Mullins’ vital ignition lit up the Heffo years
Dublin hero’s contribution to football will never be forgotten
HE was part of the first generation of Dublin dominance, one of the men whose hair had thinned and greyed by the time the six-in-a-row side emerged to be hailed as the county’s greatest.
Brian Mullins, though, towered over all.
Whatever the year, the feat, the generation, he is a fixed point in the lore of Dublin – and of the wider GAA, too.
He is as prominent in the history of the sport as he was on the playing fields of the 1970s, when his astonishing fusion of aggression, grace and athleticism provided perhaps the vital ignition that lit the Heffernan years.
News of the death of Brian Mullins yesterday, at the age of 68, has arrived into the close season with shocking suddenness.
He is forever synonymous with September, barging into the space between late summer and early autumn to claim the year in the name of Dublin. He was one of the gods of fall. And, as is so often the way with the passing of those whose presence makes them feel imperishable, it feels shocking that death had the temerity to come and claim a warrior like him.
The bare statistics of his career immediately distinguish him: four All-Ireland senior titles, a club one with St Vincent’s, nine Leinster titles. And all this was harvested between 1974 and 1985.
The team put together by Kevin Heffernan featured a staggering number of interesting individuals, men who starred as footballers but many of whom excelled in their lives away from the field, too.
Mullins was no different, becoming in 1991 the principal of Carndonagh Community School on the Inishowen Peninsula in Donegal. It was at the time the largest community school in the country.
HE had one year as a caretaker manager of the Dublin footballers, in 1986, and then three years with Derry, in which he won a National League and, in 1998, the Ulster championship.
He interviewed for the Dublin role again in 2004 but some years later, when ruling himself out as a contender following the departure of Paul Caffrey in 2008, revealed his unhappiness with how the process was carried out four years before.
That will not have surprised those who knew or even encountered Brian Mullins: he was straight in calling things how he saw them, and he never showed a great deal of interest in softening the edges.
Those who tried to live with him on a football field will recognise the tendency, too.
In an interview with the GAA website in 2016, Mullins offered an interesting insight on the impact into that remarkable 1970s team. They are often, understandably, credited with saving the game in the city.
It was Mullins and O’Driscoll, Moran and Hanahoe, Keaveney and O’Toole and the rest of them who were the formative boys in blue.
But Mullins (right), never a man to shirk from a contrary view, saw a different angle to it.
‘I like to think that the impact of that was not just big matches and the supporters that went to them,’ he said.
‘It was all those people giving back to their own small communities because they witness the effort of the team and the ambition of the team to do as well as they could. I would hope that filtered down to all levels.
‘I do believe at times that this country would be seriously imperilled if it wasn’t for the GAA, their clubs and the spirit of community that the games have delivered all over the place.’
That the truest of blues, a man central to the birth of the metropolitan powerhouse that threatened to make summer their own in more than one age, brought such a bottom-up perspective was surely based on his background. He was a city boy, but both his parents were country people. His father was from Clare, and his mother from Kerry. Bill Casey of Lispole, one of the looming figures in Kerry football history, and who won four AllIrelands in his playing days, was an uncle of Mullins. The nephew would go on to match that tally, but his insistence that the lasting legacy of his side was in how the GAA was rejuvenated at its granular levels was the view of a man who understood how the GAA sustained rural Ireland. Brian Mullins was to the fore in ensuring it would sweep the city, too. He was – with Anton O’Toole, the only man to start the four winning finals, in 1974, 1976, 1977 and 1983 – the player who defined the Decade of the Dubs. Now, like O’Toole, he is gone too young. But figures like Brian Mullins don’t really go. As long as the game is played, blue is worn, and summer feels special in the city, then the spirit of the man, the courage, the class and the sheer doggedness that inspired him, will endure. He will never be forgotten.