Authors: Donal Keenan
* * *
Setanta Ó hAilpín was in his early teens when his big brother first played Senior Championship hurling for Cork on 26 May 1996. The nineteen-year-old Seán Óg came on as a substitute for Mark Mullins, a Na Piarsaigh team-mate, in the opening round against Limerick at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Young Setanta was already a familiar figure around the Cork squad, always accompanying Seán Óg to training and placing himself behind the goal where he would spend the evening pucking sliotars back into play. The sixteen-point defeat suffered that day against Limerick was an indication of where Cork hurling existed in the inter-county rankings list. They had to wait until the 1998 Championship for a first taste of victory at senior level, when Cork beat Limerick, but exuberance triumphed over impatience and the rewards would be reaped in 1999.
Two legendary figures in the history of hurling and football, Jimmy
Barry-Murphy and
Larry Tompkins, were managing the respective Cork senior teams for 1999. Seán Óg’s elevation to the Cork senior football team placed further demands on the time and energy of a young man with an already daunting schedule at club, colleges and county level. Respite came in the form of a first national senior title when Seán Óg lined out at full back on the football team that captured the National League in May 1999. Just two weeks later he made his Senior Football Championship debut in the opening round against Waterford and on June 13 officially became a dual Championship player when lining out for the hurlers against Waterford. With the cooperation of the two team managers, the player performed a delicate juggling act that lasted until the final day of competition in late September.
‘Cork had not won an All-Ireland senior title since 1990 and that was a famine for the county, especially in hurling,’ he remembers. Expectations were not high in either code at the start of the campaign, but by 4 July Cork had won its first Munster senior hurling title since 1992, when the young team with Seán Óg in the familiar number seven jersey beat Clare by 1–15 to 0–14. Two weeks later he lined out with the footballers as they beat Kerry in the provincial final by 2–10 to 2–4. The pressure was unrelenting. On 8 August, Cork played Offaly in the All-Ireland hurling semi-final, a game rated as one of the best of the modern era, which Cork won by three points. And on 22 August the footballers defeated Mayo to qualify for the All-Ireland football final.
‘The build-up to September was massive because of all the hype about me going for two Championships in the one year,’ recalls Seán. ‘It hadn’t been done since
Teddy McCarthy had won hurling and football with Cork in 1990. The list of people who had won titles in both games at senior level was small and Teddy was the only one to do it in the one year. He had been one of my early heroes so it was a huge thing to be in a position to emulate him.
‘This was my fourth year playing for the hurlers. The first three years were a process of development. When you start playing at that level you are always worrying. When the ball is coming to you, you worry that you will mess it up, you’re thinking about things a lot more than is necessary. And when you think too much about things you will mess it up. By 1999 I felt more comfortable in the team. Things began to happen naturally. I was so confident I wasn’t thinking about my hurling.’
The hurling final between Cork and Kilkenny on 12 September began a rivalry between two sets of players that would see them dominate hurling in the new century and scrap almost annually for the right to claim the Liam McCarthy Cup. The 1999 final was a classic match-up – Kilkenny’s skilful forwards including D.J.
Carey, John
Power, Charlie Carter and a young kid named Henry
Shefflin, and a powerful Cork defence with
Donal Óg Cusack in goal, fronted by Fergal Ryan,
Diarmuid O’Sullivan, John
Browne,
Wayne Sherlock, Brian
Corcoran and Seán Óg, who was tasked with marking
Carey for the first time at this level. Carey was held scoreless, Cork won by 0–13 to 0–12.
There was no time to celebrate. Training resumed two nights later with the footballers who were due to play a vastly experienced Meath team on 26 September. ‘We came up short,’ Seán Óg recalls candidly. It was a close game won by Meath, 1–11 to 1–8. That Meath outscored Cork by 0–6 to 0–2 in the final half hour told the story.
Nothing, however, would taint the joy. Eleven years after arriving in Ireland as a frightened young boy from the other side of the world, Seán Óg Ó hAilpín had proven himself one of the outstanding hurlers in the country. In the stands that day and back home on the north side of Cork city and in the Na Piarsaigh clubhouse some tears were shed. The project had been a huge success. Yet the story was only beginning and it had twists and turns to take.
* * *
‘Rebel strike throws Cork hurling into state of crisis’. The headline on the front page of the
Irish Examiner
on 30 November 2002 did not come as a surprise to supporters around Cork city and county. For three months towards the end of the year it was clear that the stand-off between the players and the Cork County Board was of a different hue to anything seen before in Gaelic games. Central to that were the very public positions taken by players of the stature of Seán Óg,
Donal Óg Cusack and
Joe Deane, three of the most popular sportsmen in the county. It was the first battle of what proved to be almost a decade of conflict that led to two more strikes, in 2007–8 and 2009. The issues were complex: the players wanted better facilities, more modern management structures and better expenses. Three times they withdrew their services and each time positions became more entrenched and the divisions became greater.
Seán Óg Ó hAilpín has been talking for a couple of hours. The chat flows freely, tales are swapped and the mood is light. It is springtime 2010 and a new season is about to start. His presence in the foyer of the Silver Springs Hotel has caused quite a stir, though he is the only one around who doesn’t seem to notice. Men and women, young and old, steal a glance from time to time but are too polite to interrupt. Two twenty-somethings do ask if he will attend the kick-boxing exhibition later that evening.
‘What time?’ he asks.
‘7.30,’ they reply and head off delighted.
Then the conversation turns to the strikes. Immediately the discomfort is obvious. It is not because he is embarrassed or ashamed of what has happened in Cork GAA circles over the last decade. He still believes passionately that the players had a just cause, that there was no other choice but to take the stand they did. It was always a matter of principle. But Seán Óg regrets the hurt caused. The regret is sincere; that is easy to tell from the pained expression on his face. The conversation that flowed so naturally is now halting, he wrings his hands together and does his best to articulate what are very mixed feelings. There is pain, real pain.
‘No matter what I do for the rest of my life, in sport or away from sport, there will always be a scar. Those strikes are the scar and we will go to the grave with it,’ he says candidly. ‘We had three strikes in what was it, eight or nine years, and every one was worse than the other. Did they have to happen? Some people will ask why we wanted to change a system that has brought Cork thirty hurling All-Irelands. But times had changed. We had a group of good, disciplined guys who wanted to compete at the very top and unfortunately we felt the County Board was not giving us the support we needed. We took a stand based on certain principles and no one won. There was no winner.
‘I felt a stand had to be made. It had nothing to do with money. I don’t care about not being paid as a hurler, but the least the players should expect is to be made feel that they are worth something to the association. When you win they are all over you, they all want a part of you. When you lose they walk all over you as if you don’t exist and that pisses me off. It has nothing to do with being paid, it is about looking after your players the very best way you can.
‘The Cork County Board was out of date and didn’t un-derstand the demands on modern players. It was a clash of cultures. I didn’t enjoy any of it; anyone who did must have been mad. I wanted to be playing; I had no wish to get into boardroom battles with the greatest boardroom battler of them all, Frank
Murphy. Frank is a shrewd man, an experienced official and a politician. Here we were as players who were used to training and playing with no experience of working the system and we were standing in a room fighting a case; it was daunting to say the least. We didn’t want to be there. We were seen as upstarts; people formed their own opinions on us and fair enough. But we didn’t wake up one morning and say we were going to take them on and give them a hard time. We didn’t do it for fun. It is not good reading on our CVs to be involved with three strikes.
‘Gerald
McCarthy was caught in the middle of the last strike and became the scapegoat. I can understand people questioning us and being angry with us. Who were we to take on a legend of Cork with seven or eight All-Ireland medals jangling in his pocket? I would be a conservative, a traditionalist. I love hearing stories about teams in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the Christy
Rings and all that. It fascinates me, because to understand where you are going in the future you need to know about the past. Because I was involved in the strikes people might regard me as a radical. The way the
Gerald thing went made me very sad because Gerald was a player himself. There have to be serious lessons learned. It will take time to heal the hurt. We did things wrong and the County Board did as well. Last winter was a torture; it affected everything, you became almost paranoid just walking down the street. There are people today who won’t look at me or talk to me because of my involvement.’
* * *
Solace is to be found in the bosom of the family. In the spring of 2003 Seán Óg was again making the familiar journey across Cork city to training three times weekly. He had a familiar passenger beside him in the car: Setanta. Only this time Setanta was not travelling as a brother, supporter and ball-fetcher. He was a team-mate, potentially at least. The third of the Ó hAilpín boys had been causing quite a stir as an under-age hurler in the county and had played in the All-Ireland minor final of 2001 in which Cork beat Galway.
‘Away from hurling we were going our separate ways,’ recalls Seán Óg. ‘I had moved out of home and I was getting on with my life, getting serious about my career in banking. There is a six-year age gap between us. Setanta was a student in Waterford without a care in the world. But when it came to training with Cork and playing matches we travelled together and it was special.’
Donal O’Grady had been installed as the Cork manager after the turmoil of the strike and knew the Ó hAilpíns better than anyone. At 6 feet 5 inches, Setanta had a physical advantage, but he also possessed speed, balance and natural skill.
O’Grady saw him as a target man as well as a score-getter. Playing alongside players of the experience and calibre of Alan
Browne,
Joe Deane, Ben
O’Connor, Niall
McCarthy and
Timmy McCarthy, Setanta would be a quick learner.
By the time Cork returned to Croke Park as the Munster champions, having dethroned Waterford in the provincial final, the whole country was aware of Setanta. ‘Santy’s on the run’, shrieked
Cyril Farrell, the
Sunday Game Live
TV analyst, during the All-Ireland semi-final replay against Wexford. It reflected the growing excitement everywhere about hurling’s new superstar.
Although Cork were beaten in the All-Ireland final by Kilkenny, Setanta and Seán Óg had enjoyed a memorable first season together in the Cork jersey. Both were selected as All Stars at the end of the season and Setanta was named Vodafone Young Hurler of the Year. But on the night of the glittering All Stars banquet in early December it was Emile who accepted the award on behalf of her third son. Setanta was on the far side of the world in the land of his birth starting a new adventure.
‘It had been a great year but there was no indication until very late that Setanta would get the opportunity to go to Australia and embark on what he hoped would be a professional career,’ says Seán Óg. ‘It was a fantastic opportunity for him and he has done very well out there. So while having the chance to play together in 2003 was a great privilege, I look back on it with a tinge of sadness because I don’t see him coming back now, at least not before I stop playing.’
While Setanta went through the arduous task of adapting to a new game in Melbourne, Seán Óg and Cork embarked on another wonderful odyssey in 2004. It was almost certainly Seán Óg’s best year in the Cork jersey and he ended with another All-Ireland medal, his second All Star and won both the Vodafone and Texaco Hurler of the Year awards. But the year was memorable for other reasons too. ‘The journey that began in the back yard back in 1990 reached its destination,’ is how Seán Óg explains it. Na Piarsaigh won the Cork Senior Championship and Seán Óg, Setanta and Aisake Ó hAilpín were part of the victorious team.
‘Setanta had signed a contract with Carlton AFL club that year but was home for a few weeks. The club management convinced him to help us out. He came on in the county semi-final and won it for us. Then he was a great target man for us in the final.’
Seán Óg and Setanta also played together for Ireland in the International Rules series against Australia that autumn. Seán Óg was a mildly controversial selection because he had not been involved with inter-county football for four seasons. ‘It came out of the blue. I was reluctant at the start to become involved because I knew there would be hassle and I didn’t need it. But
Larry Tompkins [a selector with Ireland] convinced me to give it a try. I was embarrassed going to the first trial. I knew there would be people wondering what I was doing there, this hurler. But very quickly I got to know the lads, they welcomed me and I began to feel part of it. Now I treasure it, because beating the Aussies ended a great season on the right note. The fact that Setanta would be playing was a big factor too and it was great to win the series that year. It really made 2004 special for me.’