Paul Rouse: Leitrim final encapsulates the meaning of football across Ireland

This is a final that encapsulates the meaning of football across so many towns, villages and parishes around Ireland.

Ballinamore are the most successful GAA club in Leitrim, with 21 senior football titles to their name. There is a ‘but’ though. And the ‘but’ here is that only one of those 21 titles has been won since 1990.

By contrast, Mohill have won five of their nine titles in the last 20 years.

That the game is being played in Ballinamore will surely add a unique flavour to the occasion. This is a footballing heartland where the game matters as much as in any bigger counties where All-Irelands are regularly won.

This love of football in Leitrim (and by extension across Ireland) is something that was beautifully captured by the writer John McGahern.

In his book ‘Memoir’, McGahern wrote of how in the rural communities of Leitrim ‘the local and the individual were more powerful than any national identity’.

To illustrate this point, he recounts his memories of Eddie McIniff, who is described in ‘Memoir ‘as a fine footballer and the man ‘who took all the close-in frees for the Ballinamore team’.

One evening, Eddie gave McGahern a lesson in good kicking, using some potatoes they were meant to be picking as imaginary footballs and the whitethorn hedge which bordered the field as the goal.

It is the kind of thing that anyone who has ever stood in the wake of a spudler will have no problem envisaging.

Under Eddie’s expert instruction, McGahern started kicking the potatoes himself: ‘I missed the first few kicks, but soon, with Eddie’s help, was managing to send the occasional potato clear of the hedge’.

There was a problem, however: the impromptu practice session was being observed by McGahern’s father (a police sergeant with a sharp temper) and he was duly outraged.

McIniff may have been a star footballer, a drinker and a casual labourer, but the Sergeant, with his authority and standing in the local community, had little time for him: “The child is bad enough, but I don’t even know how to begin to describe you.” That put an end to an autumn of kicking lessons.

The following spring, when Aughawillan played Ballinamore in a match, McGahern met McIniff again. Although McGahern was cheering on his own Aughawillan, it was Ballinamore, led by Eddie, who won the day.

At the end of the match a crowd swirled around Eddie on the field, but he saw the young McGahern and lifted him into the air. McGahern was delighted at the attention and told him, in tears: “You played great Eddie.’” 

He, in turn, was made to laugh when Eddie replied: “We’ll always have spuds and eejits.” When it comes to sport, John McGahern is more usually remembered as a man who loved cricket. Declan Kiberd once wrote in ‘The Irish Times’ of the depth of McGahern’s love of cricket: “At lunchtime in Belgrove [school], when other teachers talked of the GAA, McGahern often sat in a corner of the staff room and listened to John Arlott’s cricket commentaries. After a few weeks of this, he removed the earplug from the transistor and soon half the colleagues had become Arlott addicts.” 

And yet the GAA – and especially Gaelic football was a constant presence in his life. In writing about it, McGahern highlighted just how there was no escaping the GAA in Leitrim. He remembered as a young boy: “I had watched enviously from the bank as the older boys played football, and my dream was to learn to play.’ Later, in his last novel ‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’, a crowd returning from a football game enters a bar.

After a discussion between those in the bar and the football crowd about who won and how bad the local team was, a comment is made about the team: “They are not great but it’s a day out. Only for football we might never get out of the house.” What is also the case is that football in Leitrim has been defined not just by the people who lived there, but also by the people who couldn’t.

To this end, it is undeniable that the GAA in Leitrim has suffered for its size; it has also been ravaged by emigration. The numbers around this are extraordinary.

The 1841 census recorded in the region of 155,000 people living in Leitrim. Just 10 years later that had fallen by almost 28% to 112,000. By 1901 Leitrim’s population had fallen to 69,000 and the 20th century saw further decline. By 1951 the population had fallen by a further 28,000 to 41,000.

The shadow of emigration fell across success as well as disappointment. Back in 1927, Leitrim had won the Connacht championship for the first time. The Leitrim players later received their Connacht championship medals at a dance in Ballinamore in February 1928 and that same month five of them were picked to play for Connacht team in the Railway Cup.

But four of their best players – Johnny McGoldrick, Willie Daly, Nipper Geelan and John McGuinness – had been actually been lost to emigration after the 1926 championship and played for New York that year.

The 1927 team, too, was immediately destroyed by emigration. Tom Gannon recalled that the last he saw of some of his teammates was when they posed for a team photo after arriving back in Ballinamore following the defeat to Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final.

In the following decades, many more were lost to the sea and sky. Leitrim’s population reached its lowest number in the 1990s (at just over 25,000).

One of the people who went was John McGahern’s childhood hero and fellow potato-picker, Eddie McIniff, whose return from England every Christmas was memorable.

His friends and others from the town band with whom he had played the drums met him at the train station: “After the handshakes, the slaps, the embraces, the jokes, the laughter, he was carried shoulder high from the platform. The band would lead the crowd through the town to whatever bar had been decided upon.” Leitrim experienced its first demographic growth in over a century and a half in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the last census, in 2022, the population had reached 35,199, an increase of 10% since 2016.

Looking back this week at matches in the championship, it is clear that the quality of the football is high. Leitrim’s underage development squads are impressive and there is a general sense of momentum around what is a happening. It will be worth watching what happens in the coming years – beginning next Sunday’s county final which is on TG4.

Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin