The life of O'Reilly
April 30, 2011The date is etched on the mind of Ger O'Reilly. "I left Ireland on the fourth of March 1987," he says. He looks back with no regrets; returning to Raharney twice a year, he often ensures that his visits coincide with matches involving the hurling club of which his late father Thomas, who ran a pub and post office in the village many years ago, served as chairman.
He has no family in the village any more: he met his wife Kathleen Spillane, a proud Kerry woman, in New York while his brother Philip has also been domiciled in the Big Apple since the 1980s.
And yet the ties that bind Ger with his homeland remain as strong as ever. He pays special tribute to the Raharney girls, who he watched in action in a county final a couple of years back and are now bidding to complete an exceptional five-in-a-row in 2011, and he was at home last November to watch the club's senior hurlers in action in the Leinster club championship semi-final against Oulart-the-Ballagh of Wexford.
Surprise victors over Coolderry of Offaly in the previous round, the Westmeath kingpins fell just short of adding an even bigger scalp against an Oulart side who are heavily fancied to lift the All-Ireland on St Patrick's Day, having been so unfortunate to bow out at the hands of eventual champions Ballyhale Shamrocks last year.
"The Ballagh game was an awful day to play hurling with the fog," says Ger, "but they were one puck of the ball away from winning and they have to be very proud of themselves. I went out that night with about 20 of them in Killucan, and you wouldn't meet a nicer bunch of guys. It's a great club, and they're a great team.
"I keep in contact with all the lads at home and make it my business when I'm there to meet all the hurlers. I had John Shaw working with me out here when he was a student. Young Nicky Weir also worked with me for a year."
Almost as soon as he had touched down at JFK Airport all those years ago, he headed for Gaelic Park and the experience was a reassuring one: New York was a concrete jungle thousands of miles across the sea from rural Westmeath, but it was a home from home nonetheless.
"The first day I went over, I went to Gaelic Park and it was like walking into Cusack Park," he says. "There were 40 lads over here I knew. I met Willie Lowry and Eamonn Corcoran, Stephen Hanratty and Gerard Jackson, the Dalys from Brownstown. Gerry Gillen from Cullion, the Weirs from Raharney.
"The GAA was a big thing for me for the first seven years I was here. I played with the Westmeath club - we had three teams, senior and junior hurling, and a football team. We had a great team, several great hurlers like Mick Cosgrave, Brian McCabe and Willie Lowry, Gerard Jackson, Eamonn Corcoran. Pat Dalton was here, Sean Dalton the goalkeeper. Those guys were all county level players, super hurlers, but they were all playing here in New York."
With overstated modesty, Ger insists he "wasn't much of a hurler", but he had won honours at U16, minor, U21 and junior level with Raharney at home and he added a New York senior title with the Westmeath club shortly after his arrival in the States. "I had played beside Nicky and Jimmy Weir in the full forward line with Raharney, and my job was to make room for those guys to score goals," he says. "I might get an odd one myself but they got plenty. They had a lot more skill than I had."
After several years togging out for the Westmeath club in New York, during which time he was an undocumented immigrant working construction - "I was always a salesman at home," he says, "I never held a hammer until I came to New York" - Ger received the necessary paperwork and started his own business, Reicor Construction, specialising in flat roofs and structural waterproofing for industrial and commercial clients.
Before then, he had taken the decision to call time on his hurling career. "I gave it up and went golfing," he says with a laugh. "You get too old for hurling very fast. I was undocumented for the first few years and didn't have health insurance, so if you got injured you could be in big trouble. You get to a stage where you start thinking about things like that. You're not at home in your parents' house, you have to make sure you can pay the rent."
Golf and business, he says, go hand in hand these days, with negotiations and discussions often taking place between the drives, the chips and the putts. It's a pastime, but a serious one. It's taken plenty of straight hitting to get Ger's handicap down to eight, and he has taken part in the FBD All-Ireland Golf Challenge on two occasions, helping the New York Tipperary club to outright success last September, when he met some of the GAA's most enduring stars.
"We played the final in Faithlegg in Waterford. One of the people running it, Liam Daniels, is a friend of Davy Fitz, they came over to New York a few months ago and we had a few games of golf. Davy plays off a handicap of five, and he taught me a lesson, that's for sure!
"The FBD All-Ireland Golf Challenge is running 11 or 12 years now and takes place every year on the Sunday between the two All-Ireland finals. You have a team from each of the four provinces, a team from Chicago and a team from New York. I was part of a New York Roscommon team that finished third in the competition a couple of years ago but we played well this time and managed to win it."
The whole weekend, from Friday's practice through the competition rounds on Saturday and Sunday and the social event on the Saturday night, is a cherished memory for Ger. "It was a great occasion, and we got to meet a lot of great GAA people. Eddie Keher was there, Brian Mullins, Christy Heffernan, they all support it. They're very nice guys - Eddie Keher is one of the greatest there has ever been but you couldn't meet a nicer guy, he's there with a guitar and singing a song."
Back in New York, Ger has moved to strengthen his links with the Westmeath club in recent years by sponsoring the club's footballers through Reicor Construction. He was involved at committee level in the hurling club years ago, and he hopes to make a bit more time for the club again in 2011 and beyond. "I wouldn't be a big football man," he says, "but I'll try to help them out as much as I can."
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