Broadcast

Blackrock resident Tom Rowley had one sliver of consolation on the day his native county, Mayo, lost out to Dublin in an epic All-Ireland final when his football related story was broadcast on the morning of the match on the popular RTE radio programme Sunday Miscellany.

Tom, a former senior journalist with The Irish Independent and later a Government media advisor, has been a regular contributor to the programme, which has an average listenership of almost 250,000, for more than two decades.

On All-Ireland Sunday his story, ‘The Curse of ‘ The Curse’”, told how Mayo people are plagued year after year by people from the other 31 counties wanting to talk, once Mayo football is mentioned, about a curse that was supposedly put on the Mayo team after they last won the All-Ireland back in 1951.

As Tom said in his broadcast story; ‘Every year the Curse of ‘ The Curse’ crawls out of winter hibernation and sets about stalking Mayo people. The story goes that Mayo’s victorious cavalcade in 1951 passed through the town of Foxford while a funeral was taking place. The local priest became incensed at the failure of the team to show proper respect for the deceased and mourners and vowed that Mayo would not win another All-Ireland until every player of that team was deceased.

But when you look into it, there’s not a shred of evidence. There was no funeral in Foxford that day that anyone can recall, and nobody who was with the victory parade remembers any priest ranting and raving. But somehow, somewhere, the story was started, and it stuck. Call it a piseog or old wives’ tale or balderdash if you like, but the reality is, ever since it started, ‘The Curse’ has been clinging to us Mayo folk and making life miserable”.

And that misery continued this year as Mayo fought heroically against the much fancied Dublin but in the end of an epic encounter were edged out by a single point.

But just like Mayo’s footballers, events move on and Tom, who now works as a freelance writer and Public Relations consultant, is looking forward to the publication

in a few weeks of a new book that will feature one of his stories. The book, ‘ From the Candy Store to the Galytmore’, is a collection of stories from Ireland’s showband and ballroom era of the 1950-1970’s.

It is published by Ballpoint Press which two years ago brought out ’Around the Farm Gate’, a collection of stories about growing up in rural Ireland, which became a bestselling book and was lead off by Tom’s story ‘The Bend at the Church’, a poignant account of growing up on a farm in Mayo while his father worked for many years on construction sites across Britain. He broadcast an edited version of the story on RTE radio’s Countrywide programme.