Mayo triumph celebrated in Kildare

THE Lilywhites have won the All-Ireland. Or so it seemed as the Mayo team clad in white jerseys outscored the Kerry champions in the final minutes of this year’s All-Ireland Football Championship Final.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable game of football, unexpected in its closure given the unanimous favouritism bestowed on the Kerry team before the game started. 

No matter how much sympathy we had for the western team who were facing a likely defeat for the umpteenth time in an All-Ireland Final, one could not imagine the eventual outcome. 

It was a wonderful game and one which erased the memories of thirteen final defeats for Mayo since 1989.

After fifteen minutes into the game with a score 1-5 0-1 in favour of Kerry, I’m sure that many like me felt that the floodgates were about to open with Kerry sweeping away the Mayo challenge.

It was not to be, and great credit especially goes to the young Mayo players who challenged and conquered, narrowly it must be acknowledged, the Kerry kingpins of Gaelic football.

I was delighted for the Mayo team, as apparently were the vast majority of neutral followers of the game.

My delight was formed from a strong family connection with the western county.

My maternal grandparents were of Mayo stock, and it was in Ballykilleen in Co Mayo that my mother was born.

It was while living at home that my mother met the young Garda John Taaffe who was assigned to his first garda station in the nearby village of Cloonfad, which is over the nearby Roscommon border.

They married and as required were moved to a distant Garda Station in Easkey, County Sligo.

My eldest brother Jack was born in Ballykilleen a year later and so joined his mother in claiming and upholding Co Mayo allegiances for the rest of his life.

Jack’s Mayo connections lasted his lifetime and were reinforced and strengthened when his career in local government saw him appointed as assistant county manager for Mayo County Council.

He remained in that position for several years before his appointment as county manager in Westmeath in 1981.

My own links with Mayo were strengthened during summer holidays I spent each year on my grandfather’s farm at Ballykilleen with my mother and my younger brother Seamus.

Both Seamus and I were quite young then and I recall the train journeys to reach Ballyhaunis where we were picked up by car for the onward rural journey to Ballykilleen.

Maybe it was the close contact with the Mayo farming stock of that time which gave me a liking for Mayo folk which carried over so many years later as its footballers sought to eradicate the memory of many All-Ireland defeats.

I would normally follow with interest and support the Kerry football team, especially the extraordinary footballer, David Clifford.

That age old support stemmed from the never-ending encouragement that Kerry native Molly McMahon of St Patrick’s Avenue voiced so eloquently for Kerry.

Molly, whose husband Johnny served in the local garda station with my father, was a friend of my mother and even in those days when Kerry footballers ruled the roost, Molly’s support for the County team was unquestionable and easily transferred to a youngster like me.

The appearance of the Mayo players in the Kildare colours was a reminder of the 1998 final when Kildare last shared in the glory of an All-Ireland Football Final.

Kildare’s previous football final appearance had been in 1935 when we were favourites to achieve our All-Ireland final success against a Cavan team.

Kildare had shared with Kerry great success on the Gaelic football scene in the 1920s, and indeed the matches between these two teams brought football to a new audience and gave Gaelic football a popularity it never lost.

The 1935 final was expected to give Kildare yet another All-Ireland success but like last Sunday’s final, the favourites were caught out.

Here in Athy we have always claimed that we lost the 1935 final because incompetent county team selectors decided to award the goal keeping position to a player other than a man who held the position for some time before the final and would do so again after the final defeat.

Cuddy Chanders was an Athy man who was badly treated by the Kildare County Board and whose absence from the All-Ireland final team led, it is said, to Kildare’s loss.

The Kildare team captain on that occasion was Athy club captain, Paul Matthews, who lost out on an All-Ireland medal to add to his many County Championship medals which he won with Athy.

Kildare next had an opportunity to win an All-Ireland in 1998, but again it was a western county, this time Galway, which deprived us of that goal. Coincidentally, a local young man, Christy Byrne, was in goals for Kildare that day, replicating the role Cuddy Chanders should have played so many years previously.

Congratulations to Mayo on their victory in the 2026 All-Ireland Football Final. They surprised and delighted us all in winning as they did. The celebrations in Castlebar and elsewhere were well deserved.

The one disappointment was the unworthy claim by the Mayo team manager that “they sneered and they laughed …… they won’t laugh at us again.” These words were unkind, unnecessary and inappropriate following a worthy victory and contrasted sharply with the generous attitude of the Kerry players and supporters after the match.

No. 1752