GAELIC GAMES: KEITH DUGGANtalks to club and county GAA officials at home and abroad and hears how a trickle of player departures is now turning into a flood
SHORTLY BEFORE Christmas, Tyrone county chairman Ciarán McLaughlin decided to frame his annual address around the theme of emigration, which has become the big whispered fear across GAA clubs in Ireland.
Over the past decade, Tyrone GAA has developed an enviable blueprint for success, with a robust framework for its showpiece senior team and a seemingly endless parade of strong underage teams coming through. If any county seemed designed to stave off the consequences of the economic tsunami of the past three years, Tyrone would have been a good bet. And yet McLaughlin found himself gravely worried.
“I would be out around the various clubs in my role as chairman and I am just worried by what I am seeing and hearing,” he said this week.
“It is not just confined to players: it is the knock-on effect of young people leaving their communities. And it is going to start affecting clubs. Right now, it is just a trickle, but I do feel there is a serious problem on the horizon.”
Recent figures on emigration make bleak reading for the GAA: almost 1,000 applications for transfers from players based in Ireland to play for clubs in England, the USA or Australia and an estimated 250 players a month leaving for elsewhere.
The fact that a number are high profile GAA players – including Clare hurler Brian O’Connell, Louth All-Star nominee John O’Brien and Limerick footballers Pádraig Browne and Conor Ranahan – illuminates the seriousness of the problem. In the previous recession of the 1980s, one of the perks of playing hurling or football for the county was that work was almost guaranteed.
This time, work is harder to come by. The fact that Cork’s All-Ireland-winning manager Conor Counihan this week made an appeal on behalf of three of his players, Alan O’Connor, Donnacha O’Connor and Paul Kerrigan, who are currently out of work emphasises the starkness of the situation. Reports that Kerry had lost some 200 players last year hammered home the seriousness of the problem.
Good footballers are like apples in an orchard in Kerry and none of those who departed are involved with the senior county team. But it is a trend that concerns the Kerry county board.
“It is a hard thing to pinpoint,” says chairman Peter Twiss.
“If I go solely on the paperwork, then we have had no more than 90 official transfer requests for 2010, which is relatively small in the overall scheme of things.
“We have had a lot of media enquires about this – even the BBC called recently about it but it is hard to establish a clear pattern. For instance, in 2010 there was an increase in player participation in the B league.
“Against that, Miltown Castlemaine won a Mid-Kerry final last year and three of their players left for London that evening. My big fear is how the picture is going to look at the end of this year. The reality is that most fellas leaving don’t transfer straight away. They go to wherever they are going, wait and see if it works out and then the transfer comes. So we may be dealing with a lot more transfers by the end of 2011, because I think this is going to be a much worse year.”
In GAA culture, everything possible is done to protect county players. Two years ago, when the first wave of the recession crashed over Ireland, John Joe Doherty was managing the Donegal team and he spoke publicly about his fear his squad would be decimated by players forced to leave to find work. But even though an estimated seven of the Donegal squad are currently seeking employment, there have been no departures.
And even within Donegal, the pattern does not always run along expected lines. Kilcar, the home club of Donegal double All-Star Martin McHugh, has always punched above its weight in terms of getting big performances out of a small squad: they won last year’s minor championship with just two substitutes on their bench.
Kilcar would always have been susceptible to the affects of a recession.
“We are down Barry McGinley and Oisín McFadden, both former county minors,” McHugh says of recent departures.
“But as it happened, both of them left through choice. We are lucky in that there is work here in Kilcar at the moment (an announcement has just been made for a huge hydro-dam in the area). But we are never overburdened with players and it is always a concern.
“In general, I do think it is worse now than in the 1980s because of the fact that it is not just a recession but the huge debt we are saddled with. And I think we are going to see a lot of smaller clubs amalgamating in the coming years in order to field teams.”
For smaller clubs, the consequences of emigration can be devastating. Jimmy Langan has been coaching Leitrim club Drumkeerin for the past two seasons. Their progress has been promising: they have contested two intermediate finals – losing narrowly to traditional kingpins Aughawillan in October – and have won the under-14 and under-16 county championships.
But two of their senior players left for Canada after last year’s final, bringing the number of players they have lost in the past two years to five. A sixth, Stephen Feeney, is almost certain to leave shortly.
“When I told the lads that Stephen would probably be leaving, their heads dropped. He is a very important player for us. When you go from just losing an intermediate final, you want to try and push on and win it so to hear that you are losing a vital player is not the best news. And I know that Stephen is agonising over this.
“It is a wrench for the lads to but what are they meant to do when they hear there is loads of work elsewhere? It is a problem in Leitrim and I think things are going to get worse and worse.”
Stephen Feeney does not want to leave. After graduating from NUIG – he was captain of the Freshers team that won the All-Ireland in 2005, he decided to go into journalism and got a job with the Longford News, which was abruptly closed in September 2010. It had been in business since 1936. Since then, he has applied for more jobs than he can remember – in anything.
“My girlfriend is a teacher here and she is not in a position to leave now, which is the main priority. In terms of the football, it is more than just playing. I do coaching here, I am the PRO for the club so the thought of leaving it and not having it in my life anymore, it is an awful strange feeling. Even though football is only a hobby, it is the thing that your life revolves around. It is the framework.”
Feeney has been part of the Leitrim panel for this year’s FBD League but he does not expect to be in Ireland for the upcoming National League. His brother Andrew has already left for Perth and he can list six of seven other friends who are either in Australia or America.
“They don’t miss the country, unfortunately, but they all say they really miss the football and the club. The only way I can put it is that it feels like the bottom has been taken out of it. The work that Jimmy has been doing with us has been brilliant but it is just devastating to see guys you have played with leaving. I reckon that if we had everyone available, we would have one of the stronger sides in Leitrim. But I am biased I suppose.
“My dad was driving from Sligo the other day and he said something that struck me: ‘The countryside is a quiet place now’. And it is. You can just feel it, the difference, even in the few years. There is not as much happening. I am 95 per cent certain of leaving unless something turns up very quickly.”
Officials in the GAA’s expatriate clubs are bearing witness to a familiar scene. John Doyle has been in London for 22 years and is one of the founding members of Fulham Irish GAA club. The Putney-based club was set up six years ago in response to the lack of new players coming to London.
Doyle had previously been involved with the Garryowen club in north London but he and a few others decided to set a new club up for Irish people working in the financial empires of the city.
“Guys going into finance and trading were about the only Irish people coming over here and they simply didn’t have the time to make the long commute to the traditional Irish clubs. We are just 20 minutes from the City and training is more flexible.
“We won the intermediate title in our first year and got to the London semi-final in 2008. But we are noticing a big increase in terms of people looking to join the club. If I scroll back on my email, I have had 32 enquires from people coming over here since October. And we are just one club.”
But the scene in London has changed in some respects. The building trade, for decades the guaranteed source of work for Irish moving to England, is no longer so accessible. Work for the London Olympics has all but concluded. Paperwork is much more stringent now.
And the big Irish building firms, which used to rely on Irish workers making up about 70 per cent of its work force has, since the Irish boom, experienced a reversal in profile, with only 30 per cent of those on its books coming from Ireland. But the GAA network – largely dormant for the last 15 years – is still in existence.
“It is not that you can ‘get’ someone a job but it is contacts,” Doyle says. “I know of cases in our club where a fella here worked for a firm that needed an accountant and someone who joined up with us had an offer of work straight away. You meet people, you hear of jobs more quickly and people look out for you. That still exists.”
Doyle can’t claim to be surprised at the sudden return to the pattern which brought him to London in the 1990s. His frequent visits to Ireland opened his eyes. He recalls going into a post office on a particular Friday and seeing queues of foreign workers sending cheques and hearing anecdotally that that was the pattern throughout the country, much the same as Irish workers in England had done in the past.
And he remembers being at a wedding in Kerry in 2005 and seeing sets of apartments blocks for sale: three years later, at another wedding in the same church, he noticed they were still for sale.“It just wasn’t adding up.”
Doyle is confident Fulham Irish can have a good season. They have recently recruited Paddy Walsh, a former Carlow midfielder – even if they are losing Eamon O’Cuiv, son of the Fianna Fáil minister, who is returning to Dublin after four years in London.
“From what I am hearing, a lot of players are going to Australia because that is where the work is but we are seeing a lot of new faces here too.”
In general, the expatriate clubs are becoming stronger. The pubs and restaurants along McLean Avenue in the Bronx are, once again, filled with voices fresh from Ireland. Throughout the last decade the Irish enclave had fallen quiet.
The tradition of turning to the local GAA community had come to be considered old hat, a 20th century comfort blanket that was no longer necessary. Now, they are coming back.
The New York GAA board has been inundated with enquires – about 30 a week – and, after a period of fretting that the Big Apple GAA culture might perish, there has been a strong resurgence.
In last year’s All-Ireland championship, the New York team almost shocked Galway in the early stages and reigning Connacht champions Roscommon face a testing visit to Gaelic Park in May. But that is still three months away, it is guesswork as to how many GAA players will have left Ireland by then.
Meantime, the clubs just continue to run training sessions and play games and hope that their players will be there next week, next month, next season.
“It is desperately tough on those young people who have no choice but to leave,” says Jimmy Langan. “And it is hard as well for those who are left behind.”
PS: This week, Stephen Feeney decided to book his flight to Australia. He has informed Mickey Moran and left the Leitrim panel. His flight leaves next month.
