LockerRoom/Tom Humphries: When we came back from camogie in the park on Tuesday night they were waking Paddy Donnelly in the clubhouse bar, and for a while the place was a mix of condolences and inquiries as to how the under-11s had gone on. Paddy Donnelly would have liked that.

I didn't know Paddy Donnelly well. When I was a kid skulking around the old St Vincent's precinct in Raheny, most of us were scared silly of him for some reason which I found hard to recall when I began to bump into Paddy more regularly as an adult.

He had a stern face and a straight,

old-fashioned way about him, and the rumour which ran among us was that he'd twice been banned for life by the GAA. It was enough to scare most of us.

Every GAA club has its Brahmins, and the Donnellys were foremost among the Marino caste. If you'd have a good little run on the B teams when I was a kid, you'd find yourself transported briefly to the supernova of the As, where you'd be squeezed into a car with better players and brought someplace for a match wherein your best hope was not to draw attention to yourself. Those of us who lived for mullocking and benchsitting were in awe of the young Donnellys and Drumgooles and Foleys whose heritage was royal and glorious. We never really knew or considered the contributions that separated them from us in the first place.

Paddy Donnelly encapsulated what is most remarkable and most cherished about the GAA. He was an ordinary man who became remarkable through Gaelic games. He was at the centre of

community and family in a way that is hardly possible in the parts that the GAA doesn't reach.

He was at the front of the great wave of talent which came roaring out of the curiously symmetrical Marino estate which was the Vincent's catchment area for so long. His specialty was hurling, and he was a beautiful player, a minor All-Ireland winner in 1945 and a senior runner-up in the All-Ireland of 1948. And his life moved on in stages measurable partly through Gaelic games.

He was the club's star hurler, then a mentor and manager for a long time of good senior hurling teams; he managed the county team for a while in the 1960s, getting more out of Liam Lawlor than any tribunal has managed; he wrote a history of the club to mark its 50th anniversary in 1981, and when he passed away it was as president of St Vincent's.

He was a butcher and ran a shop on the Malahide Road, and you have to wonder if without the GAA as an outlet for expression whether Paddy Donnelly would have lived a life of quiet desperation passing suet and dripping and bones for the dog across the counter and wondering if there shouldn't be more than this.

He read voraciously, a fact which comes across in Na Blianta Ogra, his club history which is filled with unlikely references to the classics and to history.

HE could write and he could speak. His oration at the grave of the late Joe Drumgoole is still spoken about. Last week, when Paddy's son James was going through some of his Da's stuff, he found notebooks in which Paddy had recorded words he liked or words he just meant to look up the meaning of.

In that special world which St Vincent's people created for their community he moved like a fish in water.

He won an All-Ireland minor hurling title in 1945 against a much-fancied team of Tipperary striplings. He played for Dublin and was beaten in the All-Ireland senior final against Waterford three years later. They were well beaten in the end.

Paddy Donnelly should have enjoyed a long and uninterrupted career, ending possibly with the All-Ireland final defeat of 1961. He didn't. In 1951, St Vincent's were playing Eoghan Ruadh in Croker. Paddy was marking Seán Óg

Ó Ceallacháin. Nobody is too sure what happened, but a Keane-like mist descended. Paddy Donnelly's face would turn white when his temper snapped as if the blood was pouring out through a gap in his own calm. Seán Óg took a blow of the hurley to the jaw.

They were walking off in Croke Park later that evening. Abuse coming down on Paddy Donnelly's head. Tony Young and Paddy took off around the stands chasing one of the critics.

Paddy told all this to James a couple of weeks ago, getting it all off his chest.

"Jaysus, Da," said James, "thank God you didn't catch him."

Paddy got a 10-year ban. Seán Óg was put under a lot of pressure to bring assault charges. He didn't, and he and Paddy became quite friendly again afterwards, a friendship that would have been helped by Paddy Donnelly's immense regret concerning the incident.

The ban was later reduced to two years and Paddy used the time to play soccer and become a scratch golfer. He came back and played with distinction for Vincent's and Dublin and Leinster again. He scored a point in Croke Park once from such a prodigious distance that, at this stage, legend has him launching it from The Casino in Marino.

His temper let him down once more later in life. At a famous under-21 match out in O'Toole Park in the late 1970s a Drumgoole got into trouble and Paddy Donnelly got to the vicinity quickly. Suddenly they were coming at Paddy from all angles. Bloodbath is how James Donnelly describes it. Paddy got another two years for that. More regret.

THOSE incidents, decades apart, were among the first stories which people told when they talked about Paddy Donnelly, but his world was bigger than that. He gave the club a fine history of its early days and its glory years in which he reduced himself to an oblique figure on the fringes, which wasn't the way it was. His pride was an elemental force in the club he loved.

There's another story of him mentoring a senior hurling team one day in Parnell Park, and just holding a Vincent's jersey tight in his hands, taking his time looking every man in the eye and saying nothing as he walked around the table. That was the team talk. Absolute pride.

In this era of the GPA, he was among the most passionate believers in the credo club first, county second. He loved the juvenile section of St Vincent's and looking after kids' teams and teaching them the skills.

There's another famous story concerning the Vincent's minor hurling championship team of 1981. Night before a big game against Erins Isle. Final game of backs and forwards. Paddy pucks out a brand new sliotar and he's hopping it furiously with the lads gathered tight around. "Tomorrow," he says, "is the game. Tonight, though, we play with live ammo." People still talk about that one.

He was one of those figures whose gentlemanly nature and quiet humour overcame all you'd heard of him when you were a kid. Yesterday's All-Ireland final at the spectacularly refurbished Croke Park was one of those days for the new GAA, swish with money and the executive classes and talk of revolution.

What it's all built on, though, is clubs and people like Paddy Donnelly who transformed lives and places through their own passions and love.

And it's people like Paddy who'll make it last.