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HomeSportsAn Elite Guard always gunning for glory

An Elite Guard always gunning for glory

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St Flannans’ winning Harty Cup final tradition goes back over 80 years and it’s something that they will be hoping to tap into this Saturday writes Joe Ó Muircheartaigh.

“I think any hurler that passes though St Flannan’s, his ambition will always be to win a Harty Cup medal and an All-Ireland Colleges medal. If you go through Flannan’s and haven’t done that, it is like playing for the county for years and not winning anything.”
Bishop Emeritus Willie Walsh

This feeling has always been in the hallowed halls of St Flannan’s College, well almost, when you do the math on the abacus and realise just how many Dr Harty Cup titles have been racked up by the boys in blue.

Yes, the almost, but never an asterix, is there because of the barren spells in the wilderness that have must have been something akin to what the butt of the hurley to the gut, or lower again, feels like.

And, yes, there were those much more distance days when St Flannan’s were actually barred from Harty Cup competition, thanks to the enlightened and all-embraced approach to sport adopted by one of the scions of those same hallowed halls.

The ‘Ban’ actually straddled three decades, even if the de facto architect of these lost years where St Flannan’s College and the Harty Cup was concerned wasn’t around to witness that majority of this punishment meted down by the powers that were in the GAA at that time.
That was Canon William O’Kennedy, the formidable College President, who in his days as a Sinn Féin activist and physical force Republican had hunger struck for Ireland while a prisoner at the pleasure of His Majesty.

And just like he didn’t like being a prisoner of the foreign faction when he was holed up in Bere Island detention centre during the War of Independence, he didn’t like being a prisoner to the GAA either when he was back on his St Flannan’s College beat in the 1920s.
He showed this defiant streak in 1929 when he famously declared that “the boys are perfectly free to play what game or games they choose,” he told the GAA hierarchy in Clare and everywhere that supported the Ban on ‘foreign games’.

The biggest proponent of the Ban in Clare was his fellow priest, the chairman of the Clare County Board, Fr Michael Hamilton, but Canon O’Kennedy proudly declared that “during the past year they played hurling, rugby, Gaelic football and tennis,” before adding “our principle is ‘No Ban’.”

The result was that St Flannan’s were banished from Harty Cup for nearly a decade and a half, only returning to the fold for the first time in 1943 when to say that they had points, and goals, to prove was putting it mildly.

And, how they did that, because since 1943 St Flannan’s College has always expected where the Harty Cup was concerned – so it was that in their first year back provided the setting for a famous first victory, while since then a further 21 titles have been plundered and brought to Clonroadmore, with the photographs of all winning teams that decorate the corridors being colleges’ hurling’s answer to the Louvre.

Of course, 22 titles is a record – three clear of North Mon, while Sunday’s opponents Thurles CBS are Tipperary’s great standard-bearers in the competition with eight titles to the school’s name.

And, it’s because of all those titles that have been backboned by hurling titans at every turn, be they from Clare, Tipperary or Limerick along the way, that Willie Walsh’s assertion about what’s expected of Harty hurlers in the college is so true.

And, it’s why from the mid-40s to the mid ‘20s some 80 years later that St Flannan’s have produced so many hurling heroes, with the latest…

For more on this story and all the latest news from the Banner County, pick up this week’s Clare Champion or view our digital edition which is available HERE.

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