ALL-IRELAND SFC FINAL: Tom Humphriesreports on the thriving footballing heartland which has already garnered three All-Ireland titles for Kerry this season

WHEN KERRY take the field at Croke Park tomorrow, the sight of the green and gold bursting yet again from beneath the Hogan Stand will be so familiar we will have the impression of a monolithic dynasty going about its business of grinding out All-Ireland titles as a way of life.

The perennial position of Kerry as brand leaders in the football marketplace disguises the richness and diversity of football life in the county. The Ó Sés from An Gaeltacht for instance experience a different footballing universe entirely to their comrades from Austin Stacks of Tralee or Dr Crokes of Killarney, the archetypal townie teams.

And beyond the tapestry of club life exists the seams which mark the county out into a patchwork of divisional sides which give a chance to players from the more sparsely populated reaches of the county to play in the county championship.

Within these divisions there are distinctive styles and cultures, none more preciously cultivated than that of South Kerry. The division or region has a couple of men playing tomorrow. Killian Young in defence, Declan O’Sullivan leading the attack. And Jack O’Connor on the sideline.

There have been times in the past when South Kerry has been as well represented or better represented than now (the 1984 side who will come out and wave at the crowd tomorrow being an example) but this current era is by most lights special.

South Kerry football is enjoying a golden era and looking for perhaps the first time in its history to see if it can buck the trend of economic misery and keep the good times going.

Hard times are lingering at the door again and South Kerry is bracing itself for another belt of emigration which vanishes the best players. Meanwhile though, there is so much to enjoy and savour.

Last Saturday night in South Kerry, St Michael’s/Foilmore beat Dromid Pearses in the final of the local league. Nothing seismic for the rest of the GAA nation to worry over, but little more than a decade ago such a pairing would have been virtually unthinkable.

One club, Dromid, had been in and out of existence for much of the time since its founding. The other was an amalgamation of two clubs which had all but died having struggled on life-support for a long time.

Much has changed though in South Kerry football.

St Michael’s/Foilmore are the county champions for the past two years and current All-Ireland intermediate club champions and have been on the go virtually non- stop for three years.

Last Saturday their manager, James Mike O’Sullivan, had the luxury of putting out a first 15 which didn’t include any of the four players the club supplied to this year’s Kerry minor team. The same four had won an All-Ireland in the spring with Coláiste na Sceilge of Cahirciveen. On Saturday they could be kept on the sideline. An unprecedented luxury.

“They have been lucky in a way in that they have huge numbers at the moment and good structures,” says Jeremiah O’Shea, the divisional chairman and chair of Dromid Pearses since 1976.

“They have an under-21 side out on their own who reached the final last year against Valentia. It’s hard for a rural club to do that at an underage grade.”

Hard but these are changed times in a part of Kerry which for so long felt excluded form the great banquet of Kerry football.

Mick O’Dwyer often tells the story of breaking onto the Kerry minor squad of 1954. The first player from Waterville ever to wear a Kerry jersey in any grade.

He scored 1-6 in the Munster semi-final of that year against Waterford. The game was played in Kenmare and most of the population of Waterville made their way out to see the young fella play.

He was from South Kerry though, a place which lacked clout and influence and Micko was dropped for the Munster final. Kerry won the game. Micko wore the number 20. He never received a medal. For the All-Ireland semi- final, he was number 21 and for the All-Ireland final against Dublin he didn’t get a jersey at all and watched in the clothes he had travelled up in.

His experience wasn’t untypical. South Kerry produced many players of style and substance in the years which came afterwards but the feeling was always that you had to be twice as good if you were from South Kerry. Geographically isolated, the area had a reputation for football which was highly attractive but soft. If you wanted lads who would get their hands dirty you went to North Kerry where they would fight each other like dogs.

South Kerry representatives tended to be of the style of O’Dwyer, Mick O’Connell, John Egan, Jack O’Shea or Maurice Fitzgerald – extravagantly gifted players who simply couldn’t be denied a jersey.

These are changed times however and even Jack O’Connor, who came to the Kerry job six years ago as a self-described outsider, seems like part of the establishment now.

In the past, South Kerry football has known decent eras which have brought the gratification and nourishment of county championships but nothing on the scale of what is being enjoyed at the moment.

Partly it is the special flavour of the South Kerry championship which revived itself dramatically in the good times bestowed by the late Celtic Tiger to become a vibrant democratic competition, as likely to be claimed by a small rural club as it is to be annexed by St Mary’s of Caherciveen or by Waterville.

When Jack O’Connor came home from America for a few weeks in the 80s and ended up staying he was a harbinger both of the reverse flow of emigration and the revival of football in his own neck of the woods.

Dromid Pearses, in and out of existence for so long, suddenly had a passionate organiser. Famously they won a Gaeltacht tournament in Donegal and celebrated as if they had reached the promised land.

O’Connor kept pushing however and in 2004 Dromid won the South Kerry championship for the first time, captained by Declan O’Sullivan who in 2001 had captained the last of three South Kerry teams to win the Kerry minor championship in successive years.

The same group would go on to take three county under-21 titles on the trot, an achievement which overlapped with the annexing of three county senior titles on the trot by South Kerry.

Two years later, Portmagee, or Skellig Rangers as they are known, beat Waterville in the final to take the title for the first time since 1968. Three small rural clubs usurping the traditional powers of Caherciveen, Valentia and Waterville! As an index of the good times which the country was enjoying, the rude health of the South Kerry football championship served fine.

In bad times in an area with no great tradition or farming and not much industry the drain of players hit teams constantly. When the Western Union cable company closed its doors in 1966 for instance, Valentia, one of the great powerhouses of the region who had three South Kerry titles under their belt in that decade already, went into a nosedive and ceased to exist for a while causing the great Mick O’Connell to line out briefly with Waterville. The club was reformed in 1969 but took 10 years to recover and win their next county title.

Economists tell us there were good years sometime back, just as meteorologists insist that there were great summers.

How bad did things get? James Mike O’Sullivan played for St Michael’s Ballinskelligs in a novice semi-final many years ago. “That was in 1985 and the next year there were 11 of that team gone by the time the season had started up. Scattered.

“The problem now is there is nowhere for them to go. We were broke but we weren’t in debt. That’s the difference I suppose. Football in South Kerry was always strong but emigration killed it. There were good players from South Kerry playing in Dublin and London and New York.”

James Mike himself went away in the 80s, came back from London in November 1997 and by then his old club as he knew it had ceased to exist.

“Ballinskelligs and Foilmore were gone by 1990. They were closed. Seán Kelly was the county chairman at the time and he came down one night to officially dissolve both clubs. You can’t dissolve a senior club yourself the county chair has to officially dissolve it.

“He came down to do the two in one night and when he was here he suggested an amalgamation at senior level. To see how it goes. Otherwise it would have been open territory.”

Such amalgamations were a way of life for Kerry clubs who hovered on the brink of extinction when emigration scourged South Kerry. In previous times of peril for instance, Foilmore had joined forces with Derrynane and Portmagee got into bed with Ballinskelligs. Clubs endured these marriages of convenience until times got better and then tended to strike out on their own again.

This year on St Valentine’s night, St Michael’s/Foilmore won the All-Ireland intermediate championship in Croke Park.

The competition was the brainchild of the same Seán Kelly so it seemed natural, when it came to organising a function to present the medals, to call upon Kelly. He spoke that evening of a club which “had gone from the brink of extinction to the steps of the Hogan Stand”.

A symbol of the hardy flower which is South Kerry football. On the same night, Skellig Rangers won the All-Ireland junior title.

In the bad years South Kerry just bled good players.

“I suppose very obviously everybody would talk about Jerry O’Mahony of Renard and his late brother John who passed away a few months back,” says Christy O’Connell of St Mary’s Caherciveen and an historian of South Kerry football.

“They are two who were truly outstanding as minors and had greatness in them but had to leave. Others like Georgie Curran, a great Kerry minor from Valentia Island, or Willie O’Shea of Waterville. And a host of other players. The great Caherciveen CBS team of the 60s, a lot of them went, Kerry Looby, PJ Fitzpatrick, the Murphy twins.

“It was hard to keep things going. That remained the case through till the early ’90s.”

In the early ’90s the population ceased to haemorrhage and South Kerry caught another break in the middle of that decade.

“In the mid-90s,” says Jeremiah O’Shea, “there was a FAS course started in South Kerry for coaches. There was one or two coaches in each of the schools and each club benefited form coaching.

“There was a huge amount of work went into coaching skills etc and an awful lot of players who came in contact with those coaches went on to represent South Kerry.

“That and the schools of Caherciveen being amalgamated into Coláiste na Sceilge in 2000 made a huge difference.”

Jack O’Connor, whose fingerprints are all over modern South Kerry football, soon turned the success he had enjoyed at vocational schools level into something more prestigious.

Coláiste na Sceilge contested the All-Ireland colleges semi-finals of 2001 and 2002, losing by a point each time to the eventual winners.

Success has come in great waves for a decade now in South Kerry and the football landscape has been transformed. All-weather pitches are dotted around. Plentiful players and a tendency for the graduates of Coláiste na Sceilge to head to college, usually to Cork, to further their football education.

“I would say travel arrangements are better, the facilities and the pitches are on a par with anywhere in the country and with the school inside it is being bound together as a unit,” says James Mike O’Sullivan, who is a little sceptical about this era being any more special than any other but is happy to concede that some things are better.

“I don’t think we are producing better footballers than ever before. We always had good footballers in South Kerry. The clubs are just more into coaching. That is better.”

Better to the extent that South Kerry supplied seven players to this year’s county minor panel and Coláiste na Sceilge will be fielding a strong side again next year.

There are some worrying signs however. The South Kerry Board are in talks with the Kerry County Board about getting some help in for coaching in Coláiste na Sceilge. Jack O’Connor lost his co-mentor Michael Ó Sé for this season and can’t be expected to shoulder the full load of coaching duties in school while tending to the Kerry senior team.

This year Derrynane had to amalgamate with Sneem. And once again there is a trickle of players to foreign shores.

Dromid Pearses for instance regularly fly three players home from England and back to Blighty straight after the final whistle.

“Fishing is gone, farming is taking a hammering, construction is dead. No obvious areas of employment. In reality, the bad times hit everyone.

“Even St Mary’s, we have always lost lads. It is an isolated rural town and we would have been hit the same as the rural clubs. Lot of lads in Dublin and Cork. The safety valves have always been London, New York, Boston and San Francisco. They could become safety valves again,” says Christy O’Connell.

“Times are hard,” says James Mike. “The difference now is that we had no money but we weren’t in debt. Now there is no money and everybody is in debt, that adds an extra something to it. The only consolation right now is there is really nowhere for anybody to go that is much better than here.”

The good times are all gone but in South Kerry there is a residual good feeling and renewed confidence. The crop which Jack O’Connor delivered from Coláiste Sceilge this year is outstanding and will continue to nurture the area’s divisional strength.

Tomorrow, instead of catching the old ghost train from Caherciveen, the people of South Kerry will descend on Dublin in confident and boisterous mood. This year has seen three All- Ireland titles already coming to their area.

A fourth, brought home by Jack and Declan and co, would make it a year which would sustain and insulate a people through the bad times to come.