'I have a picture up in the house of my father lifting the cup that night. We were not exactly the sports family of the parish. We almost felt like 'is it right that we're here?' but there we were, at the centre of it.''
By then, Maura O'Connell had been a professional musician for 15 years. Starting out with De Danann in 1980, she made an instant impact, and that translated to America too.
"None of us had a mobile phone. They weren't common at the time. And I kept getting the bus to stop at diners along the way to use the pay phone. But binning the curse of Biddy Early that never really existed - she died 10 years before the GAA was founded - changed Clare in ways that went beyond hurling.
"I couldn't be bothered with it, but the summer of '95 changed that for me, in loads of ways. It actually set off a whole different career path for me."He was dabbling in acting but not getting anywhere. An idle few months in '95 might well have been the making of him.. "There were these heroic figures too - Anthony Daly, the Sparrow - it felt as unstoppable as the summer was. It just didn't end.''
"Out of that, I got good recognition and got work in the Gate. At its heart, it had this amazing monologue which got me the attention of producers in town. Hayes put his energy into music, rather than hurling, but that didn't mean 1995 passed him by, not by a long shot. "It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that people viewed Clare as the place in between Limerick and Galway, that it was playing fiddles and the Cliffs of Moher...
English spent 12 months working for Clare FM but was five years in RTE by the time 1995 came around. It felt good to be a Clare woman in Dublin then."There was the whole mythology about them training on the Hill of Shannon. It didn't feel like other teams had the same kind of story. "I genuinely think '95 changed Clare as a county. You feel almost foolish saying that, it was just a handful of matches.
All-Ireland Hurling Championship Cork GAA Anthony Daly
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