Mansion House and, win or lose, Hammersley will present himself for work at 8am. Another day on the good path he found.
Time flies by in the yellow and green…
