Brothers in Sport (6 page)

His eldest son
David enjoyed prolific success with the club, winning county titles at minor, under-21 and senior level.
Dermot Junior began to mock the supposed burden of a famous name when he won a Kildare Minor Championship in 1996 and by 1998 he was a member of the Kildare senior team under the management of Mick
O’Dwyer. Despite being one of the best supported counties in football, Kildare had not won a Leinster title for thirty-two years. But the Earley family was out in force in Croke Park on 2 August when
Dermot Junior played a major part in their victory over Meath. They beat Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final and played a huge role in one of the most entertaining finals of the modern era, losing narrowly to Galway. He joined his father and uncle Paul on the All Stars roll of honour that year and won a second award at midfield in 2009. Uniquely, the youngest Earley, Noelle, was named on the Ladies’ Football All Stars selection just weeks later. Dermot and his wife Mary have three other children, Conor, Paula and Anne Marie.

Paul also caught the coaching bug. He returned from Australia in 1998 and immediately became involved with the Allenwood club in Kildare. ‘I had no experience at all but I tried to combine all that I had learned during my time with Roscommon with what I had learned from the professional game in Australia and I thoroughly enjoyed my three years with the club.’ During that time, Allenwood reached the Kildare senior football final. Inevitably, their opponents were Sarsfields of Newbridge, for whom
Dermot Junior and
David Earley were playing, with Dermot Senior a selector. Sarsfields took the laurels. Paul enjoyed another three-year spell with the Celbridge club and they progressed from playing in Division Two of the League to reaching the quarter-finals of the County Championship. Now, as a Level Two coach, he is assisting the Leinster Council of the GAA in their coach development programme.

During 2008 he had his first experience of inter-county management when he took on an emergency role with Roscommon following the resignation of John
Maughan. While the Roscommon County Board sought a permanent replacement, Paul agreed to take temporary charge. ‘I loved the job even though I only did it for a month, but I just did not have the time to take it on for any longer.

‘I would love to be an inter-county manager and maybe some time in the future it will happen for me. But it is a full-time job and I already have one of those [he works in the financial services industry]. I have a huge interest in coaching, but I see what the commitment to the inter-county scene is and at the moment I could not give it the time. I was interviewed a few years ago for a manager’s job and I told the county chairman involved at the time that I could only do it if the post was offered on a full-time basis. Of course that was not possible, but I thought I had to be honest.

‘The inter-county manager’s job is a sixty-hour week. I really admire the guys who are doing it at the moment. To combine it with work and a family life is really difficult. [Paul and Mairéad have three children, twins Ailbhe and Lea, and Declan]. At the moment I’m afraid I just do not have the time to give it the sort of commitment it deserves. Hopefully that will not always be the case.’

Five decades have passed since the Earley name first seeped into the public consciousness and this story is not yet completed.

All Stars: Dermot Earley Jnr celebrates a player of the month award with his mother Mary and father Dermot Snr.
© Brian Lawless/SPORTSFILE

Seán Lowry, winner of three All-Ireland senior medals with Offaly, pictured during the 1981 final against Kerry.
©
Ray McManus/SPORTSFILE

Some days are more inspirational than others. Imagine those that immediately followed Offaly’s All-Ireland Football Championship final victory in October 1972 when the players took the Sam Maguire Cup on the traditional parade of the schools of the county. The team captain
Tony
McTague was especially in demand, but there was no more important visit than that to the national school in Ferbane, his home place in west
Offaly. Accompanying him on that visit was his twenty-year-old team-mate Seán Lowry, another former pupil at the school.

They carried the famous trophy through the familiar gates and walked the corridors from memory. They exchanged greetings with teachers they knew as friends. And they recognised in the excited faces of the children the features of their parents, many of whom
Tony and Seán worked with or played with. Two of the faces among the boys from fifth and sixth classes were more familiar than others to Seán Lowry. They were his brothers, Brendan and Michael, and their smiles were as broad as any in the school and their beaming faces were full of pride for their oldest brother.

‘I felt like I was ten foot tall in the classroom that day,’ Michael remembers fondly. ‘Seán had the cup and it looked huge, it was full of Cidona and to us it was the greatest thing in the world. I had a dream that some day in the future I would bring the cup into our school. There’s no harm in a young lad having his dreams, is there?’

But even during those exciting, fun-filled and happy days when it felt absolutely as if dreams could be fulfilled, no one could possibly have imagined what the future held for the Lowry clan, the All-Ireland hero and his kid brothers. Ten years later, on 19 September 1982, Seán, Brendan and Michael Lowry would play together for Offaly in one of the most famous All-Ireland final victories of them all when they stopped Kerry’s bid for a historic five consecutive Championships.

They would do it with panache and style, fierce will and possibly the most famous goal ever scored in the football Championship. ‘An awful lot has happened since that day,’ says Seán. ‘A lot of teams have won the All-Ireland for the first time, there have been great matches and great teams, but hardly a week goes by that someone does not ask me about that final. You could go to a funeral and be in the process of commiserating with someone and they will say “I was looking at the 1982 final on TV the other night”. It’s amazing.’

Almost thirty years have passed and the Lowry name is back in the sporting headlines, not just in Ireland but around the world. Shane Lowry is making his exciting way in the world of professional golf, an Irish Open title won when he was still in the amateur ranks. As the world gets to know this talented youngster, the media consistently refer to him as the son of ‘the famous Offaly footballer Brendan Lowry’.

* * *

Like so many young couples of their generation, Ned and Margaret Lowry left Ireland in the 1950s to find employment abroad. They based themselves in Manchester where the first few of their eleven children, including Seán, were born. They kept in close contact with their families back home, always listening for news of employment opportunities in a homeland that was embracing the modern world. The Electricity Supply Board was expanding and one of its major projects was the opening of the power station in Ferbane. Ned Lowry saw his opportunity to return to Ireland and secured employment at the plant. ‘I always say that only for the power station in Ferbane I would have ended up playing for Manchester United instead of Offaly,’ jokes Seán.

Ireland was changing rapidly as a country. The ESB and Bord na Móna were among the major employers. ‘Without them a lot of the people in Offaly and other counties would have had to look elsewhere in the country or more likely out of the country for work,’ Seán explains. ‘And it is hard to imagine that Offaly would have been winning football All-Irelands in the 1970s and 1980s if those jobs had not been made available.’

Back in Ireland and settled in Ferbane, the growing Lowry family was comfortable among family and friends. They worked hard and found respite with football and hurling. Ned Lowry was a passionate football man. His brothers Art and Joe played for Offaly. Art farmed in Clogherinkoe and his son John later played for Kildare against an Offaly team that included cousin Seán. The maternal gene also contained plenty of football DNA. The Horans of Ballycumber were a renowned football family. ‘We were reared on stories of club games, the hitting and the fights. They’d call it dirt now, but then it was regarded as manly stuff,’ explains Seán. ‘My Uncle Johnny always told me to keep my elbows up to protect myself.’

The swinging 1960s began with Offaly winning its first ever Leinster senior football title. The county became transfixed with the fortunes of a hugely talented group of footballers who would inspire Championship-winning generations to come. They might have won an All-Ireland title themselves had they managed to avoid the crusading Down team that emerged from Ulster to claim Sam Maguire and bring his trophy across the border for the very first time in 1960. The team of Kevin Mussen,
Dan and Jim
McCarthan, Joe
Lennon, Paddy
Doherty and Seán
O’Neill thwarted Offaly in the 1960 All-Ireland semi-final and the 1961 final after a replay.

But those Offaly giants awoke a county. Willie Nolan,
Paddy
McCormack, Greg
Hughes, Phil
O’Reilly and Mick
Casey were just some of the heroes. Ned Lowry went to all the games. Tim
Egan in Ferbane owned a car and he had a regular load to travel to Portlaoise, Croke Park or wherever Offaly were playing. Young Seán also secured a ride. ‘It cost my father five shillings for himself and two and six for me.’

On summer evenings on the green in front of the terrace where the Lowrys and their neighbours made their homes, the boys learned their football skills. They played all sports, whatever was the fashion of the week, but football was dominant. They would start around 4 p.m. and might not finish until close to midnight. Those were carefree days and skills were honed during the long hours. ‘We had no gear then,’ Seán says. ‘That led to a few problems if you came home to your mother with the toe off your shoe, a tear in the knee of your trousers or a green grass stain on your good shirt. It was a struggle for our poor mothers to keep everything right. But we were always doing something.

‘Those days you wouldn’t even think of being bored. There was always something to do. If we weren’t on the green, we would be out in the fields with the men helping on the land. You’d get fifteen shillings for a day’s work and you handed up twelve shillings and six pence to your mother.’

Among the older lads kicking football around the green were
Seán Grogan and
Tony McTague. The Grogans were a football-mad family and Seán
Grogan was named captain of the Offaly minor team in 1964.
Tony took the frees. They won the Leinster title by beating Laois by a single point. They went on to win the All-Ireland title, Offaly’s first in any grade, beating Cork in the final. The seeds for success were being firmly planted.

The Lowry family was growing all the time. Éamon, Joe, Jimmy, Mary, Brendan, Michael, Eileen, Kieran and Tom joined Rose and Seán. Éamon played football with Offaly during the 1970s and was captain of Ferbane when they won the County Championship in 1974. Everyone joined in the adventures on the green. They didn’t need organised sport. They managed for themselves. Under-age and schools football were not as organised as they are today. County trials were held for the minor team and clubs sent in four or five players for those trials after which a team would be picked for a Championship game the following Sunday. There were no formal training sessions. They were different times, Seán says. ‘I remember when I was picked for the minors and a few days later a parcel arrived at the house. It had an O’Neill’s football in it. Whoever sent it remained anonymous and to this day I don’t know who the donor was. I remember pumping the ball and the whole terrace came out to play with it. It was a huge thing to have an O’Neill’s ball. Of course, after two days it was kicked out on the road and a car ran over it. But it shows how times were.’

Seán also played at under-21 level for Offaly and at the age of nineteen, in 1971, he was called into the Offaly senior panel for the Championship and ended up with an All-Ireland medal as a substitute. He felt privileged just to be associated with the team that would make history by bringing the Sam Maguire Cup back to Offaly for the first time. A year later, he was wearing the number six jersey as Offaly retained that title by beating a famous Kerry team in a replay. ‘I was just twenty years old and life was wonderful. I had two Leinster senior medals, two All-Ireland medals and two Leinster under-21 medals. I thought this was going to happen every year.’

He was young and happy. Life was to be enjoyed and there was no better way to enjoy it than by winning big football games. Ferbane won the Offaly Senior Championship in 1971 for the first time since 1914. It was getting better and better. The club was always a priority. ‘I’ve always said if you haven’t a passion for your club you will never make it. When I’m eyeing up a footballer I never worry too much at first about how good he is; I go back and see what kind of lad he is. You’d often hear “he doesn’t bother with the club much” and that means he is no good to me.’

Seán enjoyed playing with good players and there were plenty of them on the Offaly team on which he became a regular as the 1972 Championship progressed. The quality is apparent just in reading the names:
Martin Furlong, Michael Ryan,
Paddy McCormack,
Larry Coughlan, Eugene
Mulligan, Martin Heavey,
Willie Bryan,
Seán Evans,
Seán Cooney, Kevin
Kilmurray, Séamus
Darby, John Smith,
Paddy
Fenning,
Murt Connor, Nicholas
Clavin and Mick Wright among them. It was an injury to
Clavin that gave Seán his chance. He would remain in the Offaly colours for another eleven seasons.

They won the Leinster Championship by beating Meath and Kildare. They accounted for Donegal in the All-Ireland semi-final and then met a star-studded Kerry team in the final.
Mick
O’Connell and
John
O’Keeffe formed a powerful midfield partnership; Donie
O’Sullivan and Micheál Ó Sé were two of the outstanding defenders; the forwards included Brendan
Lynch, Dan Kavanagh, Mick
Gleeson,
Éamon O’Donoghue and Mick
O’Dwyer. Kerry were the traditional giants but, on 24 September 1972, Offaly were the better team yet had to be satisfied at the end with a draw, 1–13 each, in front of 72,000, a new record for the reconstructed Croke Park.

The replay was fixed for 15 October. Kerry led early in the second half until a speculative ball from
Paddy Fenning was allowed to fly straight into the net. Offaly seized the initiative –
Bryan out-fielded
O’Connell;
McTague scored 0–10 of Offaly’s 1–19 in a convincing victory. There wasn’t a happier man in Ireland than Seán Lowry, was there? Maybe one. ‘My father, Ned. It was a great time for him. He had brought me everywhere as a boy, gave me all the encouragement I could ask for. He didn’t rant or rave, just had a quiet word here or there, little words of encouragement and advice that meant so much.’ He was fifty-four then and died at just sixty in 1978. ‘I’m so glad he saw me win an All-Ireland but it is sad that he was not around for 1982.’

Seán looks back now and reflects on how football has changed so dramatically. ‘It was very direct then. Kicking skills were so much better. That was the benefit of how we played as kids on the green in Ferbane or anywhere in Ireland really. At home, I could kick the ball 150 times in an evening. Now lads go training and they mightn’t see a ball at all. And then they go home to the PlayStation.’

Offaly retained the Leinster Championship in 1973 but lost to Galway in the All-Ireland semi-final. ‘I think now I should have savoured those days more because there were barren years to come,’ says Seán. But through those years Seán,
Martin Furlong and Séamus
Darby kept the faith. Their success had fired the imagination of the youth of the county in the same way as the team of 1960 and 1961 had inspired them. For six years they had to sit and watch as
Kevin Heffernan’s Dublin revolution brought new colour to football and Mick
O’Dwyer turned to coaching and created the Kerry team many now call the greatest ever. They could not have known the part they would eventually play in the story of that team and in the history of football.