The former Roscommon footballer, captain in 1997 when St Brigid’s bridged a 28-year gap back to their previous county title, will head up to Dublin and sort out his accommodation.
For lunch, he will meet with his old team mates and they will share stories and hop ball about all the wars they fought and the county titles won.
Then, he will leave the Dingle contingent of Ashes and Geaneys, one of which, Colm (father of Dylan, Conor and Niall Geaney) is Godfather to his eldest daughter, Bláithín, and head somewhere else to meet the St Brigid’s crowd for pints and bring back whatever intel he managed to squeeze from the Kerry crowd.
Probably not much.
The following day, the ball will be thrown up and the All-Ireland final will begin between St Brigid’s and Dingle, two clubs he gave everything to and for.
***
Let’s take it back.
By 1988, O’Brien had played in four county finals for St Brigid’s, losing each and every one.
He was also a mainstay of the Roscommon side, losing a series of Connacht finals.
But man cannot live on the promise of football alone and after he got his Masters from UCC, he had the offer of a job in London, or an interview with a Norwegian company, based in Dingle.
He went down to Kerry in September ‘88. Interviewed well and was offered six months work.
He stayed for nine years. Only for personal circumstances changing, he might never have moved back.
Down there, he made friends fast, and kept them. The Geaneys, the Ashes, Murt Mortiarty. Dozens of others.
In 1989, he continued to travel up and down to Roscommon, a torturous four-hour journey on bad roads, all to come on as a sub and lose another Connacht final to Mayo after a replay.
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The following year, he cut the ties to home.
In 1990, Páidí Ó Sé came in as manager of West Kerry and O’Brien won a county championship medal as they beat Mid Kerry in the final, 4-9 to 0-7.
A year later, the Dingle side, with a precocious goalkeeper Diarmuid Murphy, won both the West Kerry league and championship.
The successful Dingle team of 1991.
The livin’ was easy.
“I liked it and it was great craic down there. So I stayed on because I had my wife, Rosemary, down there with me.
“But I had some of the best years of my life down there, playing with those guys. We won a few West Kerry championships. Darragh Ó Sé was coming on the scene there.
“And with Dingle, we were always in Division One, always at the top table and I would have played with Paul Geaney senior and Sean Geaney who was our only Kerry player at that particular time. Sean continued on until 1997 and got an All-Ireland medal.
“There was a lean spell for Kerry football back in those days.”
In 1993, he even went fully native and lined out for The Kingdom in the Munster junior championship, when they were beaten by Cork in the final ,along with Jerome Stack, who would later fetch up as St Brigid’s manager when they lost the All-Ireland club final to Glen, Maghera in 2024.
The connections between the two clubs don’t end there.
Cormac and Eoin Sheehy are on the current Brigid’s panel.
Their grandfather Pat Sheehy was on the Dingle side that won their last championship prior to this year, along with Paddy Bawn Brosnan, and ended up the headmaster of the local national school in Kiltoom.
Where he taught a young Tom Óg O’Brien.
***
When O’Brien came home, he started a couple of businesses, one with mushrooms, the other a dairy herd that his brother runs.
“I came back in ’96, but I never really left Dingle. They had a fundraiser years ago when the tourism was getting very strong around 2004. They raffled an apartment, and I bought the one next door.
“We have been going up and down since then with my two girls, Bláithín and Róisín.”
The connections stayed strong. When he went down to Dingle, his Irish was rusty and when he left it had become stronger.
When he came back up the road he got involved in establishing Gaelscoil de hÍde in Roscommon town. Naturally, he was able to tip off potential teachers of any jobs going. That’s how David Devane ended up coming up from Dingle and playing for and winning county and Connacht titles with St Brigid’s. Pity for him however, that he moved on at the end of 2012, just prior to their All-Ireland win.
When O’Brien came back up the road, St Brigid’s was still his club, but different.
“The club were annoyed at me for going,” he says.
“Things were at a low ebb and a lot of the players I started with had moved on or retired and the younger generation just hadn’t come through properly. We almost went down into intermediate. They just hung on by a fingernail the year before I came back.
“Nobody had played regularly for Roscommon from our club since I left, until Frankie Dolan came on the scene afterwards. It was a massive long break for us.”
It was coming up on three decades since they had last won a county title. But they had a new manager, the one and only John O’Mahony. O’Brien’s plans to slip back quietly into the dressing room were torpedoed when O’Mahony made him captain.
John O'Mahony. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
All his time in Kerry and exposure to top players had confirmed one thing with certainty for him.
“I learned that to make it, first of all you have to get the belief and confidence into yourself,” he says.
“The only way to do that is physically train. John O’Mahony was the trigger for it with us, getting a massive buy-in from all the lads on the panel. You have to tell yourself that it is our year.
“John O’Mahony was a king at that. He was brilliant. And we had Marty McDermott who came back to the club and he would have managed Roscommon when they went on to win Connacht. I lost four Connacht finals before that!
“I missed out on that. And my best years playing football were down in Kerry. I came back when I was 31 so it was a different era for me.
“So we had gone a long time without a championship and during that time, Clann na nGael dominated. What made it even sweeter was that we beat Clann na nGael in the final (in 1997).”
Lifting the Roscommon championship in 1997.
That evening, the clubhouse hummed with Kerry accents, a few carloads of Dingle men having made the journey.
*****
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O’Brien played on for a few more years, finally putting on the boots for the last time in 2004. By then he moved into coaching and started the ball rolling with the first two of seven U21 county championship titles. He estimates he has coached around nine of the players that will be on the starting grid on Sunday and even last year, he was managing Creggs, a club on the Galway border.
This winter, he’s been racing from one game to the next. He was at the Munster final and got his picture taken with an assortment of Geaneys.
He has immensely enjoyed the growing confidence of his two cousins’ sons; Sean Trundle and Ruaidhrí Fallon.
Tom Óg (right) with Ruaidhrí Fallon after the semi-final win over Scotstown.
But ask if it will be mixed feelings in Croke Park and he knows where his heart lies.
“St Brigid’s is my club. My father won four county finals and he was on the very first team of St Brigid’s in 1951 when we won our first county title, Tom O’Brien.
“There’s a big mural on the wall of our clubhouse and he’s on it there. There are only two surviving members of that team; JJ Lennon and Tom O’Brien.
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No divided loyalties for a treasured son of both St Brigid's and Dingle
SATURDAY WILL BEGIN early for Tom Óg O’Brien.
The former Roscommon footballer, captain in 1997 when St Brigid’s bridged a 28-year gap back to their previous county title, will head up to Dublin and sort out his accommodation.
For lunch, he will meet with his old team mates and they will share stories and hop ball about all the wars they fought and the county titles won.
Then, he will leave the Dingle contingent of Ashes and Geaneys, one of which, Colm (father of Dylan, Conor and Niall Geaney) is Godfather to his eldest daughter, Bláithín, and head somewhere else to meet the St Brigid’s crowd for pints and bring back whatever intel he managed to squeeze from the Kerry crowd.
Probably not much.
The following day, the ball will be thrown up and the All-Ireland final will begin between St Brigid’s and Dingle, two clubs he gave everything to and for.
***
Let’s take it back.
By 1988, O’Brien had played in four county finals for St Brigid’s, losing each and every one.
He was also a mainstay of the Roscommon side, losing a series of Connacht finals.
But man cannot live on the promise of football alone and after he got his Masters from UCC, he had the offer of a job in London, or an interview with a Norwegian company, based in Dingle.
He went down to Kerry in September ‘88. Interviewed well and was offered six months work.
He stayed for nine years. Only for personal circumstances changing, he might never have moved back.
Down there, he made friends fast, and kept them. The Geaneys, the Ashes, Murt Mortiarty. Dozens of others.
In 1989, he continued to travel up and down to Roscommon, a torturous four-hour journey on bad roads, all to come on as a sub and lose another Connacht final to Mayo after a replay.
The following year, he cut the ties to home.
In 1990, Páidí Ó Sé came in as manager of West Kerry and O’Brien won a county championship medal as they beat Mid Kerry in the final, 4-9 to 0-7.
A year later, the Dingle side, with a precocious goalkeeper Diarmuid Murphy, won both the West Kerry league and championship.
The livin’ was easy.
“I liked it and it was great craic down there. So I stayed on because I had my wife, Rosemary, down there with me.
“But I had some of the best years of my life down there, playing with those guys. We won a few West Kerry championships. Darragh Ó Sé was coming on the scene there.
“And with Dingle, we were always in Division One, always at the top table and I would have played with Paul Geaney senior and Sean Geaney who was our only Kerry player at that particular time. Sean continued on until 1997 and got an All-Ireland medal.
“There was a lean spell for Kerry football back in those days.”
In 1993, he even went fully native and lined out for The Kingdom in the Munster junior championship, when they were beaten by Cork in the final ,along with Jerome Stack, who would later fetch up as St Brigid’s manager when they lost the All-Ireland club final to Glen, Maghera in 2024.
The connections between the two clubs don’t end there.
Cormac and Eoin Sheehy are on the current Brigid’s panel.
Their grandfather Pat Sheehy was on the Dingle side that won their last championship prior to this year, along with Paddy Bawn Brosnan, and ended up the headmaster of the local national school in Kiltoom.
Where he taught a young Tom Óg O’Brien.
***
When O’Brien came home, he started a couple of businesses, one with mushrooms, the other a dairy herd that his brother runs.
“I came back in ’96, but I never really left Dingle. They had a fundraiser years ago when the tourism was getting very strong around 2004. They raffled an apartment, and I bought the one next door.
“We have been going up and down since then with my two girls, Bláithín and Róisín.”
The connections stayed strong. When he went down to Dingle, his Irish was rusty and when he left it had become stronger.
When he came back up the road he got involved in establishing Gaelscoil de hÍde in Roscommon town. Naturally, he was able to tip off potential teachers of any jobs going. That’s how David Devane ended up coming up from Dingle and playing for and winning county and Connacht titles with St Brigid’s. Pity for him however, that he moved on at the end of 2012, just prior to their All-Ireland win.
When O’Brien came back up the road, St Brigid’s was still his club, but different.
“The club were annoyed at me for going,” he says.
“Nobody had played regularly for Roscommon from our club since I left, until Frankie Dolan came on the scene afterwards. It was a massive long break for us.”
It was coming up on three decades since they had last won a county title. But they had a new manager, the one and only John O’Mahony. O’Brien’s plans to slip back quietly into the dressing room were torpedoed when O’Mahony made him captain.
All his time in Kerry and exposure to top players had confirmed one thing with certainty for him.
“I learned that to make it, first of all you have to get the belief and confidence into yourself,” he says.
“The only way to do that is physically train. John O’Mahony was the trigger for it with us, getting a massive buy-in from all the lads on the panel. You have to tell yourself that it is our year.
“John O’Mahony was a king at that. He was brilliant. And we had Marty McDermott who came back to the club and he would have managed Roscommon when they went on to win Connacht. I lost four Connacht finals before that!
“I missed out on that. And my best years playing football were down in Kerry. I came back when I was 31 so it was a different era for me.
“So we had gone a long time without a championship and during that time, Clann na nGael dominated. What made it even sweeter was that we beat Clann na nGael in the final (in 1997).”
That evening, the clubhouse hummed with Kerry accents, a few carloads of Dingle men having made the journey.
*****
O’Brien played on for a few more years, finally putting on the boots for the last time in 2004. By then he moved into coaching and started the ball rolling with the first two of seven U21 county championship titles. He estimates he has coached around nine of the players that will be on the starting grid on Sunday and even last year, he was managing Creggs, a club on the Galway border.
This winter, he’s been racing from one game to the next. He was at the Munster final and got his picture taken with an assortment of Geaneys.
He has immensely enjoyed the growing confidence of his two cousins’ sons; Sean Trundle and Ruaidhrí Fallon.
But ask if it will be mixed feelings in Croke Park and he knows where his heart lies.
“St Brigid’s is my club. My father won four county finals and he was on the very first team of St Brigid’s in 1951 when we won our first county title, Tom O’Brien.
“There’s a big mural on the wall of our clubhouse and he’s on it there. There are only two surviving members of that team; JJ Lennon and Tom O’Brien.
“My heart will always be with the club.”
Some things you can’t ever leave.
*****
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