Heroes immortalised in song

Cavanman's Diary

The history of writing songs and recitations in honour of football heroes and their achievements is a long and colourful one in Cavan.

As far back as the county’s first senior All-Ireland in 1933, Andrew O’Brien from Killynebber, outside Cavan Town, celebrated Cavan’s win over Kerry in Breffni Park with a seven-verse ballad. “The pace it was a cracker, ’twas swift and strenuous too/ When the green and gold fell victims to the hardy boys in blue.”

He wrote another when Cavan won again two years later, opening with the lines “Mid a sea of human faces, of men and ladies fair/I viewed the All-Ireland final, between Cavan and Kildare.”

The style seems archaic now but the compositions were wildly popular in their day. Generally, the context was established in the early stanzas – the narrative was generally that Cavan were written off and won the day with a heroic performance – and, later, some of the leading players would be feted by name.

Another, author unknown, about the ’35 success hails Mick Dinneny from Cornafean, “like a granite rock”, “the fearless Willie Connolly”, “the artful Paddy Boylan” and Donal Morgan, who “showed the way with talent rich and rare”.

The success in the Polo Grounds in 1947 spawned a dozen or more tributes and the captain of that team, John Joe O’Reilly, was immortalised in one of the most famous GAA-themed songs of them all, the Gallant John Joe.

The tradition has died off to some extent, despite the persistent popularity of Irish Country, which has enjoyed a resurgence among young people. The last ‘smash hit’ of this quite niche genre was written 30 years ago this month – Charlie From Cootehill, in honour of Cavan icon Charlie Gallagher (above).

The song was written by MJ Clarke. MJ was having a drink with a friend, Paddy Farrelly, and the discussion turned to football and MJ’s memories of a sun-drenched 1969 Ulster final in Casement Park, when Cavan defeated All-Ireland champions Down, with Gallagher as captain.

“Anyone who was there that day still remembers it... it was one of those JFK moments,” he said a few years ago. Farrelly made the throwaway comment that it was “unbelievable” that no song had been penned about Charlie.

When Clarke, a presenter on Northern Sound at the time, got home, he took out his guitar and started strumming, coming up with some lyrics as he did.

Within 20 minutes, he had put together the bones of Charlie From Cootehill. He got on to Eddie Fitzsimons, a friend and football follower from Gowna. They hired a studio in Mullingar and a producer called Paul Sheerin and added the meat.

The song was released on cassette in May. The first mention on these pages came that month in the Arva local notes.

“Surely a must for all GAA supporters is the new record to be released this week by Eddie Fitzsimons entitled ‘a Tribute to Charlie Gallagher’.

“This is a great song with very good lyrics and is sure to be great seller for the popular Eddie and will, no doubt, become a favourite alongside ‘The Gallant John Joe’ and ‘A Tribute to PJ Duke’.”

A few weeks later, the popular ‘Top Notes’ column carried a photo of the cover, which depicted Charlie with the Anglo-Celt Cup. “The song is available on tape coupled with the well-known Cavan song ‘Blue Hills of Breffni’,” it explained.

An address was given; to get their hands on a freshly-pressed copy, readers were advised to send £3, which also covered postage and packaging. Innocent times.

By September, it had reached New York, where it was a huge hit, featuring on Irish programmes broadcast by the local stations, as reported here by the Celt’s Cavanman in New York, PJ O’Reilly.

“Of course, it does not hurt the Gowna singer that his cousin Eileen Fitzsimons co-hosts the four-hour Ceol na nGael Irish radio show on WFUV every Sunday,” PJ noted.

Tony Jackson from Cavan Town also hosted a radio show in Nempstead, Long Island and reported that the song was one of the most requested numbers, while Pat Thompson from Cootehill also had his own show and was featuring Charlie on heavy rotation.

“Another great football supporter called Charlie Clerkin was doing an album and he recorded it as well and included it on an album called ‘The Gallant Men of 1947’, which is sort of self-explanatory,” MJ told me.

“Then, yet another great football supporter, Ian Corrigan, who had an absolutely huge hit with ‘The Gallant John Joe’, recorded it. He knew Charlie, too, and he was the third person to record it... I must say, I was very pleased about it. And that’s how I became a millionaire!”

Corrigan included the song on his 1996 album ‘Memories’, which was like a stamp of approval. Where once, a song had to enter the oral tradition, the fact that it was professionally recorded and released by a few artists meant it was quickly enshrined in the canon.

The mid-90s was a modern high-water mark for football in the county. In 1997, Cavan won their first Ulster Championship since that famous day ’69 and later played Kerry in New York to mark the anniversary of the 1947 Polo Grounds final. Some of the players from that team were in town for the reunion; football nostalgia was in the air. Charlie From Cootehill could be heard ringing out in the bars of Woodlawn and Sunnyside and the other Irish enclaves, night and day.

There was an interesting postscript. Later, MJ and Eddie were invited on to RTÉ Radio’s Both Sides Now show to talk about Gallagher. The poet and writer Brendan Kennelly was a guest on the same show and, before they went on air, in the green room, the men fell into talking.

“Brendan asked us what we were doing up there. Oh Lord, he knew more about him than we did, even though he came from Kerry. Charlie was just one of these people who really made an impact.

“He was everybody’s hero. He was the Georgie Best of Gaelic football. Unbelievable. The Sunday Independent used to run a list of Ireland’s leading scorers every week and Charlie was on top of that for years.

“Thirty years ago, maybe we were more easily pleased, but Charlie was the boy. I often think the GAA should have put up a monument to him in Cootehill. There was nothing really — gone and forgotten.

“Only for that bit of a song that we clapped together in 20 minutes, there wouldn’t be a word about him.”

MJ described Gallagher and his colleagues as “the backbone of cultural and sporting life in the county” and that is no exaggeration.

While “to catch the match on Sunday was every schoolboy’s dream”, time, and trends, move on. In the modern era, viral TikTok and Instagram videos are the currency of commemoration and the old ballads, to some, seem twee and out-dated.

But fashions change. Could we see more songs written to honour Cavan players and teams in the future?

Stranger things have happened.