STILL MAKING SENSE
Sixty years shaping and being shaped by Wexford hurling
FOR over an hour, four plump white ducks have waddled back and forth past Liam Griffin. Now, they are gathered at his feet under the table, not a quack out of them.
Sitting on the terrace of his Monart Spa retreat near Enniscorthy, Griffin is burrowing into his past, recalling his childhood and 1996. He talks about the present, about today in Croke Park, his respect for Davy Fitzgerald and his admiration for how Liam Dunne prepared the ground for this summer.
And at 70 years of age, when he might feel entitled to let the future be shaped by others, he pulses with ideas. The ducks don’t stir. Griffin will be in Croke Park this afternoon, his head full of hope and his heart swelled at seeing the colours of his beloved Wexford flying on one of the high days in the GAA season.
For over 60 years now hurling has mesmerised him. He was a boy when the county emerged in the 1950s as a new force in the sport.
He sounds amazed, still, that Wexford beat Cork in the final of 1956. ‘My God almighty,’ he marvels, ‘I mean it was like Azerbaijan beating Brazil.’
Four years later, they were champions again.
‘I went to secondary school in 1960,’ he says, ‘to De La Salle College in Waterford, and I walked in on the first Monday in September and Wexford were All-Ireland champions. I felt I was the king of the place before I started.’
Hurling worked its way deeply, ineradicably, into his life. Any frustrations, disappointment or fury the game caused him in the decades since could not threaten that love.
‘You were just seared like an animal with it on your backside,’ as he puts it.
Listening to him talk, it is obvious that what he admires over lustrous skill is the determination hurling demands. That fierce will to succeed runs through his life like a vein through marble.
It is clear, too, that he is attracted as much by Davy Fitzgerald’s determination to prevail, as by the astonishing improvements he has wrought in his first season in the south-east.
‘Davy brings a wealth of experience. He’s been on the road so long, kicked around the place, beaten up, walked on, success, backwards again, in college all the time with young players. So he has a lot on his CV to make him attractive, and he’s done a great job.’
For five years before Fitzgerald, Liam Dunne worked to make Wexford competitive. His time in charge was pocked with controversies and setbacks.
Griffin had a role in Dunne’s support team for a couple of seasons, and he is certain the joy that has broken across the county through the spring and into the summer should be credited, in part, to the work of the previous manager.
‘Liam had to be sacrificed at the altar of what he has done. Liam was with these (players) since they were minors. There’s a lot of work gone into this team since they were Under 14. ‘Martin Storey had them as well. ‘All the lads we had there (in 1996) have been doing fantastic work: Martin Storey, Larry Murphy, JJ Doyle, Billy Byrne, Adrian Fenlon, Liam.
‘They have given so much back into the game and you don’t want them to get disheartened by all of this because somehow it’s a reflection on them? It’s a reflection on them that we have a good team.’
Young Liam Griffin was shaped by the deeds of the Rackards and the other heroes of Wexford’s rising over half a century ago. He reels off the names and the matches, the setbacks and the victories as if they were part of his own family lore.
Greater than the influence of any hurler on him, though, was the impact on his life made by Michael and Jenny Griffin.
‘My parents were just amazing people,’ he marvels. ‘They brought me to every match under the sun when I was a kid, and every college match I was playing, they were there, all the way from Wexford.’
His father was a Clareman whose job as a Garda brought him Wexford. He was a native of Maurices Mills, a part of Clare where football was pursued more than hurling.
‘Listen here, when he was a kid I think sport might have been the last thing on their minds,’ says his son. ‘They weren’t easy times.
‘My parents started off a hotel business after my father retired from the guards. They put such an effort into that business when I was a kid. I worked beside my dad bottling stout, doing bottle bins and just working beside him.
‘I got a grá for that and felt a loyalty to them and so I was always going to go into the hotel business.’
He studied hotel management in Shannon before moving to Switzerland to continue his training. The cost would be his ambitions of an inter-county hurling career with Wexford. ‘I knew it,’ he remembers.
‘I remember crying on the plane going away. “That’s it, it’s over now”.’ But it wasn’t. Griffin famously went for the Wexford minor manager’s job in the winter of 1994 and didn’t get it. When they were met with refusals elsewhere, the county executive approached him about the senior job.
Less than two years later, they were the champions of Ireland for the first time in 28 years. And the bonfires hadn’t burned out before Griffin was gone.
His wife Mary had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and from early on in that season Griffin knew he would be finished as soon as Wexford were.
Work was making terrific demands of him, too. ‘I was leaving that job and I was never going to stay another year anyway. I couldn’t afford to. I was in business. I couldn’t afford to stay at that job.’
The Griffin Group owns three hotels today, but the battle to run a business in Ireland over the past decade animates Liam Griffin more than any other topic.
‘The unfairness of sport pales into absolute insignificance by a million per cent, to what the State did to the likes of us in business, and to ordinary working people.
‘There are people on the road out of their businesses because of the State itself. The State moves on as if nothing happens.
‘Coming up with things like Nama to go into business against you, and run by people, their first port of call was to undercut everybody else’s business and get away with it.
‘It’s like a fella selling milk at the gate of a farm and the State buying the farm next door to him and saying, “No matter what you charge, we’re going to charge less. See how long you can stick that”.
‘It wouldn’t happen in Russia.’