KILLINAN END - The life of Paddy Prendergast

The death last weekend of Paddy Prendergast at age 95 severed the last mortal link with the Mayo teams of 1950-51 which brought the Sam Maguire to that great footballing heartland. Mortal links broken, now they must trade on immortality. Prendergast had an unusual career in the modern context but maybe not so unusual in his own days. He was born in Ballintubber in 1926. That place was referenced recently in this column as a rural outpost whose most famous feature is Ballintubber Abbey. It is self-styled as the church that refused to die despite the best efforts of Cromwellian forces in the 1650s to destroy an Abbey which had stood since the fourteenth century. It did require restoration in the 1960s but maybe reflects as well as any the spirit of the county that keeps coming back.

Prendergast, certainly the area’s most renowned son, joined the Gardaí and was stationed in Dungloe in the Rosses in west Donegal in the late 1940s. In interviews he referred to the Gardaí as the “Póilíní” betraying the Gaeltacht status of the area. He joined the local club and naturally, for a player of his talent, made the Donegal team straightaway. He was well-regarded in his day as a full-back who could handle the big full-forwards and the roughhouse environment that often accompanied them. Not so many full-backs, it seemed, were as comfortable as Prendergast when brought out the field.

Getting back to the geography of his story it is worth noting that of course the GAA had a huge background of players lining out for counties which were not theirs natively down the decades. Lack of transport was the obvious reason and indeed the association had for some time a rule which forced players to play for their county of residence. No doubt this was more to try to keep track of players as much as anything else and to avoid players playing for more than one county. To the modern eye it might seem strange that this could happen.

We could instance many examples. Perhaps the most significant instance, though it has been lost to posterity was the case of Matt Gargan, a Kilkenny hurler who reputedly lined out fairly regularly for Waterford. Gargan was a member of the iconic Kilkenny hurlers of the first decade and a half of the twentieth-century, a group which included the legendary Sim Walton of Tullaroan, whose grandnephew Liam Doyle of Bodyke won two All-Irelands in the 1990s. Gargan’s involvement was cited at no less a level than an All-Ireland hurling final between Kilkenny and Cork when he was objected to on the basis of having played earlier in the championship for Waterford. What the modern observer must realise is the difficulty of spotting a player whose photograph is not on public record. Even players’ ages were difficult to ascertain.

Another factor which again might surprise modern observers is that right up to Prendergast’s time there was a creeping professionalism in the GAA. Collective training had been a feature of the GAA since its infancy. Collective training in this sense often involved teams going to specific locations, maybe a boarding school or a monastery and training effectively as professional teams with meals, expenses etc. There are plenty of stories of the Roscommon champion team of 1943-44 spending weeks at training camps ahead of big games and no doubt it was widespread among those who competed vigorously with them. Paddy Prendergast recalled about 25 of the Mayo team living together as full-time footballers for a number of weeks in Ballina in the lead-up to key games.

Another element of Prendergast’s era was the airbrushing, officially at least, of players who became members of the clergy. While in later decades players such as Iggy Clarke, Willie Fitzmaurice of Killeedy and Limerick, Pat Barry of Cork, all in the 1970s and onwards hurled county without any issues. In earlier decades many an inter-county career crashed on the rocks of ordination and no doubt cost counties plenty of players of calibre. Peter Quinn, a team-mate of Prendergast, and wing-back on those successful Mayo teams played under an altered surname to avoid the long arm of the cloth. It is the end of many eras with Paddy Prendergast taking his final sleep.

Paddy Prendergast was gifted a lifespan of remarkable longevity, in the end spending the bulk of it in Tralee where he married a German lady. His older brother Tom had played full-back for Mayo too before Paddy came along. His younger brother Ray did so too starring for Mayo when they had success in the late 1960s, with the GAA grounds at Ballintubber named in his honour. Ray was full-back when Mayo brought Galway’s four-in-a-row ambitions crashing to a halt in Salthill in 1967, with John Morley of Kiltimagh outside him at centre-back. The unfortunate Morley made national headlines when on 7 July 1980 he was shot fatally in the course of his duties as Garda. He was just 37. Ray Prendergast ran a pub in Castlebar and died two years later at just 42 years old. Their two ages combined is still short of Paddy Prendergast their iconic predecessor in the Mayo jersey. Funny how dice of life can roll. May they all rest in peace.