Keith Dugganfinds Ger Loughnane at ease with himself and the world despite aiming a few broadsides at the county that sacked him

GER LOUGHNANE points accusingly at the photocopier in his office by way of illustrating the problems with hurling and with the world in general. It may have been a trick of the light, but the machine actually seemed to cower a little. For years, St Aidan's had a machine that the principal loved using and believed could not be bettered.

"Then one day this fella comes in and shows me a new one that made the photocopier we had look absolutely obsolete," he explains with the broad mischievous grin that he uses when he knows his audience has no idea where he is going.

"This is the thing. You have a system that you think is grand and an outsider comes in and says that, no, it is antiquated. And people resent that. Less intelligent people resent that. Instead of saying: what can we do about it."

The Clareman is, of course, talking about Galway hurling and his tumultuous exit as senior team manager rather than the importance of cutting-edge office technology. Metaphor and devastating bluntness are the chief tools of Loughnane's conversational style - acquired over many years in the classroom.

For the past week, his scathing remarks on the state of the maroon game and its figureheads, originally printed in the Clare Champion newspaper, have been widely circulated. Typical they said: Loughane is at it again.

On the afternoon we met, he recalled his two-year sojourn in the West in similarly unrepentant language, as if he was at last content in his own mind that the politics of Galway hurling was simply beyond his comprehension. Everything and everyone was slated, from hurling officers to the state of the fields.

"Ballinasloe is like a sheep field. Loughrea is an absolute disgrace - a tiny, cabbage garden of a field. Athenry is the worst of all. I asked myself: what were these people doing in the 1980s when they had all this success? It was Pearse Stadium they concentrated on - the stand, not the pitch. Because the pitch is like something left over from Famine times, there are so many ridges in it. It has left Galway bereft of any decent hurling facility. But you get over that!

"What absolutely stunned me was the bitterness of the rivalries not just of the clubs but between the people. One of the few conversations I had with Miko Ryan (Galway hurling chairman) he told me I should go to a particular club match - I think it was Castlegar and Kinvara — because they had 'history'. I said, 'Miko, as far as I am concerned, not only is there history between every two clubs in Galway, there is history between every two people in Galway that I meet'. That was one of our last conversations."

These outbursts could, of course, be construed as sour grapes from one of the celebrated prophets of modern hurling. Viewed coldly, his Galway experiment was disastrous, Irish sport's very own bonfire of the vanities. The popular notion was that Loughnane, the brilliant firebrand, would sweep in and harness all the disparate energy and talent that had been neglected for 20 years in Galway. But there was no revolution and he left Galway as much of a broken-down enigma as he had found it.

So verbally machine-gunning those who he believes orchestrated the county board vote rejecting a third season under Loughnane is surely just some old-fashioned Irish payback, some stinging words from a hurt man. The thing is, Loughnane does not sound hurt. He delivers anecdotes of his time in Galway like a man enjoying his tales of myriad misadventures experienced on a foreign holiday.

DOWN THE HALL, the Christmas decorations twinkle in the dull afternoon light and we can hear the classes reciting tables and singing carols. Loughnane has been principal in this Shannon school since 1982. As he talks, several young pupils wander in and out of his office. One boy takes a set of keys from the headmaster's desk, another lifts a mobile phone and leaves with it after giving the principal a quizzical look. It is notable that there is no timid knocking at the door, no meek, obedient whispers of "sir": the kids are not exactly quaking in their boots in the presence of a man who, over two decades, built up a reputation as the most fearsome and driven hurling coach in the land.

When he got his first teaching job, he had 52 children in his class and because a new wing was being built in the school, he taught in the dressingroom in a GAA club nearby.

"We had to sweep it out every day. The dust rising and this window you could only open about five inches. Body heat was the main heating system. I was strict back then because that was the system. Back then, you were the authority figure and the kids dreaded it. Families were streaming in from Northern Ireland and England - most of the difficult kids were sent to me! I wonder why.

"But children nowadays are so much easier to handle. There is a fantastic relationship. Now, they can talk to you. The teacher is no longer the lecturer above at the board with the chalk. They learn how to communicate with adults and they haven't half of the hang-ups that we have on leaving school - hating authority and all the rest of it."

In his public life, Loughnane has always drifted with seeming ease between the dual role of traditional authoritarian and anti-establishment cult figure, a Che Geuvara from Feakle. In his famously tough training purges with Clare, he formed a granite-hard and ambitious team under the tried and tested GAA model of uno duce, uno voce.

Clare won two of the most celebrated and transcendent hurling All-Irelands of modern times by the stroke of a ball. But it is the crusade of '98 that Loughnane seems to recall with most pleasure, when he was constantly feuding with the authorities, when Clare were no longer the darlings of the press and when the popular mood in the county was at fever pitch. That Clare did not win that summer - they lost a gripping semi-final trilogy against Offaly - enhances the experience - "if we won, it would not have the same resonance," he insists. "Losing it is what gave that year its mystique."

BUT THAT WAS 10 years ago and since then, Loughane has been stridently critical of several of his former players in his role as a television analyst and rows have intermittently flared between him and his most loyal confederates in the great days.

When his ambitions with Galway went up in flames this summer, it came full circle: Anthony Daly, his All-Ireland winning captain, was now sitting in the television studios and he said: "Maybe now Ger will realise that maybe the players had something to do with Clare winning those All-Irelands."

Loughnane beams in delight when the slight is repeated. He had been watching the broadcast that evening.

"There is a Chinese saying - a Tao, is it: the best that any leader could want is when the people say: we did it for ourselves. So when I saw Anthony saying that, I said: Yeah. Okay. Sure look, I always said I would never meet the likes of those Clare lads again - as people or hurlers."

And he rarely meets them. He admits to having something close to a phobia at the thought of old team reunions. Occasionally, he meets a former player and they reminisce. Last Christmas, he was walking home after a few pints and a car pulled up and it was PJ O'Connell, his cavalier forward. They sat chatting for a long time but he has not seen him since.

"Instantly, all the good times come flashing back. But look: you cannot live in the past. The biggest danger is that you get stuck in that little time frame."

From the outside, Galway was perceived as the second coming of Ger Loughnane. It seemed like the perfect combination of leader and pack and it promised to add spice to a hurling landscape dominated by the calm impenetrability of Brian Cody's Kilkenny. Loughnane and Cody went to college together and a popular theory was that the Clareman was burning to get back into the arena purely to halt Cody's imperious ascent to the summit of hurling management.

When Galway met Kilkenny in the summer of 2007 they lived with the pace for an hour but ultimately lost by 10 points. In the build-up to that match, Loughnane made comments about Kilkenny that were bound to have been a source of discussion among players after training in Nowlan Park.

Predictably, he regrets nothing and laughs off the idea that Cody's success spurred him to return to the game.

"That is rubbish. Look, I would love to play Kilkenny three times a year and beat them. But I didn't go back into management to try and down Brian Cody on a personal basis. I remember (GAA president) Nickey Brennan said that to me - that Cody would put manners on me. Look, the two big managers in the GAA will be Cody and Mick O'Dwyer. No question. Kilkenny would have won All-Irelands in the last 10 years without Cody but not as many. They are the most ruthless and efficient machine and the movement they have now is much different to when Cody started. I admire him for what he has done there.

"And I don't regret what I said because it is true: Kilkenny are the most aggressive team that hurling has seen. They will target opposition players who are either very strong or very weak and I would think that last year, they sometimes went beyond the bounds of aggression. They are not dirty. They are not mean. But they are prepared to do what is necessary to make sure you will not get past them."

IT MAY HAVE been his intention to introduce some of the same qualities to Galway hurling. After all, his Clare teams were no shrinking violets - in fact, the lauding of their physical prowess over their hurling craft was a source of annoyance to them. He can talk loquaciously about the Galway shortcomings and about the political intrigues - John Fahy, the Galway hurling secretary, would find his ears burning if the praise he merits from the Clareman were reprinted here - but when all the explanations of substandard facilities and Galway's ghetto mentality and the fact that the players may simply not be there are exercised - he was the man in charge.

He maintains that the training and preparation were second to none but if there was one significant absence he could not predict, it came from within him. Whether on the damp nights at the training ground or on the sideline of Croke Park, Loughnane realised the dragon's flame was not there. It was somewhere out on the moors of east Clare, where he spends so many winter afternoons hunting, or perhaps locked into that time capsule with Clare that he so determinedly avoids.

In his interview with the Clare Champion, Loughnane turned to the somewhat unlikely figure of WB Yeats to sum up the differences between Clare and Galway. Colum Flynn, his trainer, had given him a gift of war poems and Loughnane was taken with the lines in An Irish Airman Foresees His Death: 'Those I fight I do not hate/ Those I guard I do not love.'

If Loughnane has made one discovery about himself during his Galway years, it is that he can never again whip up the passions and frenzies that he did with his native county. And in a way, it was that unholy storm which Galway hurling people so desperately wanted from him.

"That was the whole bloody thing of it," he says with a note of regret. "People expected me to be fanatical on the sideline. But that would not have been true - because I did not feel it inside. I always said that I could not give to any team what I did to Clare. I see photographs of myself during that time and I was worn out. You would have to have been there to see what the fanatical drive to succeed was like. Everyone was my enemy. That is why those lines stood out. We used to pass Coole Park every night driving to train in Galway. Those I Fight I Do Not Hate. That was it. You were like a feckin' hound in Clare, waiting to get out on the field and it was savage. That drive, you could not repeat it."

He could not repeat it. That was the verdict. His years in Galway were dramatic and potentially sensational but the gunpowder was confined to the meeting chambers rather than igniting the hurling fields. If Loughnane does not return to management, it means his last posting will have ended with a sacking - a fact that he laughs off. "Listen. There is nothing wrong with failing provided you did your absolute best. If you fail, then what the hell about it?"

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker as they say. Soon the school bell will ring. Loughnane's first daily task at home is to feed his set of beagles: hunting consumes him almost as much as hurling, although his admiration for the fox is clear and he claims never to have seen a pack track the prey down.

"Never," he declares. "There is so much cover all over east Clare. He will take them into the cover - go under the lowest briars and eventually slow them down and eventually he will get down the burrow - because we never block the burrow."

It could be that the Feakle man will vanish down a similar maze in the years ahead. He retains a great enthusiasm for hurling and talks in rhapsodic bursts about the current issues. He champions the Cork hurling exiles, for instance, on the grounds that the players are, he feels, unique spirits, comparable to Heffernan's Dublin football team of the 1970s.

But he rules out ever leading the Rebels. "No," he says solemnly. "I would not be suited to them."

So where next for Ger Loughnane? Who knows? Christmas is with family in Manhattan, where his youngest son is working and after that, it will be back to the good familiar things: teaching, roaming the fields of east Clare and perhaps finding fresh causes for agitation.

The school becomes noisy and Loughnane escorts us from his office -the photocopier is no longer trembling - and down the hall lined with the art of the students. He shakes hands in his customarily energetic way and disappears into another schoolroom. Soon, his warm, manic laugh fills the corridor. It is hardly the sound of a man in torment. Another day ended, the blackboard wiped clean.