Both rural and urban GAA clubs face increasing challenges as demographics in Ireland change. This is one of a series of articles exploring the issues clubs face and what they are doing to adapt.
In Kilmeen & Kilbree GAA club, 35 miles west of Cork City, they don’t sweat the numbers, they take them as they come. They haven’t been denuded by emigration and depopulation, like other clubs further west in the county and on the Beara peninsula, and they haven’t been swamped by new housing estates in ever-expanding dormitory towns close to the city. In that sense, it is a temperate climate.
Last year they didn’t have enough players to field teams at U-17, U-19 or U-21, so they pooled their resources with two neighbouring clubs to compete under the banner of Owen Gaels. In a situation like this the GAA’s rule book makes an important distinction. Rather than operating as an amalgamated club Owen Gaels conducted its business as an “independent team”.
The word play might seem like an exercise in semantics but in the GAA’s rules on club sovereignty it makes a world of difference. By playing for an “independent team” all of the players were still registered to their original clubs, available to play for their adult teams if they were old enough to do so. Owen Gaels was a coalition of convenience.
In its own right, Kilmeen & Kilbree is a dynamic, resourceful club, wrapped up in its place. Marie Dorgan, the club PRO, reckons that the population of the parish is no more than about 800 people, but 515 of them are paid-up members of the GAA club; the GAA exerts wild magnetism in rural Ireland, but even still those numbers are extraordinary.
It is essentially a farming community revolving around the villages of Rossmore and Ballygurteen, neither of which boasts a shop. According to Kevin O’Donovan, the CEO of the Cork County Board and a native of the parish, five new houses might have been built in each village in the last 10 years.
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In that environment, the only primary school in the parish rarely experiences a surge in enrolments. Dorgan says they had “huge” numbers last year for their U-9s group which in their context meant a class of about 20 boys, most of whom were interested in playing.
“With a club not flush with numbers, success comes in fits and starts,” says Dorgan. Less than a decade ago they had a generation of minor footballers good enough to compete at the highest grade in the county, and for the last couple of years they’ve had a minor camogie team who were able to do the same thing. A couple of those girls won a minor All-Ireland with Cork.
Last year, they had a terrific bunch of U-15 boys who won three 13-a-side county hurling competitions at C grade, and added a football league title to boot. The level of competition was immaterial to the triumph. In a county with more than 250 clubs, some of them giants, there is a premium on picking your fights to scale.
Over the last 40 years Kilmeen & Kilbree have developed remarkable facilities. It is a common story in the GAA but it is always admirable and sometimes stunning. Having hopped from one farmer’s field to another for training and matches over decades, they bought a field from the local parish priest in the late 1970s.
Dressingrooms were added in the 1980s, followed by a second pitch 20 years later, and more dressingrooms, a meeting room and a ball alley. They sourced a certain amount of grant aid for their developments but they also leant heavily on the generosity of their neighbours and on volunteer labour.
Every enhancement was the outcome of unbending commitment. The players funded a gym for their own use. The club put down an 820 metre, floodlit walkway around their grounds, for the benefit of anybody in the area who wished to use it, whether they were a club member or not.
Their most recent major works was a drainage project on their original pitch, which had become prone to waterlogging: 22 kms of drains were laid and 450 tons of sand was applied.
When that was done, there was something else. Kilmeen & Kilbree became just one of five clubs in Munster to join the GAA’s Green Club Programme, which among other things involved the planting of 1,500 native trees and pollinator-friendly plants. The local bees are thrilled. They’re welcome too.
