Change can come suddenly

Killinan End column

In the fall of 1985, the Laois hurlers could hardly have begun the National League under more illustrious management.

Jimmy Doyle took over a team that had shown historically significant levels of potential in the previous year. Not since 1951 when the memory of the county’s most recent All-Ireland Final appearance was still fresh had blue and white ribbons threatened the Bob O’Keefe cup.

The mid-80s suggested something stirring in the midlands. Laois had beaten Dublin comprehensively in the 1985 Leinster quarter-final, which was no great surprise for a Laois team which had been hugely competitive in the National League. However, the provincial semi-final win over Wexford was the one that really shook the championship. On the face of it this was hardly an earth-shattering occurrence since Laois had finished above the relegated Wexford in the League. The shock was that it happened at all in a sport where ladders of progress tend to be very slippery propositions. That the final involved a heavy loss to the eventual All-Ireland champions did not diminish the sense of progress.

Adding that summer’s momentum to an appearance in the 1984 Centenary Cup final Laois would have turned to the National League and its top tier with some optimism. Dublin in Croke Park in a repeat of the Leinster championship would have been cause for confidence. As it transpired it was unjustified as roles were severely reversed from the championship game. On this day, Dublin dominated the game winning by ten points. Coming off the back of a bad beating in Cusack Park, Ennis, it marked a resurgence for Dublin which almost staved off relegation. In the end, the two counties that lined out in Croke Park that day would take the drop together.

It was a day also when Galway and Kilkenny wore hurleys off each other in Nowlan Park in what was described as a “mean” encounter with the sound of hurleys on flesh echoing throughout. This was maybe the start of a few tasty matches between these teams which included a niggly League Final the following April and the 1987 All-Ireland Final which was certainly no day for parlour hurlers. The same day, Offaly’s hurlers lost to Cork for just for their first defeat since the previous March, a period which included a MacCarthy Cup win.

Tipp, at this point, were at the other end of the spectrum enduring what this newspaper called a “catastrophe” of a seven-point defeat in Mullingar against Westmeath. To be fair, when you see the Tipp team – bedecked with All-Ireland Senior, Under 21, and Minor medallists - you can but conclude that this Westmeath team was a good one. Their promotion along with Wexford - ahead of Tipp - further evidence that whatever they achieved was deserved.

Whatever talking points might have emerged from this round of National League games were soon put in the ha’penny place by events that unfolded at Croke Park. Paul Mulhare was one of Dublin’s midfielders. Just 22-years-old, he was a member of the Good Counsel GAA club based in Drimnagh to the south-west of the city centre. This was one of the new estates built in Dublin in the 1930s and ‘40s during the tenement clearances from the city centre when many of those old sprawling Georgian houses were deemed unsafe.

As a suburb its output of people has been extraordinary. It has featured musicians in Tom Dunne of Something Happens, Colm Wilkinson of musicals fame and whose sister played the character of Jude, family daughter in the Riordan’s. This is not to mention Brian Kerr, Michael Carruth, and soccer player Tony Dunne who became the first Irish man to win a European Cup medal in 1968. Good Counsel was also the club of Kevin Moran, winner of All-Ireland Senior football medals in 1976/77 whose family had relocated from the Liberties in central Dublin.

Chances are that Paul Mulhare had a lengthy Dublin career ahead of him, but it was not to be. Despite him wearing a helmet an accidental stroke to the head left him fighting for his life over several days in St Vincent’s hospital on Dublin’s southside. He hurled vigorously against Laois on a Sunday; the following Saturday he was buried in Newcastle, west Dublin. Human vulnerability doesn’t get a much starker demonstration. His death opened, perhaps seriously for the first time, the question of safety on the hurling field. GAA Ard-Stiúrthóir Liam Mulvihill appeared on Today Tonight on RTÉ to be grilled on whether the GAA was doing enough for players’ safety. It was a debate which already had a practical application.

In 1969, Cork’s Dónal Clifford had marked John Flanagan in the League semi-final in Thurles. Amid the tumultuous celebrations at having beaten Tipperary for the first time in a dozen years – since the famous ‘what did Mackey say to Ring?’ occasion in fact – Clifford wearing an ‘ice-hockey helmet’ was but a footnote. It was the start of quite a trend. Some 40 years later, Kilkenny’s Michael Kavanagh became the last player to line out in an All-Ireland final without protective headgear as the rules caught up with the prevailing tendency. It is not clear that the fate of Paul Mulhare in fact made much of a difference to the momentum of it all, but it is hard to argue that we are not now in a better place.