Gaelic Games: Hard lessons

The inner city, with a population of 80,000, has just one team, Na Piarsaigh, competing in the senior hurling championship but there are far wider concerns than just that fact. Mungret/St Paul’s were relegated to the junior grades while Old Christian’s were involved in an intermediate relegation battle. Of the 12 leagues from junior A to minor hurling Division 2, no inner-city team qualified for a semi-final. The most worrying statistic of all though, was that Monaleen, with a population of roughly 8,000, failed to field a minor team.

Hurling within the city has been in steady decline for some time. When a Limerick All Star team from between 1954 and 1984 was selected in 1984, one third of the side was from inner-city clubs. The Limerick minor team that won that year’s All-Ireland title had 11 players from the city division (including six from the inner city). This year’s minor team, which contested the All-Ireland final, had just two inner-city players on the panel. There were just two inner-city players on the senior hurling squad. No wonder the city was named as a blackspot in the Hurling Development Plan.

“When I got this job, my boss told me to treat it as a vocation or otherwise I’d crack up,” says Culhane. “I started laughing but I knew exactly what he meant.”

There is only so much Culhane will be able to achieve because there are no easy solutions; only the old, difficult and predictable ones that involve kids, coaching and relentless perseverance.

He’s starting from base camp and is in the process of putting together a survey for the 33 primary schools in the area. Already, he’s discovered that 21 of the 33 are listed to play in hurling competitions and that one school in Corbally with a population of 900 is struggling to put a team together.

As well as covering the secondary schools and assisting the 15 clubs in the city division, Culhane’s remit has no real limit. It will stretch anywhere from organising coaching courses to a broad recruitment drive to strengthen the school-club links and increase the level of volunteerism within clubs. In selling this vision he aims to use everything he has, including his degree in sports health and exercise.

“It’s not something I’m going to do immediately but why not sell hurling from a purely health promotion and recreation perspective?” he asks. “That’s one sporting angle which I don’t think has been fully developed in Irish society. Obesity, asthma and diabetes levels are on the increase in kids and I’ll be trying to educate people to the health benefits of hurling.

“Grasping the skills of hurling is self-rewarding for kids in terms of cohesion and social development. As opposed to a lot of games, like rugby for example where you need a group to train, banging a ball off a wall can increase kids’ pro-prio reception levels (mental and physical co-ordination). I’ll be doing presentations in schools but I can’t be going around in a shirt and tie all the time either. I’ll have to go out in the muck and rain coaching kids as well.”

Improving the school-club links is the key because 10 clubs within the inner-city boundaries is a decent number for a city with a huge rugby tradition. The club base is there; strengthening that base is just one of the targets Culhane will be trying to strike.

“It would be impossible to think that I alone am going to turn around the fortunes of Limerick city hurling,” he says. “I believe there will be change but it will take five or 10 years to see results. Even now, it’s difficult to see how I’m going to have an impact on the whole structure. I have a basic plan but, like everything else in life, it will change. I will just have to adapt with it as I go along.”

LAST THURSDAY night in the Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT) Students’ Union building, 11 people gathered in a boardroom upstairs for the first formal meeting of the LIT Sarsfields GAA club. After discussing the basics of insurance and affiliation and deciding to enter hurling and football teams for U-10 and U-12 competitions this season, they set next Friday as the date for their first AGM.

The club is the first of its kind in the country and is the combined brainchild of John Landers, Noel Hartigan and LIT. Landers, a former county board youth development officer, and Hartigan, games promotion officer in Limerick, researched the possibility of establishing a club in the north-side of the city, where they could use the facilities in LIT.

The LIT authorities were fully aware that last year’s Fitzgibbon Cup final between LIT and University of Limerick involved only three Limerick players in both squads and they were keen to promote Gaelic games in their area. The college sits beside the Corpus Christi and Moyross parishes and, although it is one of the poorest and most socially deprived areas in the city, it once had a serious hurling tradition.

Treaty Sarsfields used to be a powerhouse in Limerick hurling, winning three senior hurling titles in a row between 1951 and 1953 and providing a batch of players for “Mackey’s Greyhounds”, the Limerick side in 1955. By the 1970s, though, the club was on the slide and it finally ceased to exist in 1983.

There have been many attempts to re-establish a club in the Moyross area over the past 20 years but most of them failed. The Corpus Christi club was formed in the early 1990s and folded after five years. Something special was needed to reignite the flame and LIT have provided the spark; the new club will have full use of the college’s facilities.

“This is a massive opportunity for us,” says Deirdre O’Driscoll, who chairs LIT Sarsfields. “There are social problems everywhere but Moyross just happens to be given the name. We want the kids to be proud of where they come from and not to be afraid to tell people that they play with LIT Sarsfields. Plus, they might like the facilities in LIT and it might encourage them to go on to college.”

O’Driscoll was born in Moyross and still lives there but she has no background in GAA. She is a special needs assistant in Corpus Christi primary school and also chairs the Moyross community development programme. When Landers and Hartigan approached her, she jumped at the chance to get involved in the club.

Most children in the area would have no access to another GAA club but there is a community bus in Moyross, which will transport them to and from the college.

LIT, the county board and a number of other community committees have sponsored helmets, hurleys, sliotars, portable goalposts and jerseys. They ran a competition in the four local schools to design the club colours and crest. They are set up, and ready for road.

Last week, Hartigan was watching LIT’s Fitzgibbon Cup team train on their Astroturf pitch when two young lads from Ballynanty hopped over the wall on their way from U-12 soccer training. They approached Hartigan and asked him when the club was starting up. The interest and enthusiasm is there.

“All my brothers never had the opportunity to play GAA,” says O’Driscoll. “They’re saying it’s a pity it wasn’t there for them when they were growing up. It will keep the kids off the streets and hopefully keep them on the straight and narrow.

“It’s just absolutely fantastic for us.”

Another small step taken in the battle for hearts and minds.

IN LARGE tracts of Limerick city, where rugby and soccer have endured and woven themselves into the fabric of the area, the GAA still remains a victim of the siege mentality built up after years of social neglect. When the GAA eventually decided to tackle some areas of the city that had long been out of their consciousness, the move was long overdue and sometimes too late.

Six years ago, Hartigan began coaching Gaelic games under a scheme kick-started by the government, which utilised sport as a conduit to improving the quality of life in economically deprived communities.

A few of the clubs tapped into Hartigan’s work to recruit new members but many others didn’t always take advantage of his groundwork and not all of the shoots got a chance to grow from the roots.

“You’d have often heard of a club who couldn’t field a team in a certain age group and you thought you’d been doing a bit in a school in that area,” says Hartigan. “You’d be saying, ‘Am I wasting my time if the clubs are not going to come into the school and take the kids out that I’ve been working with?’ “A lot of the schools that I was going into, the kids are tough but they’re full of enthusiasm to play a game. One of the downsides of me going into the disadvantaged areas was that when a place has a bad name it sticks. You hadn’t enough of clubs going into those areas to take the kids out and get them involved in the clubs.”

Of course, the problems are more complex than just those issues. “Hurling is definitely poor at a certain level in Limerick in that a lot of the initiatives we do are aimed at primary schools,” says Hartigan. “We tend to forget that when a kid leaves primary school, he still has five or six years of hurling left before he goes to college or whatever. That’s where we lose most of our players. There’s very rarely clubs who can’t field U-12 teams but two years later they might not have an U-14 team.

“Between 12 and 16, that’s where we lose the most of our kids.”

One of the problems that continues to stalk the GAA in large urban areas is a tendency among clubs to pick from their traditional pockets, neglecting to expand into new urban areas. In some parts of the city, huge housing developments have been ignored by the very clubs who cannot afford to be so casual.

The other side of the coin, however, is that most clubs are doing what they can. Some are as proactive as many of the clubs in large urban centres around the country.

“It might be hard for people on the outside to understand just how big rugby is in this city,” says Eamonn Phelan, secretary of the St Patrick’s club. “I don’t think things are that bad and there is a lot of work being done at underage. Statistics don’t always tell the truth because I thought there were about three or four more city players who could have been on this year’s Limerick minor panel.”

Matters could certainly be worse. Before Christmas, Noel Hartigan visited four clubs where he found indoor hurling sessions with their U-8s and U-10s in full swing. Some of the clubs had almost 100 kids involved and there is sufficient work being done at those levels to ensure a decent future. It’s what happens next that counts.

Na Piarsaigh have proved that point. Ard Scoil Ris narrowly lost the Dean Cup final (Munster U-16Å) to St Flannan’s, Ennis, in November. While nine of the Ard Scoil Ris squad were from Clare clubs, Na Piarsaigh had nine players on the panel as well. The work that Na Piarsaigh are doing at underage level is a clear indication of why they are the only senior club in the inner city.

For now, though, hurling in Limerick city knows where it stands in the greater scheme of things. A new development administrator has been appointed but he will only be able to do so much. They can’t expect miracles so it’s up to everybody involved in Limerick city hurling to roll up their sleeves and confront the reality of their plight. “If people aren’t going to respond to this initiative, what are they going to respond to?” asks Hartigan. “Basically, the clubs need to realise that the area they operate in has been called a blackspot. “Everybody needs to ask themselves have they pride in their city or haven’t they? The clubs must be willing to stand up and say, ‘Let’s go and do something about this now.’ People say that Limerick city is a sleeping giant in hurling. But it’s been sleeping a long time.” It’s time the giant woke up.