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Mayo’s year perhaps?
By McGreevy
Mayo — you could write a book about the place. Alternatively, you could read a book about the place, two in fact both by the same author.
Half of the generation born in Ireland in the 1930s emigrated. The other half kept their head down, lamented the drain of emigration and got on with it.
Not John Healy though. He raged with an indignation which still has the power to shock today. He wrote Nineteen Acres — a tribute to the smallholders like his family who scattered about the world like wind.
The title of his next book, Nobody Shouted Stop, became a byword for the apathy that surrounded the death of communities in the west of Ireland, and particularly his hometown of Charlestown.
Emigration, he opined, was a tragedy for those under-educated, under-prepared people who were thrust into unknown environments but also for the communities they left behind.
Money was not wealth, he said, people were. “There is money in the town,” he wrote of Charlestown, “but we are a dead community because we do not have what we now recognise as real wealth: A living, breeding, working people.”
Healy never lived to see the Celtic Tiger. Two years ago his beloved Charlestown Sarsfields reached the All-Ireland club semi-final and you cannot do without an ample supply of what was so conspicuously absent when Healy was writing — young people.
Other counties have suffered badly from emigration, my own, Leitrim, included, yet when one considers emigration, the first place one usually considers is Mayo.
We all know Mayo emigrants. (Why do half of them seem to be millionaires?) More people emigrated from Mayo in the half century after the famine than currently live in the county and the exodus only stopped recently.
There must be millions of people in the world who can claim Mayo background.
To me, growing up, Mayo was always the real, real Ireland. Maybe it was all those pilgrimages to Knock when I was a child passing landscapes that were as flat as they were barren.
Even nowadays, amidst all the cappuccino bars, lap dancing clubs and satellite television, you can see old ladies circling the Shrine of Our Lady of Knock and you remember what Ireland used to be like and not so long ago either.
Mayo football is a lot like the county itself. It has had the guts kicked out of it, but it has kept on, keeping on.
There is fervency to Mayo football supporters that can only come from a legacy of loss both on and off the field.
When they qualified for the 1989 All-Ireland final, Father Colm Kilcoyne wrote in The Sunday Press, that the county had been decimated by emigration in the 1980s and badly needed the lift that Sam Maguire would bring.
It didn’t happen. Substitute Anthony Finnerty scored a goal for Mayo but missed another at a vital stage in the second-half and Mayo lost by three points to Cork.
Three times, they’ve been there since, three times without success. In 1996, Mayo led by six points with 10 minutes remaining against Meath, a county whose confidence is as robust as Mayo's is fragile.
Meath hauled themselves back and eventually equalised with a freakish point in the last minute, a speculative punt by half-back Colm Coyle which bounced in front of the goalkeeper and over the bar.
Could sport get any crueller? It did. In the replay, Mayo’s talisman, midfielder Liam McHale, who, if anything, was too sporting in his long inter-county career, was sent off during a brawl along with Coyle. The greater loss was Mayo’s. They lost by a point conceded in the last minute.
In 1997 Mayo again qualified for the All-Ireland final. This time we were assured that lessons had been learned, the team was more focused and confident. Mayo started as favourites against Kerry, but somebody clearly forgot to tell Maurice Fitzgerald, probably the only bona-fide genius in the history of Gaelic football. Mayo scored eight times, he scored nine points in as fine an individual display as ever seen at Croke Park.
It has been a long road back since then and Mayo are in another All-Ireland final, again against Kerry.
Again they have a real chance and the county’s supporters will still wake up this Sunday like a child on Christmas morning.
Compared to the misery of forced emigration and poverty, winning an All-Ireland title doesn’t matter much, but nothing else will matter for Mayo people come Sunday.
At home and abroad, they will want this All-Ireland as badly as any county ever wanted it.
Mayo for Sam. I hope they do it, I really do.
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