Kay Brennan’s colourful memories of the early days of Irish women’s football

The purpose of the chat with Kay Brennan, better known in her footballing days as Kathleen Ramsbottom, was to delve into the history of the women’s FAI Cup, as a scene-setter for Sunday’s meeting between Shelbourne and Athlone Town.

She had, after all, played in the very first final back in 1972 and was on the winning side the following two years. So, a solid plan.

But Brennan, the Kilkenny woman who can only be described as a force of nature, takes you places you never quite expected to go. Like when the chat turns to morgues, jaundice, bacon and cabbage and nuns in an enclosed order getting her drunk.

And these were largely asides that she skipped past, as if they were unremarkable. Like when she was talking about the team she played with in that first final.

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“Fit Remoulds. It was a tyre factory in Kilkenny, some of the staff started up a women’s soccer team around 1971. The factory was like a big warehouse, so we’d play indoor soccer in it. There was a morgue at the end so we used to sneak down to have a look at the coffins. Anyway, I loved the indoor soccer and then a local league started and we got involved in that and then . . .”

A morgue?

“Well, when I say morgue, it was more where they used to store coffins.”

Were there, like, people in them?

“There were one night because we got into them. We were curious. This area was marked off and locked up. So we crawled in to see what was going on inside and there were coffins piled up to the ceiling. So we got in to see what it was like to lie in one. If we’d been caught we would have got the arse kicked off us.”

And then she’s talking about being on a four-match tour of France in 1972 with Dublin club Jeyes, who invited her to join their squad for the trip. While giving an account of the games she casually mentions that “locked up” nuns on the Belgian border gave her three glasses of wine and she was “three sheets to the wind” when she left them. “So, we played the French champions, Stade de Reims, and . . .”

Locked up nuns?

“Gated. What do you call it? An enclosed order? They heard this Irish team was coming so they got special permission to invite us to the convent and served us up cabbage, bacon and potatoes. We were only starving after our match. They had bottles and bottles of wine. It’s a thing in France. I’d never had wine in my life. So, yeah, I’d three glasses. I was happy as Larry coming out.

“They were lovely. They talked all about Ireland and how they hadn’t seen their families in years. They were waving at us as we left, as they locked up the gates, saying ‘give our love to Ireland’.

“One of them asked if anyone was from Gowran. I said I wasn’t, but I was from Kilkenny. She asked me if I could deliver a letter for her. I had no clue who it was for, but I said I would. When I got home, I went out to Gowran and knocked on every door. I eventually found someone who knew a relation of the person on the letter, so I gave it to him and told him the story. That was the last I heard of it. I hope they found him.”

You could listen to this woman forever. At the centre of all her adventures was her love of football, which she developed while growing up on the Butts housing estate in Kilkenny city.

“In today’s terminology, they’d call it ‘disadvantaged’, but we were absolutely blessed, we had a soccer pitch, handball alleys and a basketball court on the one site. Out of only 150 houses, we have 14 or 15, maybe more, international players, be it in handball, soccer, basketball or whatever. And that’s because we had those facilities.”

She was an exceptional basketball player, but, ultimately, football stole her heart, and she was gifted enough at it to be offered a chance to play professionally in France.

She had a think about it, but decided it wasn’t for her, unlike her team-mate Anne O’Brien who joined Stade de Reims where she launched an outstanding career on foreign shores.

“When I watch Katie McCabe, I see shades of Anne, but for me, she was the greatest player I’ve ever seen. It was an honour to play alongside her.”

Brennan, a defender, was no slouch herself. She was picked to play in the Irish women’s team’s first ever official international back in 1973, but couldn’t get time off work in her shoemaking factory. When she was called up next time, for a trip to France, she wasn’t going to be denied.

She went to her doctor, talked him in to giving her a two-week sick note for an, eh, unspecified illness, and off she went. The problem was that she tanned easily. When she got back, looking like a Caramel bar, her manager wiggled his eyebrows and said, ‘you were sick, were ya?’ “I was yeah,” she replied, “I had jaundice.”

She laughs now at the lengths she had to go to to play for Ireland, but them were the days. And, she says, if it wasn’t for the likes of football historians Helena Byrne and Donie Butler, as well as Gareth Maher, the FAI’s media man for the women’s side of their operation, the story of the pioneers in Irish women’s football would still be untold.

Brennan is especially proud of Kilkenny’s contribution to the earliest part of that story, herself, Anne Griffith, Ursula Grace and Connie Jordan all playing in that first FAI Cup final, which was won by Dublin side Suffragettes, all four going on to play for Ireland.

She’s been on radio since the 1980s, “since we were pirates working out of an old hay barn loft”, and was honoured at the recent National Community Radio Awards for her music shows on Community Radio Kilkenny City.

“I love sharing music, absolutely love it,” she says, it becoming as big a passion in her life as football.

The rudest of all questions – what age are you?

“Well, I’m as fit as a 40-year-old. They tell me I don’t look my age, but on the 22nd of this month I’ll be 70. I never put anything on age, it’s only a measure of time, it has nothing to do with how you feel. And I feel young.”

Yep, a force of nature.