AT THE START of this year’s Allianz football leagues, a respected Kerry football figure went to some county board representatives and floated the idea that they might follow Tyrone’s lead.
This was, to refuse to conduct interviews with the sponsorship boards as backdrop, featuring the Allianz logo, in protest against the already well-documented protests around their continuing sponsorship of GAA competitions.
They were told that sport and politics do not mix. Their response was, ‘Lads, this is Kerry. Football and politics always mixed.’
****
To understand the deep roots of Kerry football, is to understand events of a century ago.
In November 1905, Kerry won the 1903 All-Ireland football championship. That was their first title, defeating London 0-11 to 0-3, and was London’s fifth consecutive losing final.
They added four more titles before the 1924 one, but this was the most significant in their development.
At the time, Kerry was the scene of some of the most vicious fighting of the Civil War.
One of their players, Con Brosnan, was a captain in the Free State Army. Another, John Joe Sheehy, was an anti-treaty republican. He was a wanted man and there was a bounty on his head.
And yet, Brosnan granted Sheehy safe passage to play for Kerry. For the 1924 Munster final at Markets Field in Limerick, Sheehy emerged from the crowd and played the game, a 3-7 to 2-2 win over Clare, and afterwards merged back into the spectators.
They went on to win six titles in eight years. The incident formed part of an RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta programme by the journalist Joe Ó Muircheartaigh.
“One of the people I spoke to about it was Mickey Ned O’Sullivan who was captain in ’75,” Ó Muircheartaigh tells The 42.
“He was saying that ever since then, even though they won All-Irelands before that, it referenced back to that team. These people gave so much, not only to the country with the way they sided politically, but then they were willing to give so much to the football as well.”
Brosnan had a long and distinguished career with Kerry. Being from Moyvane, however, meant he had little chance of captaining his county as that honour was bestowed to the choice of the club champions.
Joe Barrett had been captain of the winning 1929 team. Seven years before he had been arrested for his role as an active Irish republican and was on the anti-treaty side. Yet for the 1931 season, he handed over the captaincy to Brosnan. Truly, football was above all other considerations.
1931 did not signal an end to the political schisms. By 1934, the staunchly republican town of Tralee was outraged by the mass interring of republicans. Kerins O’Rahillys, John Mitchells and Austin Stacks declared that they would not play in the 1934 county championship and it was not completed.
The following year, Kerry sat out the All-Ireland championship as an escalation of their protests.
By 1939, Brosnan was the Kerry trainer. The team reached the All-Ireland final against Meath, and a decision was made to wear the colours of Dingle, red with a white hoop. As they marched around the field for the pre-match parade, they did so behind a banner calling for the release of republican prisoners that were rounded up with the outbreak of World War 2.
Kerry march behind their banner of protest, 1939 final.
One of their own, John Joe ‘Purty’ Landers, had been captured.
As the years rolled into decades, the memories of the Civil War were suppressed. Combatants began clamming up in the interest of good relations.
Kerry football had already forged an identity of excellence. Knowledge of the likes of Brosnan, Sheehy and Barrett became illicit folklore, whispered from older generations when they were in the mood.
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Kerry's 1939 team in Dingle colours.
****
When Dara Ó Cinneide started his working life for Raidió na Gaeltachta, he had some knowledge of this, gleaned from conversations with older generations.
But then he started interviewing people around the country. He went to the Waterford Gaeltacht where elderly men would tell him of their friendships with John Joe Sheehy and others.
When he came to hand over a payment for the interview, he was told it would not be accepted, but could he instead give it to a republican prisoner fund.
As a player, though, and captain of the 2004 team, that deep history was not discussed, much to his frustration.
“There would have been arguments with the Ó Sés, where they would say that everything started with the Golden Years, from 1975 on,” says Ó Cinneide.
“And we would have always have argued that Dr Eamon O’Sullivan was equally as successful as Micko, over a longer period of time. There wasn’t a huge awareness of it, and it wasn’t impressed upon us.
“Éamonn Fitzmaurice was a keen student of the history, and I would have been the same. Éamonn was a history teacher before he became principal and it was something we spoke ourselves about.
“We would have been aware of the history of Fitzgerald Stadium and Dr Eamon’s use of occupational therapy.”
This relates to Dr O’Sullivan’s work as the resident medical superintendent at Killarney Mental Hospital. It overlooked Fitzgerald Stadium and he would take patients down to the construction of the pitch and surrounds, pioneering a form of occupational therapy.
Fitzgerald Stadium. James Lawlor / INPHO
James Lawlor / INPHO / INPHO
When Páidí Ó Sé was Kerry manager, he might let the odd thing slip by way of anecdote to liven up a car journey.
‘Of course you know, Darragh,’ he might say to one of his nephews in the back, ‘We own Croke Park. You knew that?’
To which the young Darragh Ó Sé would ask for further information, to be told of the 1913 ‘Croke Cup’. This was a competition concocted out of the furore around the 1910 final, when Kerry refused to travel in protest at the prices charged by the Great Southern and Western Railway.
Their opponents, Louth, picked up their first All-Ireland with a walkover. In 1913 the two met in late June sunshine and it took two games at Jones’ Road for Kerry to emerge as victors. Attendance on both days was placed high, the Irish Independent showing their early fondness for attendance bonanzas by setting the replay at 40,000, among them John Redmond.
The gate receipts, reported to be £2,000, were used to purchase what became Croke Park. No wonder Kerry feel some claim to the land.
Ó Cinneide would have liked someone from the Kerry management or county board to have taken the time to tell them what they were all about.
Dara Ó Cinneide. INPHO
INPHO
He wasn’t the only one. In 2024, Tomás Ó Sé asked him to come into his group of U20 players and, as per his instruction, ‘I want you to tell these lads what we weren’t told.’
“The things I wanted to impress upon them was that they are part of a continuum. Even if you win the next day, you are part of a narrative and how our history was written very painfully.
“How Austin Stack Park was named thus, Fitzgerald Stadium was named thus. How Con Brosnan would have given free passage for John Joe Sheehy to play a game because football meant that much.
“You don’t want to politicise it too much when you are talking to a group of 30 kids.
“But I would have been aware of the presence of a young lad by the name of Stack on that panel.
I said, ‘I know Bob Stack would have rode out from Ballybunion to Loop Head and played in six All Ireland finals in the same pair of football boots. And I know his great-grandson is here today’.”
The person he was referring to, Robert, that year’s captain.
****
In a county as vast as Kerry, family connections through the county football team are still strong.
Taking this present team, there are some remarkable links.
From the 1903 team, the first to win an All-Ireland, Evan Looney’s great-great-grandfather was Willie Lynch.
Dylan Geaney is a great-great-grandson of Tadhg ‘Tadie’ O’Gorman, captain of that team.
Dylan Geaney. james lawlor photos
james lawlor photos
A while back, Ó Muircheartaigh went to Dingle to trace the footballing heritage of the town before they contested the All-Ireland senior club final, accompanied by senior team selector, Liam O’Connor.
He told him a story of his uncle, Bill Dillon, who was the winning captain in 1941. His home was on Goat Street and he left the Sam Maguire Cup sitting in the window for all to see.
He was also into his hunting and kept dogs for the same purpose. When he would return with something for the pot, he would butcher the animal and keep the meat in the cup, to keep it fresh.
****
Kerry has produced some remarkable culture, from literature to music. Within that art forms, Gaelic football has occupied its own space.
Con Houlihan was the most renowned and admired sports writer of his time and drew colourful stories from his youth in Castleisland. The pieces he wrote were more essays than reportage, such as the account of the famous ‘Ghost Train’, that would carry football fans from Tralee and Killarney overnight to Dublin for All-Ireland finals.
Frequently chaotic and always overcrowded, they became events in themselves, Houlihan characterising them as ‘Puck Fair on wheels’.
John B Keane observed all human behaviour among Kerry supporters in his pub and used it within his plays. He had an impish humour too, describing the Kerry fan with an inferiority complex, believing themselves to be just as good as anybody else.
Staying with Listowel, Bryan McMahon was a schoolteacher and writer who had a son, Gary, who would win All-Irelands in 1959 and 1962.
When Kerry would win an All-Ireland final, such as the big one of 1955 when they beat Dublin, he would compose a ballad, get it to the printers, and the sheets would sell out in Listowel and other nearby towns by the end of the week.
Sigerson Clifford’s poetry is drenched in Kerry football references. Even those that do not explicitly refer to football have been adopted as mantras, including the majestic, ‘I am Kerry’.
Even all of that still was a distant second to the actual playing of football.
As a young man, Marc Ó Sé had a remarkable grounding in traditional music. Each Sunday, Séamus Begley and Steve Cooney would play in his uncle Páidí’s pub.
These world-class musicians were on his doorstep and Marc, armed with an expensive Paolo Soprani accordion, would study them. When Begley went for a break, he would place his accordion over young Marc and twist a bottle of Coke around the straps so it fitted right and he would play along with Cooney.
Like getting a kickabout with Maurice Fitzgerald in Croke Park.
Marc’s music development was going well and he was competing in competitions. Right up to the point he overheard someone mention to his father Micheál that he believed he had three great footballers as sons, and a musician.
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That wouldn’t do.
To take from his autobiography: ‘I had three elder brothers who cast a long shadow and I was always conscious of living up to my surname. The fact that I was becoming known as a musician gave people a pigeonhole to slot me: musician rather than footballer.
The jibe that Fergal, Darragh and Tomás were the footballers and I was the musician stung me. It was a perception that clawed away at the inside of me and cracked me up.
‘The result was that I decided I didn’t want to be associated with the music and was instead determined to show people that I was a footballer in my own right.’
****
Part of the reason that Kerry’s footballing culture is so advanced is they play more than almost any other county.
The average club player in mid-Kerry for example, will have 11 games in the all-county league.
In the championship, they have three games minimum, six games maximum.
They have five games in the mid-Kerry league. Depending on seeding, they could have up to three games in the regional championship. And three to six in the all-county championship.
That’s a minimum of 24 games, a maximum of 31 games. It’s way above the norm.
Ó Cinneide isn’t so sure that is serving the county well anymore. Jack O’Connor has frequently lamented the fact Kerry play three club championships and the toll it takes on players.
Last year, Brian Ó Beaglaoich decided against playing the regional championship for West Kerry. It ultimately benefitted An Ghaeltacht as they went on to win the All-Ireland intermediate championship.
There might also be a sense that there is too much of a good thing, with end of season games routinely being conceded without too much fuss.
****
Where there is Kerry football, there will be a rich tradition.
Within that history, there will be layers. And you can find them in Dingle this week.
Tom ‘Gega’ O’Connor was the youngest-ever All-Ireland winning captain for Kerry.
Paul Geaney with wife Siun and son Páidí. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
If Kerry win on Sunday, Paul Geaney – married to Siun, a daughter of Páidí Ó Sé – will become the oldest winning Kerry captain.
They have had winning captains from Strand Street, Goat Steet and Green Street. Perhaps it’s Geaney from Main Street next.
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Unity, tradition, art: Why football means so much in Kerry
AT THE START of this year’s Allianz football leagues, a respected Kerry football figure went to some county board representatives and floated the idea that they might follow Tyrone’s lead.
This was, to refuse to conduct interviews with the sponsorship boards as backdrop, featuring the Allianz logo, in protest against the already well-documented protests around their continuing sponsorship of GAA competitions.
They were told that sport and politics do not mix. Their response was, ‘Lads, this is Kerry. Football and politics always mixed.’
****
To understand the deep roots of Kerry football, is to understand events of a century ago.
In November 1905, Kerry won the 1903 All-Ireland football championship. That was their first title, defeating London 0-11 to 0-3, and was London’s fifth consecutive losing final.
They added four more titles before the 1924 one, but this was the most significant in their development.
At the time, Kerry was the scene of some of the most vicious fighting of the Civil War.
One of their players, Con Brosnan, was a captain in the Free State Army. Another, John Joe Sheehy, was an anti-treaty republican. He was a wanted man and there was a bounty on his head.
And yet, Brosnan granted Sheehy safe passage to play for Kerry. For the 1924 Munster final at Markets Field in Limerick, Sheehy emerged from the crowd and played the game, a 3-7 to 2-2 win over Clare, and afterwards merged back into the spectators.
They went on to win six titles in eight years. The incident formed part of an RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta programme by the journalist Joe Ó Muircheartaigh.
“One of the people I spoke to about it was Mickey Ned O’Sullivan who was captain in ’75,” Ó Muircheartaigh tells The 42.
“He was saying that ever since then, even though they won All-Irelands before that, it referenced back to that team. These people gave so much, not only to the country with the way they sided politically, but then they were willing to give so much to the football as well.”
Brosnan had a long and distinguished career with Kerry. Being from Moyvane, however, meant he had little chance of captaining his county as that honour was bestowed to the choice of the club champions.
Joe Barrett had been captain of the winning 1929 team. Seven years before he had been arrested for his role as an active Irish republican and was on the anti-treaty side. Yet for the 1931 season, he handed over the captaincy to Brosnan. Truly, football was above all other considerations.
1931 did not signal an end to the political schisms. By 1934, the staunchly republican town of Tralee was outraged by the mass interring of republicans. Kerins O’Rahillys, John Mitchells and Austin Stacks declared that they would not play in the 1934 county championship and it was not completed.
The following year, Kerry sat out the All-Ireland championship as an escalation of their protests.
By 1939, Brosnan was the Kerry trainer. The team reached the All-Ireland final against Meath, and a decision was made to wear the colours of Dingle, red with a white hoop. As they marched around the field for the pre-match parade, they did so behind a banner calling for the release of republican prisoners that were rounded up with the outbreak of World War 2.
One of their own, John Joe ‘Purty’ Landers, had been captured.
As the years rolled into decades, the memories of the Civil War were suppressed. Combatants began clamming up in the interest of good relations.
Kerry football had already forged an identity of excellence. Knowledge of the likes of Brosnan, Sheehy and Barrett became illicit folklore, whispered from older generations when they were in the mood.
****
When Dara Ó Cinneide started his working life for Raidió na Gaeltachta, he had some knowledge of this, gleaned from conversations with older generations.
But then he started interviewing people around the country. He went to the Waterford Gaeltacht where elderly men would tell him of their friendships with John Joe Sheehy and others.
When he came to hand over a payment for the interview, he was told it would not be accepted, but could he instead give it to a republican prisoner fund.
As a player, though, and captain of the 2004 team, that deep history was not discussed, much to his frustration.
“There would have been arguments with the Ó Sés, where they would say that everything started with the Golden Years, from 1975 on,” says Ó Cinneide.
“And we would have always have argued that Dr Eamon O’Sullivan was equally as successful as Micko, over a longer period of time. There wasn’t a huge awareness of it, and it wasn’t impressed upon us.
“Éamonn Fitzmaurice was a keen student of the history, and I would have been the same. Éamonn was a history teacher before he became principal and it was something we spoke ourselves about.
“We would have been aware of the history of Fitzgerald Stadium and Dr Eamon’s use of occupational therapy.”
This relates to Dr O’Sullivan’s work as the resident medical superintendent at Killarney Mental Hospital. It overlooked Fitzgerald Stadium and he would take patients down to the construction of the pitch and surrounds, pioneering a form of occupational therapy.
When Páidí Ó Sé was Kerry manager, he might let the odd thing slip by way of anecdote to liven up a car journey.
‘Of course you know, Darragh,’ he might say to one of his nephews in the back, ‘We own Croke Park. You knew that?’
To which the young Darragh Ó Sé would ask for further information, to be told of the 1913 ‘Croke Cup’. This was a competition concocted out of the furore around the 1910 final, when Kerry refused to travel in protest at the prices charged by the Great Southern and Western Railway.
Their opponents, Louth, picked up their first All-Ireland with a walkover. In 1913 the two met in late June sunshine and it took two games at Jones’ Road for Kerry to emerge as victors. Attendance on both days was placed high, the Irish Independent showing their early fondness for attendance bonanzas by setting the replay at 40,000, among them John Redmond.
The gate receipts, reported to be £2,000, were used to purchase what became Croke Park. No wonder Kerry feel some claim to the land.
Ó Cinneide would have liked someone from the Kerry management or county board to have taken the time to tell them what they were all about.
He wasn’t the only one. In 2024, Tomás Ó Sé asked him to come into his group of U20 players and, as per his instruction, ‘I want you to tell these lads what we weren’t told.’
“The things I wanted to impress upon them was that they are part of a continuum. Even if you win the next day, you are part of a narrative and how our history was written very painfully.
“How Austin Stack Park was named thus, Fitzgerald Stadium was named thus. How Con Brosnan would have given free passage for John Joe Sheehy to play a game because football meant that much.
“You don’t want to politicise it too much when you are talking to a group of 30 kids.
“But I would have been aware of the presence of a young lad by the name of Stack on that panel.
The person he was referring to, Robert, that year’s captain.
****
In a county as vast as Kerry, family connections through the county football team are still strong.
Taking this present team, there are some remarkable links.
From the 1903 team, the first to win an All-Ireland, Evan Looney’s great-great-grandfather was Willie Lynch.
Dylan Geaney is a great-great-grandson of Tadhg ‘Tadie’ O’Gorman, captain of that team.
A while back, Ó Muircheartaigh went to Dingle to trace the footballing heritage of the town before they contested the All-Ireland senior club final, accompanied by senior team selector, Liam O’Connor.
He told him a story of his uncle, Bill Dillon, who was the winning captain in 1941. His home was on Goat Street and he left the Sam Maguire Cup sitting in the window for all to see.
He was also into his hunting and kept dogs for the same purpose. When he would return with something for the pot, he would butcher the animal and keep the meat in the cup, to keep it fresh.
****
Kerry has produced some remarkable culture, from literature to music. Within that art forms, Gaelic football has occupied its own space.
Con Houlihan was the most renowned and admired sports writer of his time and drew colourful stories from his youth in Castleisland. The pieces he wrote were more essays than reportage, such as the account of the famous ‘Ghost Train’, that would carry football fans from Tralee and Killarney overnight to Dublin for All-Ireland finals.
Frequently chaotic and always overcrowded, they became events in themselves, Houlihan characterising them as ‘Puck Fair on wheels’.
John B Keane observed all human behaviour among Kerry supporters in his pub and used it within his plays. He had an impish humour too, describing the Kerry fan with an inferiority complex, believing themselves to be just as good as anybody else.
Staying with Listowel, Bryan McMahon was a schoolteacher and writer who had a son, Gary, who would win All-Irelands in 1959 and 1962.
When Kerry would win an All-Ireland final, such as the big one of 1955 when they beat Dublin, he would compose a ballad, get it to the printers, and the sheets would sell out in Listowel and other nearby towns by the end of the week.
Sigerson Clifford’s poetry is drenched in Kerry football references. Even those that do not explicitly refer to football have been adopted as mantras, including the majestic, ‘I am Kerry’.
Even all of that still was a distant second to the actual playing of football.
As a young man, Marc Ó Sé had a remarkable grounding in traditional music. Each Sunday, Séamus Begley and Steve Cooney would play in his uncle Páidí’s pub.
These world-class musicians were on his doorstep and Marc, armed with an expensive Paolo Soprani accordion, would study them. When Begley went for a break, he would place his accordion over young Marc and twist a bottle of Coke around the straps so it fitted right and he would play along with Cooney.
Like getting a kickabout with Maurice Fitzgerald in Croke Park.
Marc’s music development was going well and he was competing in competitions. Right up to the point he overheard someone mention to his father Micheál that he believed he had three great footballers as sons, and a musician.
That wouldn’t do.
To take from his autobiography: ‘I had three elder brothers who cast a long shadow and I was always conscious of living up to my surname. The fact that I was becoming known as a musician gave people a pigeonhole to slot me: musician rather than footballer.
‘The result was that I decided I didn’t want to be associated with the music and was instead determined to show people that I was a footballer in my own right.’
****
Part of the reason that Kerry’s footballing culture is so advanced is they play more than almost any other county.
The average club player in mid-Kerry for example, will have 11 games in the all-county league.
In the championship, they have three games minimum, six games maximum.
They have five games in the mid-Kerry league. Depending on seeding, they could have up to three games in the regional championship. And three to six in the all-county championship.
That’s a minimum of 24 games, a maximum of 31 games. It’s way above the norm.
Ó Cinneide isn’t so sure that is serving the county well anymore. Jack O’Connor has frequently lamented the fact Kerry play three club championships and the toll it takes on players.
Last year, Brian Ó Beaglaoich decided against playing the regional championship for West Kerry. It ultimately benefitted An Ghaeltacht as they went on to win the All-Ireland intermediate championship.
There might also be a sense that there is too much of a good thing, with end of season games routinely being conceded without too much fuss.
****
Where there is Kerry football, there will be a rich tradition.
Within that history, there will be layers. And you can find them in Dingle this week.
Tom ‘Gega’ O’Connor was the youngest-ever All-Ireland winning captain for Kerry.
If Kerry win on Sunday, Paul Geaney – married to Siun, a daughter of Páidí Ó Sé – will become the oldest winning Kerry captain.
They have had winning captains from Strand Street, Goat Steet and Green Street. Perhaps it’s Geaney from Main Street next.
The story never ends.
**
Check out the latest episode of The 42′s GAA Weekly podcast here
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A sporting tradition All-Ireland Final GAA Kerry Tradition like no other