Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
FIELDS of Dreams
Graham Gartland tells how tallaght made him who he is ‘This is a great community, but it needs help. Build affordable houses, invest in us. Believe in us.’
He’s just Garts here. It’s only his mother who calls him Graham.
Much of who he has become was born in these streets. The have-a-go defender who won three FAI Cups, a League of Ireland title and two caps for the Ireland B team before maturing into a coach who worked in the SPL as an assistant manager with Dundee.
All around this Jobstown estate on a sunny Tuesday lunchtime are the sights and sounds of his youth.
The manicured lawn that he and his brothers converted into a penalty box. The acres of grassland, over his back wall, where he played football for hours and hours. The sound of the traffic on the connecting road which once was a playground for joyriders.
We cross a bridge over ‘the river’ — in truth, it is a stream — and he points to the house where Stephen Bradley grew up, a mere 15-minute walk from Tallaght Stadium where Bradley has managed Shamrock Rovers to four League titles in a row.
Suddenly we stop walking, but Gartland keeps talking, his arms moving furiously, pointing in different directions.
“Over there,” he says, pointing in the mid distance, “that was where Richie Dunne (former Ireland international) came from.vinny Perth (League of Ireland-winning manager with Dundalk) lived four doors up from the Dunnes.”
Then shifting slightly to his left, he gazes his eyes to a different set of terraced houses, these ones coloured brown and cream.“so if you look down, through that gap there, you’ll see Jason Gavin’s street. Beyond those houses is Robbie Keane’s home.”
In 1998, the three Tallaght boys,
Keane, Dunne and Gavin, won the European Under-18 Championship together with Ireland. A couple of months earlier, two neighbours from Kilnamanagh, Keith Foy and Graham Barrett, won the European Under-16 title. Gartland took a deep breath.
A gust of wind blew in from the Dublin mountains. It does that regularly around here. “Me da is from Ballyfermot and he hated the wind out here,” Gartland says. “He wanted us to move back to Ballyer.”
Worked
But they never did.
His mother worked in the local secondary, where he went to school. Later his dad got a job there, too, as a caretaker. “Dad drilled into us that you have to stand up for yourself, that this is a tough area. Be brave. He’d a real work ethic. Left the house at six every morning, working on building sites.
“Mum, she’s a diamond, an inspirational figure. ‘Get an education,’ she always told us.”
Her kids listened. On her living room wall are framed photos of her children with gowns on their backs and scrolls in their hands, evidence of their university degrees.
“Michelle, my older sister, she’s the hero of the family,” Gartland says.
“She went to Trinity College. She took on extra subjects in her Leaving Cert to give herself more options.
“Michelle always said: ‘Be what you want to be, nothing can stop you’.
Mum’s family, from Ranelagh, were the same. Every Sunday, we used to go over there. In Ranelagh, everyone asked you, ‘what are you going to be? What are you going to do with yourself?’
“They made you realise that it was okay to have dreams. Like, at 18, I was released by Barnsley. I came home. Straight away, Uncle Harry, mum’s brother, met me. ‘Here are the options you have, Graham.’
“I’ll never forget that guidance. Everyone in life needs that when they are young.”
This part of the story ends here. Gartland the achiever, the respected co-commentator on RTE, the coach who guided a Shamrock Rovers underage team to a win over Ajax last year, the player who got every drop of ability out of his body, is now a man of middle age.
Flecks of grey decorate his temple.
Yes, he’s loving playing the role of tourist here. In a 20-minute walk we pass a dozen or so little culde-sacs, and it seems as though every second street has produced a footballer.
“That’s Dec Fields’ road,” Gartland says, pointing at a row of houses.
“He went across to Arsenal.”
We move on.“that road in there, that’s Mark Mulraney’s. Played for Millwall. He came home and now runs the biggest flooring company in the country.”
He points in the distance to where Stephen Kenny, the former Ireland manager, came from, to Dessie and Richie Baker’s homeplace in Springfield, to the home of Jason Byrne — the second highest scorer in League of Ireland history.
Five minutes later comes another landmark. “That is where Jim Crawford (the current Ireland Under-21 manager) is from.” Then there are the Hylands, boxing people. Patrick, one of three brothers who turned professional, fought in Las Vegas for a world title.
We pass by Niall Byrne’s house. “Niall was pals with my brother; he played with Michael Owen at Liverpool.”
And it all seemed like a fairytale. Working class boys come good. A community rowing in behind their own.
“I loved it here,” he says. “I loved the freedom of it; of waking up on a summer’s day and saying to me ma, ‘I’m away out here’ and that was it.
Competitions
“We’d go up the Dublin mountains one day; we’d play on those pitches the next. There were five-aside competitions every summer. They were like World Cups.
“You had a choice. You could do bad stuff if you wanted. Robbing cars was a big thing then. Fellas would stop and ask ‘do you wanna get in, Garts?’ But if you said no, they didn’t like kidnap you, they didn’t force you in.
“But they’d still ask the next day. The day after that. The day after that, too. But you kept saying no because you knew if you said yes, that there’d be trouble.
“Wait ’til I tell you, there’s nothing you feared more than a scalding off either your own ma or someone else’s ma. I was taught the difference between good and bad.”
Eventually the offers to get into the robbed cars stopped.“after a while, one of the ringleaders would go, ‘Nah, no point asking Garts; he’s into the football’. And that was that. Football was respected. Being a footballer, even at 14, carried a status about it.”
He doesn’t live here any more but he’s back to tell his story.
He wants to show you things. The walls blocking the way down to the river to stop stolen cars being abandoned; the road where a friend was stabbed to death; the fences that were erected to stop scramblers going across football pitches; the disused playground that should be filled with happy children.
“That’s what neglect looks like,”he says, pointing through a perimeter fence at an empty, discarded space, where once there were swings and roundabouts, children’s voices and happy faces.
Now there’s nothing.
“Why has that been allowed to happen?” Gartland asks.
“How can any politician look in the mirror and say a playground is worth closing down?”
This is why he’s here, because he knows the potential the people in Jobstown pos