When Brendan Crawley was a teacher in Dorset Street in the 1970s, he set up Matt Talbot GFC and opened up a portal to the world
“There was no club for any kids to join,” Crawley says now. “They played in the school – we got them started playing when they were seven. But when they got to 11 or 12 and they were leaving to go to secondary school, none of them had a club to keep playing in. So a few of us got the parents together and said we were going to set up a club for them. We called it Matt Talbot GFC.”It was almost a revolutionary act.
McGrath became club chairman and the Matt Talbots entered the North Dublin leagues. They trained wherever they could – Fairview Park, mostly, Whitehall occasionally. It was all a bit ad hoc and haphazard but it was something.Crawley wanted it to be more though. Before joining the school, he’d spent five years living in England, working on the sites and making a nomad’s road for himself around the place. Any city he went to, he plugged into the Irish community and particularly the GAA.
Over the following decade, the Matt Talbots went back to Liverpool, to Manchester, to New York, to New Haven. Since they already had a taste for the exotic, Crawley brought them to Inniskeen as well, forming a link with his home club that survived for decades. He opened up new worlds to them, geographically, personally, the lot.
“When we got set up over here, loads of the Matt Talbot boys came out to stay with us. They were older by then and they came over looking for work and they often stayed here while they were getting set up. When Maureen and I got married, one of the Matt Talbot lads was my best man.”
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