When Mayo trailed Kerry by seven points early in Sunday’s big game, it looked as if, as the time-honoured cliche puts it, they had a mountain to climb. Luckily on this occasion, many of the team’s supporters had already climbed it.
This was the first year ever that “Reek Sunday” coincided with an All-Ireland final involving Mayo. And thousands of the county’s faithful ascended Croagh Patrick well in time for throw-in, hoping that if they didn’t have God on their side, exactly, they at least had the national saint.
At the foot of Ireland’s holy mountain, his statue’s mitre was accessorised for the day with a Mayo flag, the green and red flying proudly straight in a stiff breeze from Clew Bay.
His other hand, meanwhile, held up a shamrock. That’s always there, but this time some close observers saw the three-leafed plant as the saint’s way of predicting the margin by which Mayo would at last prevail.
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From there up, the team’s religious high press contained all the way to the mist-covered summit, where the tiny church – scene of hourly masses since 6am – was also flying the green and red flag, with its slogan “Criost Linn”.
Many pilgrims wore the county colours. Although an occasional infidel in a Kerry jersey appeared here and there on the slopes, as if trying to insist that they were God’s children too, they seemed more than usually out of place here. On Reek Sunday 2026, this was Mayo’s mountain.
St Patrick aside, the people Mayo GAA should be sending thank-you cards to this week may include a bagpipe player called Antal Szabo.
He came to Ireland from Hungary 20 years ago and adopted Mayo as his favourite GAA team “because they had the same colours as my country”, even though he lives in Wicklow and plays with the Parnell Memorial Pipe Band in Rathdrum.
He would normally have been in Croke Park, banging a bodhrán for Mayo. “But I couldn’t this year because it’s Reek Sunday,” he said. Instead, there he was, halfway up the mountain, in full kilted regalia, pipes included, and playing on request for passersby.
Reek Sunday had dawned grey and damp, with drizzle and mist making for slippery underfoot conditions, especially on the upper slopes.
Mountain rescue and volunteers attended to two fallers during our ascent: one of them – passed again on the descent – painstakingly stretchered all the way down to Murrisk.
But if it was mist-covered at the top, nearer sea level a Mayo sun shone frequently and gloriously, as if sharing St Patrick’s optimism about later events in Croke Park.
In Campbell’s bar, at the foot of the reek, a mostly local crowd gathered to watch the game on TV.
They were noisily hopeful early on, then lapsed into a muted depression when David Clifford – whom the apostle of Ireland himself would struggle to mark, even with the help of a homicidally swinging mitre – scored his goal.
Later in the game, when it was Kerry’s turn to chase down a Mayo lead, and they got within a point, you could smell the fear of the supporters. Were they in for yet another heartbreak, perhaps the worst of all?
Not this time, it turned out. The final whistle brought 75 years of suffering to an end. First, the infamous curse had been lifted. Now, finally, and it seemed with some divine assistance, Mayo were the chosen people.
Back at the summit, many pilgrims had left memorials at “St Patrick’s bed”, which in recent years has become an impromptu shrine. Some tied rosary beads to the railing around it. Others left photographs or mementos, anchored against the wind with stones.
Most of the tributes seemed to be for departed loved ones now in a better place. But someone had also added a picture of the current Mayo football squad, held down with a stone. If it seemed a bit desperate before the game, it became prescient in retrospect, on a day when the team joined the GAA’s immortals.
