‘Without the small teams behind them, the GAA is nothing’
Ballycroy are at forefront of the struggle to keep rural clubs alive
‘IT’S NOT EASY TRYING TO KEEP PLAYERS AROUND OUR TINY AREA’
IN a small corner of Mayo last Sunday, a world away from millionaire donors and international sugar daddies, a bit of Gaelic football history was made. Ballycroy GAA, a tiny rural club in north Mayo, plagued by emigration for generations, won their first adult county title in 130 years of existence.
No GPS trackers were involved in the making of this bit of history. No foreign training camps, cryotherapy chambers, or Hudl analysis software.
This is a simpler story of blood, sweat, and tears of joy, that dates back almost as far as the birth of the very GAA itself when two visionary gentlemen made the daylong journey from Ballycroy to Castlebar to register a GAA club.
Stephen Grealis Jnr is the club PRO who lined out at wing-forward last Sunday in the Division 5 Mayo League final against Louisburgh.
The junior attachment is needed because his father – also Stephen – just happens to be the resident fullforward. Stephen is just 20, a student of English, Political Science, and Geography at NUI Galway. His father is double that, someone who has been playing ball and waiting for this moment for more than half his life.
Club chairman Kevin Ginty togged out at centre-forward; club secretary James Grealis came off the bench to effect. The reason treasurer Fionán Ginty wasn’t at St Brendan’s Park in Kilmeena just north of Westport, roughly halfway between the competing teams?
‘He was absolutely sickened to miss the game,’ explains Stephen Grealis Jnr. ‘His wife was nine days overdue for his child in Dublin so he couldn’t come down!
‘My father was playing. Twenty years my senior. He was in at full-forward, I was wing-forward. That’s the way it has been the last few seasons – it’s actually our third season playing together.’
And junior is no shrinking violet when it comes to putting the squeeze on his auld lad. ‘Sometimes it works both ways. I’ll feed him a ball and try and get in off his shoulder.
‘I won’t say we’d have battles on the pitch but if one of us were to make a mistake… to be honest, I’d be more critical of him than he would be of me!
‘It’s from the likes of him that I’ve gotten my grá for football. Football is everything to me. It starts at home. There are photo albums of Ballycroy going back to 2001, him there in the front, I’d be there as mascot.’ Ballycroy has been at the forefront of the constant struggle to keep a rural club alive, a struggle so many other clubs can identify with, particularly along the western seaboard. There’s a sense of irony about the financial stand-off between millionaire businessman Tim O’Leary and the Mayo County Board over the use of funds and questions about good governance. In a strange way, what Ballycroy achieved last Sunday shows how it all comes back to grassroots. That the game ultimately comes back to identity and sense of place, no matter what level. ‘For us, every year, trying to garner the funds… there are levies and everything to be paid. That for us is tough. Last Sunday, the winners of the league got €500. Some teams wouldn’t blow their noses at that. That will make a difference for us. Takes a bit of pressure off us trying to garner funds. ‘It’s down to all the people who have worked so hard that the club is still alive. It’s as simple as that.’ Grealis thinks there was only one year that the club wasn’t able to field. ‘Around 2009, we couldn’t field a junior team. That’s the only year in 130 years that we haven’t been able to field. As far as I’m told. That was when rural Ireland was at its lowest. But they came back.’ Being situated on the road north of Achill that carries on to Belmullet and the north Atlantic means that players tend to disperse from Ballycroy when it comes to their daily lives.
‘In a small area, you try and keep these players around. It’s not easy. Because there are very few players based in Ballycroy full-time. We have five or six lads in Dublin, either working or studying. Another four or five in Galway, lads that are on the road all the time. One lad up in Carrick-on-Shannon. We’re dispersed all over the place.
‘Our panel varies. There can be 16 or 17 there, up to a max of 25. At the start of the year, our goal was to ascertain promotion from Division 5. To play at a bit of a higher level.
‘The league was split up into A and B. The top two went into semis with the winners of the semis guaranteed promotion. We won our first three league games, then came up against Louisburgh who we played Sunday at the end of June – they beat us by four points, we had a man sent off. So we had that bit of motivation.’
It was back in 1974 that legendary club president Pat Gallagher sowed the seeds for the future by pulling together the first underage team in
the club. The interest sparked there was to last a lifetime for many and would underpin the club’s pushing of that rock uphill during the 1980s and onwards.
Then, in 2009 when the numbers crunched just didn’t add up, another shoot from underage sprung up.
Local journalist Michael Gallagher – son of Pat – wrote at the time of the true significance of winning a county Under-14 Division 1 title.
‘In the wonderful, newly-opened National Park Visitor Centre in Ballycroy there’s an exhibition describing the area as The Land of Giants. On a Thursday evening in July 2009 a group of boys from that ancient land made their own mark in local folklore.
‘The blaring car-horns, blazing bonfires and cavalcade of headlights snaking its way through the hills on that Thursday night signalled that the generations of waiting, wishing and wondering had finally come to an end.
‘For many other clubs, winning a county under 14 D1 title would have absolutely no impact, it wouldn’t even register on the radar, but for Ballycroy it was different.
Generations of proudly keeping the GAA flame alive against the odds had produced many cherished memories and undying friendships, but no county title – not one, at any level, at any grade. Survival was victory in itself and dearly treasured, but winning a title was a cherished dream.’
As Grealis points out, the line from that day to last Sunday was sharply drawn.
Six of that U14 team played last Sunday. Two sets of brothers – Jack and James Deane and twins Darragh and Oisin Leneghan along with Sean Cafferkey and Ciaran Murray. One other player, Peter Cafferkey, featured all year but couldn’t be there due to work commitments, starting a new job.
In the dressing room before last Sunday’s game, the sense of history was palpable.
‘That was the driving message for all of us in the dressing room beforehand. We knew this was bigger than anything we had before. This was the first time the club was in an adult county final.
‘Now it was a dull enough first half, 0-4 to 0-2. In the second half we got back into it and the cheers and
‘NO MATTER WHAT SIZE CLUB YOU ARE, FIXTURES ARE THE ISSUE’
roars – I’d say Ballycroy were outnumbering Louisburgh 10 to 1. It was amazing.
‘I started wing-forward, then was pushed into centre-forward. We lost one lad to a red card towards the end of normal time. Then Colm Grealis, our captain, went off with a shoulder injury so I got put to centre-back then. We got a late free in added time to level it. Game went to extra time.
‘We didn’t go back in to our own dressing room – we stayed out in a huddle. There were lads going down with cramp but everyone there knew to just keep going on. We were stretching lads out.
‘Went two points up in first half. That was it until half-time. I felt good in half-time of extra time. As the second half wore on, I ran up. The ball just fell for me 20 yards out. I was lining up to shoot and I felt my left calf seize – I kicked it and the ball scraped over the bar. I’d never experienced cramp in my life until that.
‘There was no time to be carted off. Just get up and get back.
‘They brought it back to one point. Had a free right at the end of extra time. Thanking the God in the sky, he put it wide. When the kick-out came out, Shane Ginty – he is the fittest man on our team by a long way, rocking up the years at this stage, I don’t know what age he is – he plucked the ball practically out of another man’s hand. Once we had the ball, the referee blew the whistle.
‘One of the other lads on the team Michael Conway, he broke his collarbone five weeks ago, couldn’t play. You could see he was devastated not to be playing. But seeing him on the sideline would drive you on that bit more. Once the whistle went he ran on to the pitch. I plucked him up and threw him over my shoulder – we nearly broke another collarbone!’
So how did it feel to share the moment with his father on the field?
‘I was over at the sideline when the final whistle went. A bit away. Pure euphoria. Unbridled joy. Then everyone gathered in together. Handshakes, hugs. People there with tears in their eyes. We made that eye contact. A warm embrace. It meant so much. He’s been playing football for 25 years. It’s a credit to him. On a personal level, a really special day.
‘Colm our captain, his shoulder recovered to lift the cup. People flooding on to the pitch, family and friends. We were out on the pitch for a long time.
‘We said we’d stop in Mulranny, the village before Ballycroy, on the way home. Travel down in our cars. Then on home. A parade of cars, 30 to 35 long, going down into the village.
‘When you come in to Ballycroy you cross a bridge. There is a stone there – painted on to the stone it says, “Welcome to Ballycroy”. That’s where the bonfire was lit for us.
‘That was the first bonfire. Must have met four or five more. Did a lap of the village. On to Cafferkey’s bar. Celebrated there until the wee hours.’
So if Ballycroy can finally get their day in the sun, what about the county’s All-Ireland obsession. Will such a passionate support base ever get to see the county team get hands on their own Holy Grail?
‘I’d call myself a good supporter. Would I say die-hard? Possibly not that far. I wouldn’t be travelling to Tyrone on a Saturday night in February. In this year’s Championship, I did travel all over. I wasn’t in New York but I was down in Killarney, up in Dublin.
‘Someone said to me once, “What would we do if we won the All-Ireland? After that moment set in, would the fun be gone out it?” It’s the chase and the journey, it’s almost as exciting.
‘There is something special about Mayo. There really, really is. A uniqueness. We never make things easy for ourselves. Look at this week and the stuff going on behind the scenes with money.
‘On the field, Joe Brolly always says the Championship is at a loss without Mayo. I think it’s true.
‘Last summer, 2018, we were knocked out on the 30th of June. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves.’
The current county controversy perhaps suggests that maybe the balance between club and county is out of whack.
A vast sum of €250,000 – raised at a Gala function in New York last April – is currently being withheld by the Mayo GAA International Supporters Foundation, of which Tim O’Leary is chairman, until questions over county board governance are answered.
‘Things do get dictated to by the county which I don’t agree with. The clubs should be put first.
‘This year, James Carr broke on to the Mayo team, from Ardagh. Scored the goal of the season. We played against him last year. Ardagh, like ourselves, are a junior team. For championship this year, because he was with Mayo, his group games were pushed out for over 10 weeks.
‘It’s not his fault but it wasn’t fair to himself or his club or the teams in their group. That’s the big issue – fixtures – whether you’re a big club or a small club.
‘Last year Mullinalaghta won the Leinster senior title. Even watching that, their celebrations, coming on to The Late Late Show – it was fantastic. You could see what it meant to a small place like that. And we would be a lot smaller than somewhere like Mullinalaghta. But they have the same struggles as us. At underage level, too.
‘Personally, I think, it just goes to show, without the small teams behind them the GAA is nothing.’