ALL-IRELAND CLUB SENIOR FOOTBALL FINAL:Having ended a famine by winning their first Dublin senior football championship title since 1984, the famed Marino club St Vincent's have recaptured the good times, writes Tom Humphries
AW. HARD TO know how often I have sat in the press box in Croke Park on cold Paddy's Day afternoons trying to calculate how far off the mark St Vincent's were. You can actually see the club from the press box, the sentinel floodlights standing tall behind Marino's red slanting roofs away to the left over the Hill. Just a mile or so away but a million miles off; that was always the poignant conclusion.
Still though, like any member, I daydreamed about St Vincent's playing in Croke Park on Paddy's Day. Unlike other members I had cold sweats about being asked to write a personal piece about it though.
Being asked to write about St Vincent's is a little like a foot-soldier being asked to write about life in the Mafia. You know there are levels and layers to the organisation that will never be revealed to you. You know the club is essentially a sequence of personal histories which overlap and mesh very tightly at the centre and not at all at the fringes.
You know that as a foot-soldier you were of the sort of quality that the godfathers wouldn't send out to shoot an injured dog. You know just enough to know that you don't know anything really. You know that nothing invites sniggering back in the club any quicker than somebody who couldn't kick snow off a rope insinuating himself into a big occasion. Still though you love it. Here I am. Where's that rope? Give me enough and I'll make a noose.
I joined when I was 11 and stayed for 11 or 12 years, a period warmly forgotten by everyone not receiving counselling. My playing style was generally described as being as awkward as tits on a frog but with less bounce.
I was given my first punch in the face by a fella from St Finbarr's of Cabra and Lar Foley had to run on and order me to hit him back. (Rather pathetically, considering that my assailant was standing beside me, I said to Lar that it was okay, that it hadn't hurt that much before gauging Lar's mood and quickly turning and punching back.) I remember us losing an under-15Z semi-final to St Maur's of Lusk one miserable Good Friday afternoon and recall playing a Junior Z game in Sillogue one wet night when Eamon Heery's dad, Jimmy, had to come on and stand in the corner smoking a pipe and holding an umbrella just to make up the numbers. If I wanted to do a Stalinist purge of everyone who remembers anything about my playing days there would hardly need to be any bloodshed.
Then, to the overwhelming indifference of a bemused club, I drifted off and (again to mass indifference) came back 10 or 11 years ago when having a daughter of mini-league age gave me an excuse to get involved at some level where I might be of more use. Between times I would skulk along to Vins championship matches in Parnell Park and pine. Somewhere along the line I fell in love with the club and everything that annoys me and distances me from the place evaporates at the sight of a Vins jersey even if it's just hanging on a washing line.
I am an outsider. Most of us in the club are. I am part of a broad coalition of people who speak about the club as if it were somebody else's club and not our own.
I was relieved a while ago to hear one of the great names of St Vincent's history recount his discomfort at being party to a conversation at a juvenile match when he admired the skills of a young footballer only to be reproached with the words, "yeah, but whose son's place will he be taking?"
Jimmy Keaveney, another illustrious one, claims he is still a runner-in because he came from Whitehall originally. I am not alone.
The club is famously and militantly from Marino. Originally I am secretly from Raheny. Myself and a friend joined and left the club at the same time. Generally throughout our discreet careers in the backwaters I was selected at full forward and my friend was selected top of the left. The team would be called out, a monotone litany of names, and then finally, "14 and 15, the two Raheny fellas." So it went.
During this time the club was in fact enduring its long exile in, uhm, Raheny. The grounds were right in the centre of Raheny, up the hill past the church. We had a little pitch 'n' putt course and the best adult pitch in the city. But the heart of Vins was always in Marino. The decades in Raheny never changed that. When my daughters were born I made sure they were reared in Marino. You have to give your kids some start in life.
Marino is essentially an island, laid down on the fringes of the north inner city. Some Vins people work and live on the mainland these days but essentially the club is made up of islanders. St Vincent's has a tight clannishness which makes it difficult for outsiders to penetrate.
Our insularity is both a geographical circumstance and a state of mind. The compact nature of Marino and the fact of being hemmed in by other clubs in virtually every direction means the club has never really benefited from a constant through-put of new families. We don't draw much on the energies of displaced GAA men from the country, partly because of our history and partly because there is nowhere for them to move in and live anyway.
We won our first senior football title in 1948 and kept winning until 1984. Twenty- four senior football titles in that period and 11 senior hurling titles. Something to celebrate all the time. Nobody liked us and we didn't care. We were the club that pushed for, and got, a policy of Dublin men for Dublin teams many decades ago. And, as a club, we were the first successful manifestation of that policy. It was the right thing to do at the right time but in the years ever since we have probably punished ourselves a little too much in terms of our adherence to our own racial-purity laws.
There is some smirking around the clubhouses of Dublin that Monday's team will have a Kerryman and a Tipp man at midfield and two Mayomen elsewhere. So be it. The club by and large got over that years ago when Ciarán Barr (of Antrim) was admitted as a member, sparking a civil war. Ciarán's contribution to the club as a player and latterly as a mentor has been unimpeachable though and it's encouraging that the club has become open to benefiting from new energies and influences.
(Just as satisfying by the way is the presence of a huge number of the All-Ireland Féile-winning team of 2000 backboning the panel. Quality home-reared players have come through the ranks and will always do so.) We are opening up.
It is a special pleasure, for instance, to see lads like Ger Brennan and Paul Conlon playing in Croke Park on Monday. Ger comes from Dorset Street. Paul is from the Charlemont Estate which borders onto the back of the club and was built some 20 years ago. Both places should be core to the club now but aren't.
By now St Vincent's should essentially be run by the adult occupants of those 400 or so houses in Charlemont but, grateful as we are for the talents of their offspring, we have yet to permit or encourage those people to take ownership of the club.
It's a common enough experience for successful adults from Charlemont to be told by exasperated club insiders that the club can get nobody to go on the executive, meaning nobody from the club's mysterious inner circle.
It's changing though; you can feel the club drawing in the energy, learning to appreciate all of its children and all of its members equally. We are a club learning to appreciate everything a little more.
It's well known St Vincent's are emerging this past while from a long period of famine and hunger. When we freakishly lost the 1985 All-Ireland club final to Castleisland Desmonds (a last-minute goal while two points up, Desmonds' fourth score of the day) the period of mourning was brief.
The future was bright, wasn't it? We had won six Minor football titles in-a-row from 1978 to 1983 and would win back-to-back again in 1986 and 1987. An Ard Scoil Rís team which had won the 1979 colleges All-Ireland had a panel of 26 players, 23 of whom (and a management team) were from St Vincent's.
Our supply of players to the 1983 Dublin All-Ireland-winning panel (and to the beaten All-Ireland finalists the next two years) included viable young talents like Tommy Conroy, Ray Hazley, Vincent Conroy and Pat Canavan. Eamon Heery was just coming on stream But it all ended suddenly that day in Tipperary Town.
We wouldn't make it to another county senior football final until the next century came around, wouldn't win a title from 1984 to 2007. By the time complacency turned to panic and infighting there was a cause to wonder if we would ever come back.
Through that time we have struggled through debts and disappointments and the residual sense of unpopularity that the fallen houses of the aristocracy feel so acutely when they are on their uppers.
Nobody felt sorry for us and we knew that when we started attracting sympathy we would have hit rock bottom.
That thud came two years ago. There was a lot of sympathy for us when we lost the 2006 county football final to UCD. To be honest, we preferred being hated to being pitied but we felt a good deal of sympathy with ourselves that year too. This past 12 months the hunger was so bad I think we would have given away the field and sold the mini-leaguers into slavery for a county football title. We got one and everything since has been a happy bonus.
We have changed. I remember as a young fella, newly of drinking age, hopping off the bus home from Croke Park on the night in 1981 when we achieved the senior hurling and football double to mark the club's 50th anniversary and being disappointed to find that the achievement was being greeted (too strong a word) as merely the fulfilment of duty.
This year at home in Marino the arrival into the clubhouse (bearing gifts of silver) of the county champions and later the provincial champions has been a whooping, crazy, unrestrained occasion of joy. Old men have cried and young babies have been kissed and old enemies have hugged. The bar came under slight pressure to stay open late.
Everyone has elected a different constituency for whom this happy time is a great thing: great for the kids, the old- timers, the members abroad, Pat Gilroy, the community, members who had lost touch, the schools, Mickey Whelan. Members who have yet to become members, Mossy, the executive. Anyone. It's all great, the best of times.
And everyone has somebody they wish had lived to see the day, Jackie (Gilroy), Lar (Foley), Des (Foley), the Donnelly brothers and so on, an endless list of names who made the club great. We miss them and we have missed what they had.
During the long bad years - and this was noticeable maybe more so to somebody who drifted off in the good times and came back mid-famine - we lost the sense of unity which runs through a happy and successful club. As Brian Mullins pointed out in a speech at last year's 75th anniversary dinner, we had become a great club for caucuses.
Every clique within the club had the solution to the club's problems. Every other clique within the club looked like the problem preventing a solution.
Now nothing has changed and yet everything has changed. For a GAA club to work it needs engagement with the community and it needs a contribution of some sort from every member, the sort of contribution that isn't contingent on how much anybody else is doing. Suddenly nothing is a problem.
This year's was the first senior football championship we have won since returning to Marino in 1987. This adventure which has brought us to an All-Ireland club final has, as we sometimes pompously like to put it, returned the club to the national stage.
Way more importantly though it has put the club back at the heart of the community it sprang from.
Griffith Avenue and Philipsburgh Avenue and Charlemont Estate and the perfect houses of the Marino Estate have blossomed with flags and bunting.
There's a goodwill and a hopefulness about the place, the sort of mood that we had forgotten could be possible. We're surprised and quietly delighted at the goodwill coming in from rival clubs. It's great to feel proud of the club's history but not weighed down by it.
The club championship has changed and become magnified in importance since that day in Tipperary Town or those years of the 70s when we vied with Nemo Rangers and UCD to be regarded as the best club side in the country. The GAA world has changed since then and, for a club which viewed itself as pioneering, the struggle to keep up has been chastening.
Jackie Gilroy, Pat's late father, urged a small group of us towards redrafting the club history back in 2006 during the 75th anniversary celebrations for the club. Truth was, there was virtually nothing to add in the 25 years since the successful 50th anniversary.
Jackie's enthusiasm was infectious though and survived even the disappointment of us getting to senior finals in football and camogie and losing them both in 2006.
The history is long finished but publication has been delayed until the end of this great adventure so that another chapter may be added.
Jackie is with us on Monday only in spirit but that spirit gives us a 16th player. The story of this odyssey will technically be the final chapter of the history Jackie prodded us to write but nobody would have recognised quicker than Jackie that it is actually the first chapter of a new St Vincent's.
And nobody would have been more generous about passing on the torch.
We're a small tight club, island folk with sepia pictures all over our walls, but funny thing is, we're the youngest, freshest club in the country. Our history has only just begun. Happy days. Happy days.
