AGAINST ALL
MULLINALAGHTA’S success in the Leinster club final last Sunday was one of those rare victories that had the capacity to warm the hearts of GAA followers far beyond the small half-parish on the Longford-cavan border.
Drawing from resources more akin to a junior club, St Columba’s now sit on top of a pile of hundreds of clubs across Leinster and who knows where their journey will end yet.
In the next few weeks, clubs HAVING won their first three Leinster titles and contested two All-ireland finals in the 60s, Offaly’s breakthrough in 1971 was certainly no shock.
But drill down a bit further and the scale of the achievement becomes all the more apparent.
The population of Offaly in the 1971 census came in at just 52,000, making it the most sparsely populated county to ever win an All-ireland. Now, all over the country will reassemble for training and will point to Mickey Graham’s side’s as an example of what can be achieved.
Sadly, though, even at club level, achievements like Mullinalaghta’s have become more scarce in the GAA as the gap between the rich and poor continues to widen.
Here are some other against-the-odds triumphs in Gaelic football that may well never be repeated: consider that the south of the county is almost exclusively hurling territory and the football pool from which Offaly were drawing is even shallower than first appears.
Moreover, Offaly went on to retain the title the following year, dishing out what remains a record beating for Kerry in an All-ireland final (after a replay) and helped inspire the county hurlers’ breakthrough a decade later. BALTINGLASS may not exactly be a hamlet like Mullinalaghta, but it’s certainly not a sprawling town from which the GAA club can draw big playing numbers either with a population of only a couple of thousand.
More to the point, it’s in Wicklow, which is the only Leinster county not to have won a provincial title at inter-county level and hasn’t even been in a final since 1897.
Baltinglass, led by the brilliant Kevin O’brien and Hugh Kenny, overcame a history of failure from teams representing the county to go all the way to the Leinster and All-ireland titles, beating Thomas Davis of Dublin to claim provincial honours and Roscommon outfit Clann na ngael in the All-ireland final.
Only one Leinster title, won by Rathnew in 2001, has come to Wicklow since. IT’S an indication of how much the GAA and the inter-county scene in particular has changed in the last quarter of a century or so that Leitrim’s feat of 24 years ago stands out more now than it did then.
Traditionally the least populous county in Ireland, Leitrim had just 26,000 inhabitants according to the census of three years earlier.
They hadn’t won a Connacht title since 1927, but there was no fluke about this. In 1991, Leitrim were Connacht under-21 champions and in 1993 the seniors beat Galway in Tuam, their first victory over them since 1949.
En route to the 1994 title they accounted for Roscommon, Galway, in Tuam once again after a replay, and Mayo in the final – the three counties who had won every Connacht Championship bar one since 1928.