When the victorious Mayo women's Gaelic football team was returning home several months ago, it took a Saw Doctors number as its winning anthem. Strains of The Green and Red of Mayo could be heard from the mouths of the jubilant women on a live link-up with Mid-West Radio.
It got the band's manager, Ollie Jennings, thinking, to the extent that he was soon on the phone to the women's coach, NUI Galway student Jonathan Mullin. The women had been promised a well-deserved holiday after their second successive win, and Mr Jennings offered the services of the Saw Doctors for a fundraising gig.
The result: a pre-holiday All Ireland Champions' 2000 link-up with pre-world tour musicians in the Travellers' Friend, Castlebar, Co Mayo, this Thursday night.
"We always try to do a warm-up somewhere at home before going abroad," says Mr Jennings, who is delighted with the arrangement. The band begins the US leg of its tour five days later in the Boston Avalon Ballroom on November 28th, and from there goes to Washington DC and New York.
One man who may now share the Saw Doctors' enthusiasm for women's Gaelic football is Jack Mahon, teacher, writer, GAA expert, Cospoir member and author of the recently published A History of Gaelic Football. He admits that he was one of the "doubting Thomases" for some years after women's Gaelic took off in 1974. He could never imagine himself going to see such a game.
"Not any more," he writes. "Anyone who saw the television broadcast of the 1996 senior women's final between Monaghan and Laois (draw and replay) had to become a fan. This was outstanding committed football, clean and open, uncluttered, with wonderful scores, intelligent running off the ball, no gamesmanship."
He sincerely hopes that the women's game "doesn't degenerate like the men's game over the years".
Mr Mahon's history is concerned mainly with that men's game, all 115 years of it. He traces the changing fortunes of different counties, Kerry being the most consistent, and delves deep into the reasons for its status as the most popular spectator sport.
Though Gaelic football cannot claim "anything like the antiquity of hurling," he notes that the Statutes of his home city, Galway, give the first direct reference to it in 1527. They ordered citizens not to play "the hurlings of the littill (sic) ball with hockie sticks or staves, nor use no hands (sic) ball to play without the walls but only the great footballe". Anyone found guilty of breaking the law faced an eight-penny fine.
His history, which includes detailed league and championship results, has a personal touch; he recalls his own Galway-Roscommon roots when describing the impact of Roscommon's first all-Ireland victory in September 1939.
A History of Gaelic Football by Jack Mahon is published by Gill and Macmillan at £19.99 (hardback)
