Restoring old glories

KILLINAN END

If the county finals of Tipperary and Cork produced winners who had been outside the winner's enclosure for a decade, the Kilkenny final has the potential to produce winners just as illustrious but whose wait for ultimate success is significantly longer. Tullaroan last won a county senior title in 1994, and even that bridged a gap of nearly four decades stretching back to 1958. This is a rural club in north-west Kilkenny but one with deep roots in the early days of the GAA and the development of Kilkenny hurling into the powerhouse it subsequently became.

Despite Tullaroan’s lack of senior success in modern times – they were All-Ireland Intermediate champions in 2020 - the foundations were laid so solidly that it is only in the last couple of years their record tally of county senior titles was overtaken. Coincidentally that feat looms large at the weekend when they face the formidable presence of Shamrocks Ballyhale, the very club which, despite not having won a senior title until the 1970s, climbed to the top of the Roll of Honour in 2025.

Tullaroan, it can reasonably be said, boasts two of the most consequential figures in the history of hurling, and most certainly in the history of Kilkenny hurling. There was just a nineteen-year age difference between Sim Walton and Lory Meagher. Walton was born in 1880, four years before the foundation of the GAA, while his fellow parishioner, Meagher, came into the world in 1899. While nineteen years is not insignificant, hurling folklore certainly associates them with quite distinct eras in Kilkenny hurling.

One is from the epoch of hurling’s pioneers, whose achievements are hazy except to those - now long gone - who witnessed them; the other arrived on the cusp of modern communication, albeit limited, with radio broadcasts and broader newspaper coverage bringing their glory days to the attention of a wider public.

Sim Walton remains the most recognisable name from the great Kilkenny teams in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. This was a group of hurlers which won seven All-Ireland Finals in ten years with four players, including Walton, on all seven teams. It was such a dominant group that Walton claimed in his later years that, but for a few selection differences, they had the potential to win all ten titles. Pádraig Puirséal, a Mooncoin man, leading hurling writer with the Irish Press for several decades, recalled his father saying of that group, “anyone who never saw them never saw hurlers”. Suffice to say they were very good indeed.

There is little doubt that the two legendary Tullaroan men hurled together at club level – men with far bigger age-gaps have done so in rural parishes. Just five years separated the inter-county careers of Walton and Meagher. Honours had come in plenty to the youthful Walton, but Meagher’s career was an uphill one with success blooming late. A bad beating was endured in 1926 to an up-and-coming Cork team while Kilkenny’s loss to the same opponents - at the other end of their run – in 1931, stands out in the annals as the only time three bouts were needed to decide an All-Ireland Final.

When Lory Meagher won a first All-Ireland medal in 1932 against Clare, he had already passed his 33rd birthday.

He went on to win two more - the last as captain. He might be associated with his jousts against Limerick’s Timmy Ryan during the 1930s, and rightly so, given that they faced each other in three All-Ireland Finals. But this association obscures the fact that there was an age gap of eleven years.

When Timmy was coming into full bloom alongside a broader group of Limerick hurlers primed to peak together, Lory was nearing the end. It says something about the Tullaroan man’s brilliance on the pitch that his reputation shone so brightly despite this, and that he lasted until Killarney 1937. He went on to become the only man on the Team of the Century born in the nineteenth century.

It is worth mentioning another Tullaroan player who was chosen on that team, namely Paddy Phelan. On his death in 1971, he was described by the Kilkenny People newspaper - with typically native understatement – as “generally regarded as the greatest hurler of all time”. Phelan was a decade younger than Meagher and won three county medals, the last in 1934, for the club’s seventeenth county title. Tullaroan has won just three since.

The difficulty with considering Paddy Phelan in this company is hardly one of hurling ability or reputation. It is that he was from Freshford, not Tullaroan; a man who was embraced by a grand tradition rather than being born into it. Sim Walton won seven County medals, and Lory Meagher won five. You would imagine the current crew would settle for one.