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Since Mayo won their first All-Ireland in 75 years, the cup has not been out of the sight of an adoring public
Since Mayo won their first All-Ireland in 75 years, the cup has not been out of the sight of an adoring public Mayo manager Andy Moran lifts the Sam Maguire in his hometown of Ballaghaderreen following his team's All-Ireland triumph.
Photograph: Tom Maher/InphoIt was nearly twilight last Sunday evening when Achill’s five pipe bands lined up on the mainland side of Michael Davitt Bridge. Jack Carney, Donnacha McHugh and Diarmuid O’Connor stepped in behind them. Carney held the Sam Maguire Cup in both hands. Behind him were his grandfather Pat and his father Peter, two men who had left Achill and who had never left it.
Achill GAA pitch is on the mainland side of the parish and, hours earlier, they had made their grand entrance there. When Pat Carney landed in Achill as a Garda sergeant decades ago, the family lived in the Garda barracks next door, and when Peter was a child the GAA pitch was his back garden.
On Sunday night, in a living daydream, he drove his son through the gates of the GAA grounds, the Sam Maguire held aloft through the sunroof.
“If you wanted a definition of pride, that was it,” says Ed McGreal, the journalist and author, who lives on the island. “When Peter got out of the car, his face was red with tears.
”Gabriel Bannigan on Monaghan departure: ‘It’s obvious that there were some dark arts at play’The players were interviewed on the balcony of the clubhouse in front of the adoring throng and they sat for nearly three hours on the pitch, posing for photographs and signing autographs. But, in a sense, all of that was a prologue.
The evening revolved around the bridge.has been such a big part of life for generations,” says Colm Cafferkey, the chair of Achill GAA, “and that bridge is a symbol of leaving and coming home.
“And then you’re adding in the five pipe bands. A lot of those pipers live away – they might be living in England or America – but there’s a huge homecoming every St Patrick’s Day. Whenever I lived away, football was what made me come home and for the pipers it’s the same thing. It keeps them connected to the community.
This was something else ... Sam Maguire and All Ireland champions Jack Carney, Donnacha McHugh and Diarmuid O Connor piped onto Achill Island by local pipe bands. The place was heaving. It was emotional and evocative.
The gift that keeps on giving 💚❤️“You had all those feelings of homecoming and a massive outpouring of joy. It was there on everyone’s faces. It was like everyone’s Christmas and St Patrick’s Day and the All-Ireland final had come together. ” Peter Carney had been in one of the Achill pipe bands as a boy and in later life, after he had moved away, he founded the Clew Bay Pipe Band with Peter Cafferkey in Westport.
Jack had been in that band as a youngster, and as he walked across the bridge on Sunday night, one of the local band members fitted the brace of a drum on his shoulders and handed him two drumsticks. For a couple of hundred yards, he joined the towering movement of sound.
“We understood the significance of the bridge,” says Jack. “Donnacha’s dad is from Achill too. You’ve heard yourself of the American wakes. That was the farewell point where they saw their loved ones leave and often never saw them again.
I understood the historical significance of being piped across the bridge.
“Every one of my childhood summers was spent on Achill. That’s where I learned to cycle, it’s where I learned to drive, the whole lot. We’ve a caravan down there and on the week of any significant game that’s where you’ll find me, hiding out. I was down there before the final and the semi-final.
It’s where I feel most relaxed. It’s heaven.
“According to my dad, 104 bagpipers and drummers marched us across the bridge. We knew it meant an awful lot to the people of Achill, but we didn’t really realise how it would feel ourselves. The three of us agreed that beside bringing the cup to our home clubs, it was the most emotional moment we had experienced over the last four weeks. We were totally taken aback by how raw it was.
” Mayo's Jack Coyne on a visit to Temple Street children's hospital in Dublin in July. Photograph: Tom Maher/Inpho At every stop on its lap of honour, the cup has met a bonfire of feelings. Not unfamiliar feelings but inflamed now and running wild. It is easy not to dwell on place and roots and absent-mindedly take them for granted.
At every sight of the cup, that complacency has been shattered. On the Thursday after the final, two players approached Dessie Campbell with the seed of a plan. Campbell is the logistics manager for the Mayo team with a transparent record for getting things done. The players wondered how many places they could reach in one day if they put their minds to it?
“The grander the scheme, the crazier the dream, the more the lateral thinker in Dessie comes to life,” says his friend Liam Horan, who has been part of Mayo backroom teams over the years and whose book on Mayo football, I Can See Clearly Now, will be published next month. Overnight, Campbell sourced an open-top bus normally used for tourists in Galway city and devised a route that would take them to 11 places in a giant loop, starting in Castlebar and finishing in Westport.
Supplies were organised to sustain the travelling horde. Another bus travelled ahead of them in case anything happened to the bus carrying the players. Mayo had reached a state of Zen where nothing was impossible. A scene in Castlebar during the Mayo's team's homecoming after the All-Ireland victory.
Photograph: Enda O'Dowd On the bus, all the players wore their club jerseys. In the GAA, everybody has more than one skin. A provisional timetable was drawn up and soon ransacked by unscheduled stops at irresistible places.
“If we were passing the road where a player grew up, or maybe outside their house if we were that close, they were able to jump out of the bus and get a picture with Sam Maguire. The reception in Ballindine was unbelievable and we ended up blocking the N17 for 40 minutes. We were five hours behind time. Or maybe six.
” They were supposed to reach their last stop in Kilmeena by midafternoon and eventually landed at some time after nine in the evening. By then they had covered about 185km. Nobody had left the club grounds in Kilmeena. After 75 years, waiting had lost its tyranny.
“It was just getting dark as we were coming out of Kilmeena GAA,” says Campbell, “and this guy set off fireworks, flying in front of us as we left, if you can picture it. Then we got to Westport and I’ll never forget driving through the main street. It was mobbed either side. It was that good, we did two loops of it.
”on a crowded hour of glorious life and Jack Carney brandished the cup to the people of a club he has led so superbly in recent years. Colm Barrett got this photo . After the first week, the cup settled into a routine. Campbell and Michael Diskin, the vice-chair of the county board, and one or two others took responsibility for the cup’s social diary.
A Google calendar was set up. Access was given to the players, the management team and some members of the county board so that everybody in that inner circle could track its movement. It hasn’t stopped.
“We have an AM and a PM slot every day,” says Campbell. “Whoever is getting it next will link in with the person on the calendar who had it before and they bring it to the next person at the end of their slot. We’re all working together. If I was being charged for all my WhatsApp messages, I’d be broke.
” There are three Sam Maguire Cups in existence, but only one is in the hands of the champions. The original cup was retired in 1987 and rests in the GAA Museum. A replica is also held in Croke Park for commercial appearances and other odd jobs. The Sam Maguire in Mayo is the one that was handed to Jack Coyne on the Hogan Stand.
No clones of the players are available. For the last month they have faithfully chaperoned the cup through a bewildering schedule.
“Tiredness would hit you in waves to be sure,” says Carney. “People would ask you, ‘How aren’t you absolutely wrecked? ’ But the energy that you have, you get off the people. The joy that it brings to them would make you want to experience more of it.
“On days like the open-top bus tour or when you’re at a club with the trophy, the energy that you get off the people would make you endure anything. ”The plan is for the cup to visit every club, every school, every hospital and every care home in the county. Twenty clubs were represented on the panel but there are 52 clubs in Mayo. At the last count, there are more than 40 left on the list.
Some ground rules needed to be put in place. Every club visit is being scheduled in three-hour slots with three or four players, but to make the best use of everyone’s time there is an official photographer on hand. Instead of two or three or four personal mobile phones being clicked for every group shot with the players and the Sam Maguire, the nominated photographer takes a picture that is uploaded to a site where it can be accessed later.
The nursing homes have been asked not to invite “hundreds of guests” so that the residents and the staff can have an unencumbered audience with the cup. The school visits start this week; that list runs to 189 destinations. Four Mayo players have requested it for their weddings. It has appointments in New York, Chicago, London, on The Late Late Show and at the All-Stars banquet.
In the last month, every day has brought something different. Amid the mayhem, 15 days after the final, the players and management climbed Croagh Patrick, without any entourage or cheering crowds, but with Sam. It was an oasis of stillness.
“It was incredibly powerful,” says Carney. “It was a pilgrimage that we did to say thank you and sort of remembering all the people who had come before us. It was very special that we did it as a group, just those three or four hours together to climb it with Sam Maguire and have a chat about what we had experienced over the previous two weeks.
It was probably the only real time we’ve have together, just ourselves, since winning the final, which made it more special. ” But for the last month it has been about every place and other people. On a beautiful summer’s day, Carney and Aidan O’Shea went to Inishturk, an island 14km off the Mayo coast. A Cúl Camp with about 20 children was in full swing.
“The island was hopping because it was the height of the summer but in wintertime only about 40 or 50 people live on the island. They live a difficult life, there’s no point denying it, it’s harder out there. But football definitely means an awful lot more to them. They gathered at the GAA pitch, which in my opinion is the most amazing GAA pitch in the world, situated in a pure karst landscape, surrounded by rocky limestone.
” Mayo is a vast county, the third biggest in the country. The Erris Peninsula, on its northwestern coast, is 50 129sq km bigger than county Louth. Carney spent two nights down there, in Belmullet.
“You know yourself, you’d rarely get to spend as much time exploring your own county as you would like. From the point of view of being a tourist in your own county has been absolutely amazing. It gives you a massive appreciation for what Chris did and for what Ryan and Séamus are currently doing to even get to Mayo training from Belmullet.
It’s about an hour and 15 minutes each way to MacHale Park and it’s no easy trip with the roads. ” The Sam Maguire reached Belmullet on the Wednesday after the All-Ireland. On the following morning O’Donoghue took the cup by helicopter to visit his grandfather in a remote part of the peninsula. If not now, when?
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