~ Athenry, Co Galway ~

Athenry is to hurling as Milan is to opera and as New Orleans is to jazz and as Seville is to bullfighting

Source: Irish Independent, Saturday,                               February 23, 2013

                 Section: Con Houlihan Supplement

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Juno Barrett for bringing this article to my attention – Editor

There is a field near the town of Athenry that has a deep place in sporting folklore. It is known as The Lawn. Its name may conjure up an image of tea and scones and picnics – nothing could be further from the reality.

The Lawn has long been a cockpit: there the Galway hurlers do most of their preparation; the training is often fierce and the trial games even fiercer as players vie for places.

In no county in Ireland is hurling more a passion than in Galway – and this is especially true of Athenry and the surrounding countryside. Athenry is to hurling as Milan is to Opera and as New Orleans is to Jazz and as Seville is to Bullfighting.

The history of Galway hurling casts a fascinating light on us as a people. I will try to explain. The Maroon-and-White won the All-Ireland in 1923 and then came a gap that was almost inexplicable.

It was hard to understand why such a heartland was so long out of the winners’ enclosure. Of course, some people have a theory – in this country, we love the hidden agenda.

Seemingly there was an incident in the late-1920s that cast a shadow over the county’s hurlers.

There was a mission in Athenry. This was at a time when you were counted among the damned if you didn’t go to hear the Redemptorists preaching fire and brimstone.

The story goes that the hurling squad preferred to go to The Lawn – and one of the priests, obviously a good Christian man, put a curse on Galway hurlers and said that the county would never win an All- Ireland again.

Of course, the story is not only fictitious but absurd. The alarming aspect is that some people believed it, men and women who in ordinary life were rocks of sense.

Some of the hurlers appeared to believe it, too: time after time in big games they were on the brink of victory but weakened in the late stages as if they felt that they were fated to lose.

A similar and even more absurd myth went the rounds for a long time in the neighbouring county of Clare. In this context the curse was uttered not by a priest but by a woman called Biddy Early.

She went into folklore as a witch doctor; in fact, she was a herbalist and did a great deal of good and it is unlikely that she ever cursed anyone, least of all the Clare hurlers.

The story seemed to me no more than an excuse, invented by somebody with a very fertile imagination, to explain Clare’s long years of failure after they had won the All-Ireland in 1914. The story of Biddy Early’s curse seemed to gain credence by the year.

Now there is a black joke inherent in all this: the bould Biddy left this world 20 years before the GAA was founded in 1884 and long before the concept of an All-Ireland involving counties rather than clubs.

Galway came out of the wilderness in 1980; Clare followed in 1995 – and so the bad priest and the good woman can rest in peace.

You may think that in this country we have moved away from the dark age of superstition – but now on the eve of a new Millennium a report of somebody having a vision will bring people flocking.

At a very early age I became aware of Athenry in a rather strange way, if only of the name rather than the place. The story is set in the 1930s and it is a symbol of an infinitely innocent age.

My parents and all but a few of our neighbours hadn’t been beyond national school. The few exceptions were working far away in Dublin and in London.

Some of my neighbours had hardly been to school at all; they were illiterate. Others could be classified as semi-literate. My father was an example: he could read fluently but was barely able to write.

There is a strange and rather sad truth embedded in all this: because the good people had so little education, they treasured it all the more. There was a special obsession with spelling – bad spelling was looked upon as a social stigma.

There was an obsession, too, with pronunciation, especially in the context of place-names. That is how I came to hear about Athenry while I was still a very small boy.

For some reason, Athenry was in the news. This was long before the proliferation of the wireless; the name was only in the papers and a great debate began about how it should be pronounced.

The Gaelic language hadn’t long disappeared from our part of the country: some of the older people pronounced the name as Awe-An-Ree; (Ath-An-Ri); some people who thought they were modern pronounced it as At-Henry, as in a man’s name.

The debate got so bitter that something had to be done. A local school teacher was to be the arbiter. He resembled his counterpart in The Deserted Village – “A man severe he was and stern to view”.

Master Buckley was a big, forbidding man who dressed in dark clothes and kept a gold watch and chain in his waistcoat. He and his wife usually came for a walk up our road on fine evenings.

My mother was given the task of approaching him and did so one evening at our cottage gate. Both parties were disappointed with the answer but the older people claimed that they had won. Athenry is not a very old settlement. It owes its existence to the Anglo-Normans, mainly two powerful families – the de Burghs and the de Birminghams. The de Burghs especially made Athenry their seat. They walled in the town and built a great castle there and funded the building of two monasteries. The local chieftains were not amused. In 1316, they came together in a great army led by Phelim O’Connor, the King of Connacht; his allies included several Connacht princes and more from the North of Ireland.

The Anglo-Normans won a devastating victory. O’Connor and about a hundred of the Gaelic nobility were slain. It was the last attempt to drive the newcomers out of Connacht.

The two great families became Burkes and Birminghams – and it was said of them that they were Hiberniores Hibernis Ipsis – more Irish than the Irish themselves.

In time, the two great families moved their seats elsewhere. Athenry declined in importance. When Red Hugh O’Donnell besieged the town, it fell easily. He devastated it. Some people will tell you that it has never recovered.

Today you can see from the ruins of the great castle and the two monasteries that it was once a town of great importance. Today we think of it mainly in the context of hurling.

Pete St John and Paddy Reilly have made the town famous with their ballad, ‘The Fields of Athenry’. It begins: “Low Lie The Fields of Athenry.”

No doubt they sometimes are, but Athenry is an exciting place to be after Galway have won a big hurling game. The ballad has become a war song with the followers of Glasgow Celtic – that is true fame.

CON HOULIHAN’S IRELAND