Paul Fitzpatrick profiles new GAA President Aogán Ó Fearghail, a man whose first introduction to the association came in handball.
Memory takes what it wants, as the poet Tom MacIntyre wrote some years ago, and, they say, it has good taste. When Aogán Ó Fearghail looks back on his journey in the GAA, certain events glisten in his mind’s eye. It must feel like peering over a wall at a different world. There’s a teenage boy, wide-eyed and innocent to the workings of it all, who liked to play handball with his friends on an old outdoor alley, one wall and a square of concrete, and went about setting up a club, attending meetings, taking notes, grabbing the attention of a floor full of wizened old men.
There’s a schoolteacher in his early 20s, studiously conducting a survey of children in his class and parish to see how many had played football, or had any interest in doing so. Creating a tradition. There’s the same man, ferrying car-loads of kids around the county for underage matches, his girlfriend and later his wife acting as umpire, losing, losing, losing until one evening, he feels like jacking it in altogether, when a friendly priest intervenes. There’s a new man taking a top position in the Ulster Council and bringing him along for the ride. And, all the way, there have been elections and meetings, matches and conventions, long days in the classroom and summers in the Gaeltacht, speaking the language, blissfully soaking it all up.
And now, four decades after he first decided he’d organise the group who’d flock to the ball-alley after school and on Sundays after mass, there’s the 55-year-old widely-respected official has been crowned chieftain of the great global GAA tribe.
Creating a structure As a boy, in the late ‘60s and early ’70s, Farrell played football with the neighbouring Cootehill Celtic, because Drumgoon had no team of their own. The best players stayed on towards U16 and minor; the rest – including Aogán – packed it in. That’s just how it was. Finished, for the meantime, as a footballer, he turned to handball. The alley was located between his home, where his parents owned a shop, and Dernakesh National School, and the children would play on the way to school, after school and for hours on summer’s evenings.
“It was the main activity in all weathers. We all played,” he says. “We played rounders and handball but none of them were organised, that was all among ourselves, there was no juvenile GAA club in Drumgoon so we didn’t play any U12 or U14 competitions, we just played for the craic in school... You’d wait for hours on a game of handball in the summer time. But there was no club and it sort of left an impression on me, that unless there’s a structure, unless there’s organisation, it will fall away.”
So, he put it right, reforming Drumgoon Handball Club – out of business for the previous 15 years or more – and organising leagues. Soon “fifty or sixty young players” were signed up to play. The club was affiliated to Cavan County Board and the 14-year-old secretary was on his way. Attending handball meetings brought the kid into the GAA, and soon he was immersed. At one point, he spearheaded a drive to build an indoor handball court, at the same time as a local committee were putting up a hall. The hall posse approached the handballers and suggested that, should they throw their weight behind it, the alley would be incorporated. They did – it wasn’t. Lesson learned, Farrell moved on.
Soon, he was in St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, training to be a teacher, playing handball with his friend Dominic Sheridan, the well-known Cavan player. Soon, he naturally gravitated towards the football club and found himself filling the assistant secretary’s role for Erin’s Hope, the college’s club. In 1978, they won the Dublin Senior Championship. The Dubs were All-Ireland champions at the time and their championship was one of the fiercest in the country. By this stage, he was also acting as secretary of the college handball club and had dusted off the boots to play hurling and junior football, too. Ach, Is leor don dreoilín a nead – the nest is enough for the wren. The blue and gold of Drumgoon was bringing the Irish scholar home at weekends, lining out for the club on the old field at Foy’s Green. “St Pat’s,” he says, “was what really brought me into GAA administration. I was back playing adult football for Drumgoon but I was getting busier and busier with that end of things.”
On graduation, he took up work in Kells, but lived at home in Maudabawn. By now, he was looking at Drumgoon and wondering how he could raise their stock. “I was involved in the school team in Kells but I was looking very strongly at the situation in my home club which was still, at that time, a junior club with no underage. I had lived through it myself and I thought, well, it’s time to do something about that. “I got a job then in Dernakesh and I did a survey – and I still think all decisions should be based on data and evidence, there’s too much hearsay – and of most of the young boys and their brothers and sisters, the vast majority of them never played football at all.
“They just didn’t play. Those that were considered really good, they continued to go in to Cootehill to play but the guy like me, the average player, just didn’t play football at all. “So, Drumgoon were getting very little new blood into the club and that’s why they were a junior club and never winning anything.” In Dernaskesh, he found that nothing had changed since his time as a pupil. Barring the “odd gasun with a family connection”, the GAA meant little or nothing to most of the children in the parish. Needs must. Aogán got to work again.
“To address all of that I decided that I would establish a juvenile club in Drumgoon. It wasn’t easy at the start because some of the older members of the committee felt it would be a drain on their finances, that we wouldn’t have enough lads, but I showed them the figures that there were plenty of children in Dernakesh but they weren’t playing.
“But some of the wiser heads, and in particular I’ll never forget the chairman of the club at the time, a man called Jack Daly, who was one of those chairmen that had been there forever, he saw that what I was saying was right and gave me every backing.
“So, I set up the underage club and really I was on my own because you set it up, you trained them, you coached them. We had an U12 and an U14 team and I trained and coached and transported both teams on my own. I did all the administration at the start on my own.”
Mol an óige...
In 1986, the club’s U12s won their first county title, and the rest is history. The trickle turned into a flood. “People began to take notice in the club. We got to a semi-final, then we got to a final and in 1986, the dam opened, we won a county final. And that was the first ever county title in Drumgoon’s history, from they were founded, in 100 years. At any level. We’d never won anything! “We’d only a junior team, we had contested a junior final once, in 1926, and lost it. We had a really good team in the ’70s in Drumgoon but all we won was tournaments, we never won county titles.”
The sap had risen. For the next 15 years, Drumgoon would invariably contest semi-finals and finals at underage level, year after year. The Class of ‘86 would go on to win more at U16 and minor levels and, eventually, the adult breakthrough arrived in 2001 with a first-ever Junior Championship. The All-Ireland Junior club title and a county intermediate crown followed. Drumgoon had become an overnight success, as the joke goes, 20 years later. And when the smoke cleared, the fingerprints of a man with a plan all those years before were everywhere at the scene.
Handball Link
Ó Fearghail’s handball links continuedto burn bright. In time, he would construct a One Wall court at the school and introduce the game to another generation of kids. In December 2013, he presented medals at the Cavan county championships, where he spoke of his aims for the sport should he get chosen as President.
Three months later, he won that election and at his inauguration in Ballyconnell - a small, west Cavan town which has recently refurbished its own 40x20 court - he spoke glowingly about world champion Paul Brady.
“Handball is a game for life, it’s one of our core sports. Minorities deserve special attention, and I want to thank everybody who promotes handball in our clubs and to continue to do it. “And it would be important when we are gathered in Cavan to mention the greatest athlete, the greatest handballer not just Ireland but the world has ever seen. Paul Brady is an outstanding example of Irish athleticism at its best.” Few in the handball community would dispute those sentiments; few, either, would doubt that in Ó Fearghail, the GAA has a leader who is steeped in our sport. All of which augurs well for the next three years.