Very interesting stuff from Sid Wallace on boards.ie For what its worth, my read on our history was that up until the 1920s, large parts of the City were hostile to the Gaelic Revival, the Sinn Fein movement, and the like. Im sure the GAA in the City was equally disadvantaged. The City was a Redmondite hotbed and reports of the violence around the 1918 bye election give a good flavour of the atmosphere in the City. If you read the reports of the Bureau of Military history, it is notable that Sinn Feiners were afraid to walk out on their own as they were afraid of being attacked. De Valera didnt win a seat here either in the next general election and is said to have remarked that he wouldnt rest until there was grass growing on the Quay in Waterford City. Willie Walsh after whom the Sportsfield is named, the famous referee, was officer in command of the local IRA, I am sure that a large portion of the Citys population would have felt alienated from the GAA as well. And there was a ruckus over usage of the Sportsfield by other sports around 1912 which I think led Kilkenny and Wexford teams to boycott the ground. At this time there is no major evidence of any GAA presence among the population of the City and the dominant club in the county at this time were Meaghers who hailed from out Ballygunner, Gaultier way. So the city I dont think had much of a GAA tradition and while hurling was played on the borders with Cork and Tipperary in places like Mocollop and Ballyduff, football would have been more dominant in the rest of county as evidenced by a Dungarvan team winning our sole Munster football title in 1898. I am inclined to believe that that background largely explains our pitiful performance in the years up to independence. Until 1926 the only team we had beaten in Munster hurling was Kerry and in that year we defeated Clare and qualified for our first Munster final. We were hammered by Tipperary. The key turning point in the City was I think the arrival of Brother Malone at Mount Sion, though I suspect there was a plan to Gaelicise the City anyway. Mount Sion started to churn out brilliant hurlers, first Locky Byrne, then John Keane. By repute Mount Sion became the school that Gaels sent the boys to and De La Salle remained the school for Royalists. Anyway by 1929 Waterford had improved enough to win the minor All Ireland and by 1931 were good enough to draw with Cork in Clonmel in the 1931 Munster SHC Final. Locky Byrne played in both the minor and senior final that day. That was the great Cork team that defeated Kilkenny in the second replay of the Final that year. By 1934 we had won two All Ireland juniors, no mean feat and by 1938 we won our first Munster senior helped by the Jimmy Cooney controversy that did for Tipperary. We should have added the All Ireland, but that came on a great day in 1948 where we did the senior and minor double. That was an old team though and we fell back again until the mid 50s when a team backboned by Harty Cup winners from Mount Sion stormed the hurling world. In fairness that team should have won more than one All Ireland but it had a really long tail and was competitive until at least 1967. Bear in mind that at about the time this team drew to a close Waterford FC was the utterly dominant soccer team in the land at a time when Irish people went to Irish soccer matches. Although I was a hurling nut I remember all the talk around the town amongst the youngsters was about European Cup games against Honved and Manchester United and very little of it was about hurling. I think the first soccer match in Lansdowne road was when Waterford played United who were European champions at the time. At the same time the dominance of Erins Own and then Mount Sion had I think sucked the life out of the championship here. Then as happened with similar schools all over the country, Mount Sion went into terminal decline in the 1970s and this combined with many of the most athletic chaps in the city preferring soccer turned off the tap of hurlers from the school. The school actually won a schools soccer All Ireland in the 80s. Soccer then went into terminal decline after the advent of Match of the Day, and there were a few stirrings on the hurling front in the 80s, but there were a couple of events in the 1990s that turned hurling on its head again. First and obviously were the crop of underage hurlers and particularly the ones from the West. Mount Sion had no representative on the minor team (managed by Jim Greene coincidentally, which might give conspiracy theorists here pause for thought) and Tony Browne was the only one on the under 21. Again the influence of a Christian Brother was vital, this time Brother Dormer in Lismore. The other key thing that happened in the 1990s was that Ballygunner now having a huge population threw down the gauntlet to Mount Sion. Mount Sion had become very complacent (allied to the difficulty with the school) and hadnt won a minor from 1969 to 1989 and an under 21 from 1974 to 1985 and were riven by the Roanmore split, but could still tip away and win a championship every other year. That certainty disappeared when Ballygunner relied on the bye law and took the 1992 final to Dungarvan and beat Mount Sion. By the end of the decade there was real poison between the two and each upped their game to get the better of each other. Eventually other clubs realised they could get in on the act. Ultimately I think that the arrival of the crop of 1992, together with the reinvigoration of the club championship had as much impact on the county team as the arrival of Gerald McCarthy. Remember we ran Tipperary very close in Walsh Park in 1996 under Tony Mansfield. On the other hand Gerald did bring in a level of professionalism that we hadnt seen before. But equally I think Paddy Joe Ryan deserves a bit of the credit for having a bit of vision. Like the 1959 team the 1998 team had a long tail, as well and we are dealing with the aftermath of that now. Our history dictates a couple of things. We got off to a slow start in the GAA and well never win 34 All Irelands, but once we got the hang of hurling we have shown a tendency to bounce back after a decline and produce great teams again. Those teams arent outliers. They are the product of a production line of young hurlers. Occasionally our production line broke down but we always fix it.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 21:39:21 +0000