JACK LYNCH’S EXTRAORDINARY CAREERS
IF YOU’RE DOING YOUR BEST THEN PEOPLE WILL RESPECT THAT
RENA BUCKLEY had to make peace with her legend. She is the most successful figure in GAA history, with 18 senior All-Ireland Championship wins split between 11 in football and seven in camogie.
She was honoured as an All-Star 10 times in her career, picked five times on football teams and five on the camogie selection.
When she led Cork to the camogie title last September, on what was her last appearance in Rebel red before retirement, she became the first person to captain a county to football and camogie Championship victories.
On five occasions in her career, she won football and camogie AllIreland doubles in the same season.
Her status within Gaelic games is eloquently expressed in a display celebrating her achievements in the GAA Museum. It includes the jersey she wore in 2005 when, as an 18year-old, she won her first AllIreland, a football one.
Also featured is the jersey she wore when winning title No18 last September.
Her success makes her a towering figure not only in the GAA but in Irish sport.
And yet despite all that, she had to get used to her greatness. It took time to make sense of the place to which her deeds elevated her.
‘I was struggling with it for ages,’ she remembers now. ‘Then there was a Females in Sport day in a school in Fermoy. Fiona O’Driscoll, the former Cork camogie player, was there as well.
‘She had trained me and was one of the people I looked up to when I was young. Someone asked her about being a role model, and Fiona put it back on the person who asked the question.
‘She said, “Do you have first cousins younger than you? Do you have neighbours younger than you, or younger brothers and sisters? I hope you realise that you’re a role model for them”.
‘She was saying that everybody is a role model for somebody. No matter how big a role model you are or how small a role model you feel you are, you’re still a role model for people, so you should conduct yourself appropriately, regardless of whether you’re in the media or not.
‘After that I was much more settled about it. It settled my mind hugely. I thought about it and said, “That’s a great point”. Everybody is actually a role model. It’s just maybe there are a few more taking notice of me.
‘Everybody should take their role seriously.’
Buckley is one of the transformative figures in the history of women in the GAA. In 2015, she and Briege Corkery broke the record for individual All-Ireland wins when surpassing the 15 won by Kay Mills with the Dublin camogie side between the 1940s and early 1960s.
A year later, Buckley moved out on her own with that valedictory camogie win, her contribution to that final glory recognised when she was named the Player of the Year.
It isn’t coincidental that the profile of camogie and ladies football have grown in tandem with the extraordinary career enjoyed by Buckley and her generation of Cork team-mates.
The footballers, in particular, are the most extraordinary side in Irish women’s sport. Rena Buckley never lost an All-Ireland football final, her record 11 wins from 11 appearances (on four occasions she was on a losing camogie team on final day).
How could she not inspire the generations coming after her?
‘My biggest female role model when I was younger was Sonia O’Sullivan,’ she says. ‘I’m not putting myself in that category at all, but look at the role models we’ve had in our society, like Sonia and Katie Taylor.
‘The biggest thing that they’ve shown and why they’re such great role models, is because they’ve shown their weaknesses. They’re very human.
‘That’s made me realise that you need to be yourself. Everybody has weaknesses, and I think that’s what society needs.
‘I’m not perfect, I certainly have weaknesses and flaws and everything but as long as you have good values and you’re doing your best, I think people will respect that.’
That integrity was forged in a childhood in Inniscarra, a parish lying to the west of Cork city. Her mother Helen and father Tim raised her brother Jerry, Rena and her twin sister Mary in a household that was not immersed in the GAA.
‘My mother, there would have been zero GAA in her house.
‘My father would have played a little bit, but very, very little.
‘They are hugely supportive and got on board. My father would have trained us all the way up, but he had to learn it as he went.
‘He’s chairman of the camogie club at home now and puts in huge time and effort, but it was only out of our interest that it started.’
In 2004, at the age of 17, she played in her first All-Ireland final, losing the camogie showpiece to Tipperary. That first exposure to defeat would be fleeting. The football Championships came in two great gushes, a five-in-a-row between 2005 and 2009, followed by six-in a-row from 2011 to 2016. Camogie wins came in three double spurts in 2005-2006, 2008-2009 and 20142015, before the closer last
September.
The early wins were, she recalls, understated in the coverage they received. The profile grew in step with the victories, but in those early years, they were largely left to themselves to celebrate.
‘I was actually chatting to a girl from Galway (before the hurling final), and she was booking the day after the final off work hoping they’d win, after the madness of the celebrations last year.
‘And she said, “Sure you must be well used to that”. And I was thinking back to coming home from All-Irelands in the early days, when nobody really knew us, and (the celebrations) were mad!
‘And then as you get a bit older and people started to know you, you had to behave yourself!’
Those great Cork sides were distinguished by their conduct as well as their triumphs.
In her case, Rena Buckley attributes it to playing with older teammates. It was commonly the way in the ladies games that notable young talents were promoted to senior teams in their mid-teens.
‘I think a huge part of it, and something that is changing in GAA now, but when I was younger you’d be playing up ages an awful lot,’ she says.
‘I think that’s really good to mature you, because you’re around older people all the time. I never had a rebellious teenage phase, because I was hanging around with people who were five or six years older.’
Rena Buckley is something a great deal more important than that. She laughs in recalling a club-mate who was standing in front of her display in the GAA Museum when his telephone rang and he saw her name on the screen.
She is hoping to get in to see it for herself.
‘Thankfully, Cork got to the camogie and ladies football finals, and I’ll definitely go to them,’ she says. ‘I’ll probably call in then alright.’