GAA thriving in rugby country

GAELIC GAMES:SUNDAY MARKS another small step in the Dublin hurling revolution, and a potentially giant leap for the current senior team. If they can beat Cork – and Waterford beat Galway – then Dublin will contest a Division One hurling league final for the first time since 1946, when there was a very different sort of revolution in the air.

At the same time some future recruits are being put through their paces at a junior school in the city suburbs. Nothing immediately unusual about that: this is the time of year when hurling throughout the country is at its most fashionable.

What is unusual is the location – St Michael’s College, on Ailesbury Road, in Dublin 4, a private school, deep in the heart of rugby country, where hurling has never exactly been in vogue. But the hurling revolution continues to break down boundaries, and several high-profile county players, including Dublin forward David O’Callaghan, have been invited to the school to help spread the word: there is more to school sport than rugby, even in a rugby stronghold such as St Michael’s – who won the coveted Leinster Schools’ Senior Cup as recently as 2007.

Yet Gaelic Games is making inroads, and there are several driving forces behind this: Martin Delaney, a third-class teacher, has helped enter football teams into the Cumamn na mBunscoil competitions for three of the past four years, and this year also entered a hurling team to the junior competition. Delaney’s background is in hurling – with the Kinnitty club in Offaly.

The school’s PE teacher, Patrick Stephens, from Galway, is a former games promotion officer with the Dublin County Board, and there are two other teachers with a GAA background; Anthony Monaghan, from Galway, and Enda Ruane, from Roscommon.

“Hurling would be my first sport, and a few other teachers here would say the same,” says Delaney. “That’s what sparked it, but there’s definitely more of an interest in hurling and football now. The principal has been very supportive, and the secondary school principal too.

“The last two years we fielded football teams, and they’ve gone alright, won a couple of games. We started a little hurling then two years ago, and it’s going again this year. A few of the students would be involved with clubs too, such as Cuala, Clanna Gael, and Kilmacud Crokes too.”

The age group currently been catered for is mainly 9- to 12-year- olds, but Delaney can see the interest spilling over into the secondary school – which shares the same campus: “Some of them possibly will on to the junior cup team, or the senior cup team. Already we see them say pucking around on the field, in the secondary school, and they’ve had a couple of PE lessons as well.

“I don’t think you will ever see us contesting All-Ireland colleges’ competition, but you are likely to see say a Conal Keaney, who also came through another rugby school, Terenure. But if we have this for another four or five years it could be that students at the secondary school will start looking for it, even after the rugby season, or students that say don’t make the rugby teams. Because obviously they can’t all make it in rugby.”

Páraic McDonald is Gaelic football coach at Kilmacud Crokes, and believes what’s happening in St Michael’s is certainly not unique: “We have young kids starting off in the club, at age five or six, who would go on to schools like Blackrock, Gonzaga, and also St Michael’s. Most of those kids would be playing two or three sports in primary school, even in a rugby school. So it’s been happening for a few years now, that once the rugby season is over, around St Patrick’s Day, some of these rugby schools do turn to Gaelic games.”