Banking the bank holiday memories
Cusack Park in Ennis Photo: ©INPHO/James Lawlor
OK, a trivia question for you. In what year did Ireland first observe the ‘Halloween’ Bank Holiday? I happen to know the answer. 1977. You see the game played that first October Bank Holiday Sunday is lodged in my memory bank for a reason. Though just 17 years-old I was asked by then County Secretary, Jim O’Brien, to pen an article on the county hurlers for ‘Carlow Gael’, a magazine published by the County Board. Proud as punch, the teenage Leo’s opening paragraph read “It was a miserably wet October Sunday afternoon and the grassy sloping banks and grey concrete seating of Dr Cullen Park were virtually deserted, save for less than a dozen diehard followers huddled in various places around the grounds, seeking shelter from the the harsh weather. Out on the sodden, rain-lashed field Carlow’s senior hurlers were engaging lowly Roscommon in their opening game of the 1977-78 National Hurling League and while victory was expected over the Connacht men, few could have envisaged that from these bleak surroundings the Barrowsiders would launch a hurling revival which culminated in winning Divisional honours.” Now let’s recall a few other memorable October Bank Holidays.
Thumbed down to the Ennis on Sunday morning, saw Clare beat Limerick in Cusack Park, after which a gang of us went drinking in ‘Nuggy’s’ on the Square, then down the street to the disco in the Queens Hotel. I was due, as had happened in the past, to stop in the house of one or other of two friends who I went to the match with but on this particular night the two boys struck ‘gold’ and departed the night club in female company. This Lone Ranger, loth to play gooseberry, decided, as had also happened in the past, to ‘sleep rough’. However when he emerged out into the night the wind and rain soon changed his mind. Desperate situations need desperate measures! So the Lone Ranger tipped to the nearby Garda Barracks, pleading financial difficulties and sort of suggesting he might be granted a ‘room’ for the night’! The Garda on duty explained he could not make me a ‘guest of the nation’ unless I had broken the law. He did, though, give me the address of an ‘understanding’ ‘B&B’. Remember now we are talking nearly 3 o’clock in the morning when I ring the doorbell of this B&B. An old man with a handle-bar moustache opened an upstairs window and asked how could he help. Cutting a bedraggled figure I told him I was looking for a ‘bed for the night’ adding I hadn’t the money for breakfast. He came down, opened the door, brought me in, took the handful of change I proffered him and led me down the hall to an end room. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
I awoke to a knock on the door. ‘Time to get up’. I emerged to meet the man from the night before who invited me in for breakfast. I declined. He insisted. He sat with me and we discussed events of the day. He wasn’t a hurling man I deducted and he moved the talk to politics which I tried to avoid. He wasn’t of any political persuasion he maintained even though Dev was competing with the Sacred Heart in the sitting room adjacent to the breakfast room.
He asked the daughter who was working in Dublin would she give me a lift as far a Portlaoise, a request {understandably} met with an emphatic ‘no way’. The kindly gent then gave me back my change from the night before, saying, “that’ll get you a bus some of the way’. I spurned the opportunity to get public transport to Limerick and headed off thumbing, dribs and drabs of lifts on a squally day getting me to Birdhill where I dropped into the famous ‘Matt the Thrashers’ and used the now famous loose change to purchase a couple of pints of Guinness. Now cured, but broke, the Lone Ranger headed back out into the elements to hitch. Birdhill remained my stand for quite some time. Once a car slowed down, reversed, then pulled away. Eventually I got a lift to Nenagh, then more lifts, more dribs and drabs. Over nine hours after leaving Ennis I was creeping over Graiguecullen Bridge to Kelly’s Bar on Centaur Street where a few pints ‘on the slate’ brought a long October Bank Holiday to an end.
A month or so later Clare were again hurling in Ennis and I joined the boys in a packed Brogan’s. “How did you get on the last night after?” asked one of the Casanova’s. “Oh the finest,” says I, naming the B&B of mercy. There was silence. Then one tentatively asked who I was with. ‘No one’ I replied. ‘No one’ he repeated, adding, “you do know that that is where the ladies of the night in this town bring their quarry?” I didn’t. And I suppose I was probably the first to do a Mae West and sleep alone!
Christmas of that same year I was back in Kelly’s of Centaur Street when Mary Ryan (nee English), a right good camogie player, asked me if I was in Birdhill on the October Bank Holiday Monday. I replied in the affirmative. “Now,:” she says to her husband Emmet, a native if Limerick, “I told you it was Leo!” That was the car that had slowed down, reversed, then pulled away, the driver not listening to his wife!
When Clare reached the Munster final in 1993, just six months after my father, a proud son of the Banner, had passed away, the big game was fixed for Limerick and Daddy’s good friend, Paddy Murphy decided we would stay in Ennis the night before the match. Having heard my B&B story on the trip down nothing would do Paddy but to ’stop’ in the same place as I did seven years previously! Now let me quickly add that the same B&B also ran a legitimate Guest House! The proprietor was an entrepreneur capable of ‘thinking outside the box’ so when Murphy, on being told there were no vacancies, announced that “we wouldn’t be choosey’, the man of the house said he loved doing business with people like us and suggested we go into town, enjoy ourselves and when we came back he’d have something sorted. Upon arrival to the B&B at two in the morning the man with the moustache showed us into the sitting room where three ‘put you up’ beds had been strategically placed.
“I played against Carlow who had to play the bus driver and the fella from the Carlow Nationalist. That's a fact. Mikey Mac from Crusheen was wing-forward and was marking the driver and he only got two points off him. We'd a couple of pints up the town afterwards and we gave him an awful grilling.”
The words of Clare All-Ireland winning captain Anthony Daly in a ‘Clare Champion’ interview some years ago.
Now as I was “the fella from Carlow Nationalist” I am in a position to verify Daly’s story but for the fact that my truth is not his. First off, ‘Dalo’ did not actually play that match. But, yes, things were so bad that October Bank Holiday of 1989 that the bus driver was asked to play. There were, though, a couple of problems. The man Glynn’s had behind the wheel was Jim Foley of Kilbride who had never played hurling and who had been sent off in the junior football final the previous Sunday. And, yes, Mike McNamara did play right half forward and, yes, one suspects he did get a grilling as he was the only one of the starting six Clare forwards not to score You know who the ‘bus-driver’ left half back for Carlow really was? The one and only Johnny Nevin!
As I was down to cover the match for ‘The Nationalist’ I had arranged with selector Pat Cassin to get a lift on the team bus to Ennis that day and landed in the Shamrock Square to find Carlow struggling for numbers. The Sugar Factory campaign, the jazz festival in Cork and general apathy (hard to understand as Carlow had ran Leinster champions Offaly close in their in their previous outing) led to just 13 players arriving to the pick-up point. With the promise of one player leaving Cork to meet up with the bus in Limerick and another coming off nights in the factory to drive down himself, it was decided to travel. I was duly transported back up Brownes Hill to collect my hurl and gear so as to act as a substitute. Four hours later I found myself togged out in then red, yellow and green of Carlow, a lone figure in the Cusack Park dug-out as the only other sub, selector Cassin walked the line.
Clare won 5-15 to 1-2 as for the first time in their league history the Carlow hurlers failed to raise a flag from play. Mind you, I came close! Having been brought on at half-time for the badly limping Mick Slye, I raced on to a ball 50 yards from the Quinnsworth end posts, picked it first time and with John ‘Rooskie’ Russell closing in let fly with a shot that sailed narrowly wide of the saffron and blue painted uprights. It would have been a score I would have supped on for years. As it is, it’s a miss I have supped on for years!
