Cherish the good times when they come

KILLINAN END

Éire Óg Ennis is just the latest example of how club competitions almost inevitably throw up a churn in standards and outcomes.

Not matter how long the glory days for a club, it seems the turning in the road will always come. The opposite is the hope of many too – that even the darkest night has a dawn on the way. Some 35 years have passed since the Canon Hamilton cup wintered in Ennis. Éire Óg were chasing a first County title in eight years back in those days and had well known figures Colm Flynn, Wille Walshe and Séamus Durack in the management team. Their opponents, O’Callaghan’s Mills, had not lifted the trophy since 1937 - a wait that still continues. However, their corner-forward Eamon Healy was the holder of a County medal having won the year before with Sixmilebridge before transferring.

It was a day out of the ordinary for Ennis with the Junior title won by a point against Scariff in the curtain-raiser. It is notable that the manager of Éire Óg’s Senior team, Séamus Durack, playing in goal in the winning team. The presence at midfield of a young Minor called Colin Lynch and the appearance of a substitute, Stephen McNamara, for Éire Óg in that Junior Final would have gone under the radar in Clare hurling at the time, but not for long. Within a few years they were teaming up with one of their final opponents, Mike McNamara, in Clare’s massive assault on the hurling landscape during the second half of the 1990s. To give all concerned their due, despite some dark days in the intervening years, the Banner County occupies a very different perch in hurling’s Hall of Fame these days. Three times since that October day in 1990 the McCarthy Cup has visited Clare, the same record as Cork. Perhaps never again will a Cork player remind Clare during the parade before a Munster Final – as Dónal Óg Cusack did in 1999 - that “we are Cork” and expect that the message has a particular significance for Clare.

Kilkenny’s championship has provided another example of the slings and arrows thrown by the passage of time. Half a century ago Fenians of Johnstown played in the All-Ireland club hurling final. A loss to Cork’s St Finbarr’s was no shame in those days and to appear in the final was a remarkable peak in a decade of plenty for a rural border parish. It all began in 1968 when the newly amalgamated clubs of that parish – St Finbarr’s and St Kieran’s - won the Kilkenny Junior hurling championship, then the second tier of hurling in that county. Just twelve months later they were in the Senior final but lost to James Stephens who themselves bridged a 32-year gap from their previous title.

In 1970 came the big breakthrough for Fenians when they faced James Stephens again for the Tom Walsh cup. This time the outcome was different win as Fenians won a close match 2-11 to 3-5. No mean feat that considering that just two years later James Stephens provided a third of Kilkenny’s All-Ireland Final winning team – Ned Byrne, Chunky O’Brien, Fan Larkin, Mick Crotty, and Eamon Morrissey.

But Fenians has their stars too. At centre-back they had Pat Henderson, at centre-forward Pat Delaney, and at full-back was Nicky Orr who became Pa Dillon’s successor as Kilkenny’s full-back. All three would captain Kilkenny in All-Ireland Senior hurling finals, Henderson (1971), Delaney (1973), and Nicky Orr, the most low-profile of the three, was the one who did so successfully in 1974 in the rematch with Limerick. By 1975 the young Billy Fitzpatrick had emerged and he captained Kilkenny’s successful defence of the title against Galway. He also carved out a memorable niche in the early 1980s particularly the 1983 final when he tormented Cork. In a remarkable period of success, the club played in eight finals in a dozen years winning five of them. Despite reaching three more finals during the 1990s the club has still not managed to enter the winners’ enclosure since those golden years.

They’ll wait another while. Half a century on from the heady days of gracing Croke Park as Leinster Champions after beating St Rynagh’s in that final, things have changed indeed. Back in 2016 Fenians tumbled from Senior to Intermediate after losing a relegation play-off against Danesfort. They had scraped through Senior relegation play-offs in 2010, ’13 and 14 before gravity had its way. What might have seemed unthinkable back when they were Kings was the notion that they would ever find themselves in an Intermediate relegation play-off. When it happened in 2025 it happened in style. Their opponents were the team that was relegated from Senior a year after Fenians, St Martin’s, who were All-Ireland Senior champions forty years ago. Johnstown, it is said, are victims of numbers – the natural flight from the area allied to a lack of new housing. Only time will tell if these factors are for turning.