I couldn’t make it down to Baile Bhúirne for the Comortas Peile na Gaeltachta over the weekend but it was probably for the best. As anyone whose been to it down the years will tell you, that’s a weekend you have to hunker down for. Eamon McGee says he went to the Comortas in Baile Bhúirne in 2003 with €20 in his pocket, drank for three days and came home with a fiver. I have no trouble believing him.
It moves around from year to year. Clubs come from Gaeltacht areas all across the country for the June Bank Holiday weekend and somewhere in the middle of it all a football tournament breaks out.
Around our area in west Kerry, we’d have to get past the likes of Dingle and Lispole and maybe another team from south Kerry to get through. As you can imagine, they’d always be cordial affairs.
As a young lad, I remember it came to our place in Gallarus in the very early ’90s. I’d say I was about 13 or 14 at the time and the one thing that sticks in my memory was seeing Martin McHugh and James McHugh play for Kilcar. They weren’t big men but you could see as clear as day that they were county men.
I remember watching Martín Beag as everyone called him play on a bad day in Gallarus, taking on the ball and running rings around his man to score points for fun. It was brilliant for me to get to watch someone like that be so far above and beyond the rest in terms of quality.
You could often see that kind of thing at the Comortas. Any county man I ever came across whose club played in it always jumped at it if they got the chance. Of course the main job of any county manager who knew his stuff would be to keep these fellas as far away as possible from it.
All the things you’re supposed to do right as part of a county set-up, you do wrong at the Comortas. You play three games in three days. You have a scatter of pints in between them. You eat whatever’s put in front of you and whatever time of day it’s going. You sleep where you find a spot. You spend most of the following week recovering. And all this in the first week of June!
Not a bit of wonder Eamonn Fitzmaurice laid down the law on it a long time ago. Fitzy might be a north Kerry man but he teaches in Dingle. He saw this train coming down the tracks from a long way off and politely told everyone who might have been sniffing the air that nobody was available, end of story. Don’t ask, as refusal often offends.
The rows over county players getting to go to the Comortas were legendary. When Páidí Ó Sé was managing Kerry, he came under huge pressure to let myself and Dara Ó Cinnéide go and play in it. But sure nobody knew better than Páidí what those weekends entailed so he put his foot down and said not a hope in hell.
There was war about it back in west Kerry. Two local guys got so exercised about it that they made banners saying, as Gaeilge, SHAME ON YOU PÁIDÍ, YOU’VE BETRAYED THE COMORTAS PEILE. Then they stuck them up in the back window of their cars and went and parked up outside the shop on Ard an Bhóthair. It meant that everyone passing by saw them.
It was funny for us to stand back and let Páidí take the heat on it. He’d get himself all steamed up about it but sure we thought it was comical. People would be going on about the other county men that were allowed play in it – Seán óg de Paor’s club An Cheathrú Rua won it one year – but Páidí wasn’t having it.
After we beat Galway in the All-Ireland final in 2000, we were having a few drinks one night back in Ventry. I had forgotten all about the boys with the banners in the windows of the cars but Páidí always had plenty of room in the back of his head for that kind of thing. He spotted one of the lads passing by and gave me a nudge.
"I wonder now," he said, loud enough to be heard, "would Seán Óg de Paor swap his Comortas medal for an All-Ireland?" Funny enough, I always thought it was worth it from a football point of view. Yes, it was a chance for a blow-out and a session but it's the sort of thing that does a club a lot of good too. Most of these clubs mightn't be playing at a very high level and for them to go away and try and win a competition in the middle of the season is a huge help.
Our lads lost out over the weekend but it could be the thing that kicks them on. By the time we eventually won a county championship, I can say without doubt that the first real bonds between us came on Comortas weekends. There’s a lot to be said for heading off together, staying in digs, having the craic at night and knuckling down for the games the following day. Young guys come together and bond with each other, whether they like it or not.
Mainly though, it’s about the messing and the fun and the stories. The times I did get to play in it, the deal would always be that the county players would come for the final. I’d be giddy landing down on Sunday or Monday to wherever it was and starting to dig for stories. Who’s hungover? Who’s still in bed? Everybody make it through alright? Any scandal at the Cailín Gaelach?
Oh yes. An Cailín Gaelach. It’s basically the Rose of Tralee as Gaeilge, with the sash and the whole lot. The cailíní go up on a little stage and they do their interview and their party piece. It’s nearly a curse for the girl that wins it because it always seems to me that her main prize is to get chased around the place by every hungry young buachaill for the weekend.
Nothing says a Comortas weekend like a beer-stained sash on a Tuesday morning.
The general rule was that the further away from home, the better the stories. Fellas tended to loosen up a bit more the further up the road they went.
If it was in Cork, it might be tame enough. Galway? Now you’re talking. Donegal? Forget about it. Some fella would have got lost and slept in a ditch. Another would have made his bed in a sand dune. Some lad might or might not have disappeared with the wrong cailín and would be sitting very quiet in the corner giving dirty looks to anyone spilling the beans, threatening murder if word got back home.
I remember we were down to play a game one year and we were really struggling for numbers. I can’t remember where we were but we were by the sea, I know that. We were in the dressing room beforehand togging out and no matter how many times we counted, we didn’t get past 13. Two soldiers lost to Vegas somewhere along the way. The word was, they were coming. But it wasn’t looking likely.
We went out onto the pitch and did a warm-up. Still only 13. Every few minutes, we’d look over to the gate. No sign. Talk about a watched pot never boiling, the whole lot of us were looking at this gate and not a soul came through it. It turned out we were looking the wrong way. Behind us, from out of the sea and with their boots in their hand, the two boys came walking up from the beach. They were half togged out, clambering through the sand and the rushes and picking their way up to the field. It was one of those situations where you find yourself just standing there and going, “Really? This is really how we’re going to do this, is it?”
Half of me was mad to get finding out what had happened them. But I just looked at them and said, “I don’t even want to know”. That’s the sort of debrief that would have taken the best part of a month to get the full story. Better to tell one of them to go stand in one corner and the other not to get in the way and leave the inquisition until afterwards.
All part and parcel of Comortas weekend. I was watching our club play in the final on TG4 over the weekend and hankering after the days I used go along to it. Of all the things I miss about playing, it’s right up there.
