A treasured 25-years
December 31, 2002
It was the year Elvis died, Red Rum won the Aintree Grand National for the third time, Cork won the All-Ireland hurling title and Dublin won the Sam Maguire cup. It was also the year An Gaeltacht were formed and Sean Mac Donncha was elected club treasurer. All of 25 years on, and while most of the aforementioned events of that year have slipped to the back of the memory; Sean remains treasurer of the Rath Cairn club. By Gordon Manning.
It is a remarkable achievement and a testament to his unselfish work over the last two decades. While the King of Rock n Roll's 25th anniversary received the royal treatment from the media this past twelve months, Sean went quietly about with his business. He did not get into Gaelic football to see his name printed in the papers, or his face flashed on the TV screen. Like many true Gaels, he got into it solely for the love of the game. As
Elvis was getting his face imprinted on cups, Sean and the Gaels of Rath Cairn were busy trying to win some.
Sean has been involved with the club ever since its foundation and is well known to everybody in the area. Prior to his An Gaeltacht days, he played with Martinstown: "I won a junior championship with them in 1969. They eventually went on to become Martinstown-Athboy and I have been involved with Rath Cairn since 1977, the year we started the club here. I have been treasurer since then also," he points out.
He played a bit of football in his time with the club also and was part of the great championship winning side of 1983. Through his playing days he played in a number of positions but primarily at corner-forward: "Yes I won a championship that very year with Rath Cairn. We beat Bellewstown in the final and that is one of the highlights of my playing days with the club. It was a fantastic win for everybody involved," Sean enthuses.
The family have strong connections with the club, with his brothers Michael and Mairtin having lined out for An Gaeltacht through the years. Sean himself has been a selector at different times in the past and has four nephews currently playing for the club and one, Eamonn, was part of the Meath junior set-up earlier this year: "We had indeed one man on the Meath junior panel, Eamonn Mac Donncha. He is a nephew of mine and trained with the team up until the first round against Offaly. He didn't make the official panel though for that game against Offaly when they got beaten after leading 0-9 to 0-1 at half time, but he was still involved in the weeks leading up to the match."
On the field this year An Gaeltacht never really got going and as Sean says: "There is not much to say really. We didn't do well in the junior B championship this year at all and that is that."
"Dudley Farrell was training us this year. It was his first year with us and he did well. He started off brilliantly and got a good panel out early on in the year when there were about 24 or 25 lads training. For the first couple of months things seemed to be going very well, but unfortunately like many other clubs it dwindled down eventually. But we did have a few injuries as well so that didn't really help us this year," admits Sean.
Although events were pretty muted on the field for An Gaeltacht, off the pitch Sean and the club committee have been kept extremely busy organising the Comórtas Peil na Gaeltachta, which will take place in Rath Cairn next year. The annual event was last held in the county way back in 1993. Then it was the first time the Meath Gaeltacht had hosted the event and it was a huge success. The competition will be run over the three days of the Whit weekend in 2003 and demands plenty of organisation: "We will have to provide about 800 beds in the area for the competition. There will be teams coming from Donegal, Kerry, Mayo, Galway, Cork, Waterford and elsewhere. There is even a team coming over from London. "They will be put up in houses and hotels around the area and we will have to get marquees in and extra bar staff and things like that but it is great for the club and we are all looking forward to it. We had a great team of workers the last time it was here so hopefully we can run it successfully again this time. I myself have only missed one Comórtas Peil since 1970. I have travelled all around the country to it in the last 30 odd years or so," he reveals.
The Comórtas Peil will also bring extra pressure for Sean as he runs the local community centre and bar: "It should be really busy around here then alright. I have been working here since 1975 and we have good facilities now, with a nice hall and bar," he insists.
During his years with the club Sean has seen good times and bad, but he his particularly worried about the fate of smaller clubs in the future, if money starts to play a role in the game: "We have a gang of young lads coming up at minor and under-16 and in the years ahead we could be strong enough but to be honest I can see a lot of the smaller clubs in the county in trouble in the coming years. Especially if players in the bigger clubs and counties are getting paid indirectly, some of the smaller clubs could be swallowed
up.
"There are two things about this pay-for-play campaign. I mean you could pay the players but really and truly it is going to destroy the parish football and I don't consider it a sport once it's being paid for. So I guess we will have to make up our minds whether it is a business or a sport," he observes. Many other concerned GAA folk would be of the same opinion and firmly agree with Sean's sentiments as regards the pay-for-play proposal. However he also stresses the trouble all clubs are currently experiencing with competition
from other sports: "There are so many different things happening now that it is getting very hard to actually get lads to play football. With all the other sports such as soccer and so on, clubs all over are finding it hard to hold onto players and if the trend continues the smaller parishes in particular could suffer badly."
On the county front he was quite impressed with Meath's performances this year and felt Sean Boylan's charges were very unlucky not to have progressed further in the All-Ireland championship: "I got to see Meath in all the games and thought they played very well in most of them. They were unlucky against Donegal and could have won. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't more new players tried out but generally speaking I think they gave a good performance and might have gone on further had they beaten Donegal."
For the time being though Sean will concentrate his efforts on the club scene and continue to work on the future of Rath Cairn football. He has been there long enough to know how things stand and believes currently, that there is a dedicated group of people working firmly to help the club progress: " We have good people here. If I am elected next year I will continue on as treasurer but I suppose I will have to anyhow because it is a continuation, with the Comórtas Peil on here in 2003. But I have had help from Pearse Ferguson as assistant treasurer and we have a really good group of people working for the club at the moment, from the chairman right down we have a commitment bunch. We also have a lot of young lads coming up and with Athboy we have won the under-14 two years on the trot now so things aren't looking too bad," he concludes.
This time next year Elvis will be 26 years dead. Thousands of devotees will have made their annual pilgrimage across the Atlantic to his Graceland mansion in order to pay homage. Yes, the King of Rock n Roll is dead. But many, many miles away and an ocean apart in Rath Cairn, Sean Mac Donncha and other committed An Gaeltacht folk will continue to hack away at the coalface of the GAA. And as along as the association has men like that, the future of our national sport is alive and kicking.
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