Seán Brennan lost a hand in a catastrophic accident in 1964, but then went on to captain Milltown to their first county football title
They had been told about the award well in advance, and so had plenty of time to figure out a list of people more deserving of the honour than they were. Drawing up that list was exactly what they were doing on that night in mid-October. Foremost in John’s mind was Seán Brennan, the captain of the first Milltown team to win the county senior championship.
I had known this fact about our first county title-winning captain for my entire life. If you’d asked me that night last October, I’d have said that he had emigrated as a young man and lost the hand in a cotton mill in Birmingham. I met Seán a few months later. He’s retired now, and lives in Caherlistrane, about 15 miles from Milltown, and he told me the true story of what happened to his left hand as coolly and calmly as if he was talking about a scene from a movie.
He was visited in the Mater by some priests from the college, but when he went from there to the National Rehabilitation Centre in Dún Laoghaire, no one came to see him for six weeks. He left the seminary and returned to Milltown that summer a physical wreck, with shrapnel still all over his body, and 12 stitches in an ugly wound on his neck that was millimetres from a main artery. He had lost two stone.
Seán played alongside his clubmate and first cousin Noel Tierney in the Galway defence against Kerry on that day in 1963. Thirteen months later, Tierney was full back again as Galway won the first of three All-Ireland titles in a row. That winter, while Seán recuperated, Tierney would be named the Texaco Footballer of the Year, the ultimate individual honour for a Gaelic footballer at that time.
His story was written about a bit at the time, when Milltown won the 1971 county final. There was an article with him in one of the GAA periodicals of the era, a paragraph about him in the Irish Echo in the US even. Bravery, resilience, dedication – these words all seem to fall far short of what he had shown.He told me, in short, that football saved his life.