Is Cavan still 'a football county'?

Cavanman's Diary

A podcast I listened to last week got me thinking about the definition of a “football town”. Historian and journalist Paul Rouse was interviewing musician and football fanatic, Leo Moran, of the Saw Doctors.

Moran and his bandmates come from Tuam, Co Galway. Now that is a football town, a place absolutely in thrall to the size five. It is the town of Sean Purcell, Frankie Stockwell and Ja Fallon. Their club, Tuam Stars, sits atop the Galway SFC roll of honour with 25 titles and of St Jarlath’s College’s, whose 12 Hogan Cup wins is a record.

“We grew up in a town where Sean Purcell and Frank Stockwell walked around the streets,” Moran explained.

“The fact you had people of such stature walking around the town, it made football greatness seem very normal.”

Moran’s father, Jimmy, was a noted player and official; he refereed a county final at 24 and was chairman of the Galway county board at 28. He played against Cavan in the All-Ireland minor semi-final in 1937 and his son remarked on the show that his father always mentioned a great player, “Harry Bouchier… he said he beat Galway on his own.”

(The late Canon Harry, of course, came from Arva and was regarded as one of the greatest ever underage players before entering the priesthood.)

Leo talked about 1998 and Galway’s breakthrough after 32 years in the wilderness.

“I had been at the 1971, ’73 and ’74 finals, I was in America in ’83. You were so used to the disappointment but the success wiped it all away. I always think that counties that win it seldom, it means so much more to them. There is great satisfaction and a certain amount of joy for counties who win it on a fairly regular basis but there is ecstasy when a county wins it for the first time in so long.

“It’s just a magical, magical thing and a great way of getting people’s spirits up to a level that they can’t get to normally.”

In the Irish Times last week, columnist Ciaran Murphy, a Galway native, mentioned a line in Raymond Smith’s 1984 book, The Football Immortals, in which he described Tuam as “a town which throbs with a love of football as Thurles breathes the very spirit of hurling”.

“Throw a ring 10 or 15 miles around the town in every direction – the catchment area for the schools, the mart, and the shops – and you’ll harvest up a big, big majority of the All-Ireland football medals won by Galway players,” Murphy writes.

“That small constituency surely contains more All-Ireland medals than any rural part of the country outside of Kerry.”

Totting those up would be an interesting exercise. I would wager that the area within a 15-mile radius of Cavan Town would give Tuam and its hinterland a run for its money in that regard.

Because Cavan Town certainly sees itself as a football town, too. On the necklace of county towns along the border and from coast to coast, Cavan is the footballing bead that shines brightest. Or it likes to think so, anyway, although I wonder about the pre-eminence of the sport in Cavan, Town and county, these days.

Think of them, west to east, roughly in a line. Sligo, Bundoran, Enniskillen, Longford, Monaghan, Newry, Dundalk. Good towns, nice towns, towns with footballers in them and with strong football clubs. But football towns? No, not in the way Cavan is, or was.

And outside of the main town are a string of villages and tiny urban centres, some not much more than a crossroads, which have always been football places too.

For the longest time, Gaelic football had things all its own way in this county.

This is not really horsey country; no Sheikh or stock market tycoon is going to risk his prize assets among the drumlins, where the land has been described as basket of eggs, all hills and at the bottom of them, mainly water. Eggs break and so do horses.

Hurling? It’s barely a rumour. For me, growing up, hurling was like the antithesis of a Victorian child; heard of but never seen. I was on Erasmus in Brussels and turning 22 when I first pucked a sliotar. On the sporting ordinance survey map, it can only be identified with a magnifying glass, despite the best efforts of a small band of camán cartographers.

Traditionally, there have been a handful of established soccer clubs; others came and went. A few have their own permanent pitches or clubhouses.

There are minority pursuits like boxing and handball, which have produced champions and a couple of strong athletics clubs, although athletes from the county town must travel half an hour to train on a track.

There are two rugby clubs in the county, both founded in the 1970s, and a strong motor club. Basketball has a solid foundation and is on the rise.

But Gaelic football has always been the thing. Around here, the word ‘Gaelic’ is superfluous. That blasphemous word ‘Gah’, I didn’t even hear until I was 19 and in college.

Football in Cavan started in the west, in Ballyconnell, and moved east. Cavan Town, as the largest settlement, embraced the game early.

There are two clubs in the town; there were once two different ones. The Slashers, Cavan’s first great club team apart from Cornafean, drew from the professional classes, the Harps players came from ‘the terraces’. When they met, it was the establishment against the rabble-rousers.

No referee in Cavan would touch it; they sent for whistlers from places like Armagh. Eventually, the two joined forces and formed Cavan Gaels, one of the giants of the club scene.

Soon after that, another club, Drumalee, was founded in the town. Both pitches are on the top of hills, overlooking the comings and goings below. A sniper at one of the grounds, with the right scope, could easily take someone out at the other. Actually, let’s not give anyone ideas…

A few hundred metres out the Dublin road, up another hill, is Breffni Park. To proper football people, it’s known as just ‘The Park’.

It was officially opened in 1923, when it was described as “the Croke Park of the north”. At that time, some counties were barely organised or not at all – Derry had no county board until 1930 – but in Cavan, there was the interest and wherewithal to actually construct an arena on a par with almost any in the land at the time.

It was another 27 years before Tuam Stadium opened – Cavan played Mayo on the day – but it, too, became a cathedral for the football masses.

In the last couple of days, had Galway won, Tuam would have been absolutely rocking, “a magical, magical thing” as Leo Moran aptly stated.

Twenty-five years have passed since we have witnessed a football party like it in Cavan Town. At the moment, things are on a downer after a terribly disappointing loss in the Tailteann Cup final.

Rural Ireland has changed rapidly in the quarter century since Cavan won in 1997 and the county town played host to one of the greatest homecomings of all time. The population of this county has increased by 60pc, mostly centred on one geographical area, close to the Meath border, down along a central corridor to Cavan and in the town’s ‘suburbs’.

Throw in the general homogenisation of society and there is no doubt that some of the tribal characteristics have been diluted. Many clubs are struggling to field teams on their own at underage level and even adult level in some cases. There are half as many actual teams entered in U16 football now as there were 25 years ago, at a time when there were less than half as many children. In real terms, that’s a collapse.

Other sports, which I mentioned above, have got their act together, are well organised and attractive and are seen as viable recreational alternatives to football in a way they never once were.

All of which begs the question, is Cavan still a football county the way it once was? And is the town at its centre still a football town, in the truest sense of the phrase?

The coming years will tell us more.

Main photo: The Sam Maguire Cup returns to the Farnham Gardens in Cavan Town in 1952.