A dedicated servant of Wicklow GAA
HE’S sitting inside the front window of his home pouring over some documents that are resting on his knees as I pull into the driveway.
I imagine he sits here regularly, letting the warm sunshine stream through the glass and warm a body that has covered fair ground, carried great responsibility, shaped futures and seen and heard uncountable adventures, dramas and yarns.
From his window he can look out on a neat garden, well-tended, loved, and beyond to the road towards Roundwood and the beautiful countryside of the Garden County and, if the mood was right, he might reflect on a life well lived.
A beaming smile overflowing with a refreshing blend of mischief and kindness greets me when the front door is whipped open, and a comical “maturing disgracefully” is the reply to my inquiry as to his well-being.
We are off to a good start!
This is the home of former Wicklow GAA secretary Arthur Hall, selected as one of two winners of the lifetime achievement awards by Wicklow GAA, Shillelagh’s Tommy Murphy being the other.
They’re set to receive those awards this weekend at the annual Garden County Sports Stars awards in the Arklow Bay Hotel, both men most worthy recipients given their dedication and devotion to the GAA at club and county level over the years.
Into the warm heart of Arthur and Máire’s home I am ushered. We’re deep in McGillycuddy territory here, a name synonymous with An Tóchar and Wicklow GAA.
The house resonates with memories. You can feel it as you walk up the hall. There was plenty of laughter within these walls. Lives were lived here. Full lives.
The couple have just returned from the weekly shop, fresh scones have been purchased, and fancy jam. A cappuccino is made (be the holy), and enough scones for an entire full-back line are placed in front of this reporter, buttered generously with the pot of fancy jam alongside.
Arthur has taken his seat and we’re off on a wonderful journey that will take us from Meath to Roundwood and beyond, with a stop on the top of the Wicklow Gap thrown in. We’ll cross the decades effortlessly, the yarns spilling from years filled with highs and lows, joy and heartbreak, success and failure, or whatever those two imposters really mean.
Arthur Hall was born in 1940 and comes from the parish of Carnaross in the Royal County, not far from the town of Kells.
In an Ireland almost unrecognisable to the current day, Gaelic football would come to mean everything to him and his friends from the time they could walk.
“I always remember there was a brother in the school in Kells, a Brother Cleary, from Tipperary, and we used to play football with a sock, or we’d wait for the local farmer to kill the pig and we’d play with the bladder. But football was our life. We just loved football. I did anyway. And I was fairly handy at it,” he began.
“But this Brother Cleary used to jeer us and say, ‘you think you can play football, but you haven’t won one All-Ireland, and Tipperary have four’.
“And he was right. That was about 1947, I was about seven or eight, and Meath won their first All-Ireland in 1949,” he adds, remembering with fondness the arrival of the Meath men on the big stage and the quietening of a certain teacher no doubt.
Arthur Hall enjoyed the rare privilege of being able to attend secondary school in Kells, although the loss of a loaned algebra book coincidentally entitled ‘Hall’s Algebra’ and the fear of the subsequent punishment that was to undoubtedly follow led him to go down a very different path than one he could have ever imagined.
“In those days people didn’t go to secondary school. Most of my family emigrated. I went to first year in the secondary school in Kells, and there was a nasty brother there called Brother Arnold. He had a big book, an algebra book that we got on loan (for the year), it was coincidentally called Hall’s Algebra,” said Arthur.
“One day, I couldn’t find it, and I was afraid to go back to school. I didn’t know where the book had gone. Some months before that, this man came around from the Christian Brothers, encouraging young lads to join the Christian Brothers, and in the booklet he had, there were photos of young lads playing hurling and football and handball.
“During this summer (when the algebra book was missing), I developed a vocation to the brothers, because I was afraid to go back to school, and I went off to join the Christian Brothers along with two or three other lads in my class, and we went and we continued our schooling, and there I was, mixing with lads from Limerick, Cork, Mayo and Antrim and the likes in Baldoyle.
“I stayed with the brothers for a number of years, and it was a great time because you were playing football and hurling, and as well as that, you were doing your studies.
“And I still have great friends in the brothers. And I owe them an awful lot, a huge amount, because they educated me. And it was great to be mixing up with lads from all over.
“It was there that I learned one lesson. At the time, I couldn’t understand how anyone could play soccer. I’d be very prejudiced. This was around the time of the ban. I was sitting in class with a lad called Denis Maddy, and he was from Dublin. And he couldn’t play Gaelic. He could only play soccer. And I became his friend.
“And it taught me a lesson that I had to be more tolerant. And it was because of his upbringing and the environment that he was brought up in (that he played soccer). Why should I dislike him? It taught me the lesson that I had to be more accepting.
“Even though, later on, in local communities you’re fighting for the hearts and souls of young people and you’re competing with the soccer clubs, it taught me that you have to have a certain amount of tolerance and respect.
“It was a big lesson. I had to ask myself, why should I dislike him? I still think of it to this day, to be more tolerant, even when it comes to politics or whatever,” he added.
Following those happy years in Baldoyle, Arthur soon found himself in a small village in Co. Wicklow called Roundwood where he was to take up the position of a teacher in the local school. Little did he know at the time that this beautiful place high in the Wicklow hills was to become his home, a place where he would find love, rear a family and play a major role in educating generations of children over the coming decades.
We’ll get the love part of the story out of the way first.
“When I came to Roundwood, I had an old car. There was a woman walking on the road, and I used to pass her every morning during Lent. I gave her a lift one day, and I said hello to her, and we talked,” he remembers.
“And she asked me if I was the new schoolteacher, and I said I was. And she said, ‘and you’re driving out from Dublin every day?’
“I said I was, but that I was looking for a place to stay. And she said, ‘I live in a house on my own, except at weekends when the children come home, I could give you accommodation. So, I went to stay with her. The woman’s name was Sadie McGillycuddy.
“The two daughters and the son came home at the weekend. There were rows every weekend, because when the two daughters saw me, I was handsome with a lovely head of hair, and they fought over me, and she (Máire) was the one who won my hand in marriage,” said Arthur, laughing.
“Part of the dowry was a site to build the house,” he added.
It’s fair to say that Máire’s recollection of said events may differ slightly to those of Arthur’s, but we have no desire to burst a lifetime achievement award winner’s bubble.
There had been an option to take up the role of principal in Glendalough instead of teaching in Roundwood, but the shrewd Arthur made the right call it seems. Laragh’s loss, An Tóchar’s gain!
“It was just fate. I remember the Parish Priest interviewed me, and he was cleaning the chimney at the time. He wanted me to go to Glendalough as principal. I was a bit intimidated because I was just finding my feet, and I thought it would be better to start off as an ordinary assistant.
“There were only three teachers in Roundwood at the time, Charlie O’Boyle, myself and a girl from Tipperary. And as the years evolved, the school got bigger and I became the principal, and I’ve been here ever since,” he said.
Hardly a house in Roundwood won’t have had a child educated in some way by Arthur Hall. All those names Wicklow GAA people will have seen on match programmes over the years, including those who brought the Miley Cup back in 1995 and who came within touching distance of a Leinster club title benefited from this man’s teaching and love of Gaelic football.
Speaking to one or two of his past pupils, they remember a kind teacher, passionate about the Irish language and about football, and while the credit for the magical era