John Keegan, PRO with Clontarf GAA Club in north Dublin, has been involved with Gaelic Games almost all his life – even as far afield as sunny California. Robert Carry reports
“They are our own national sports, and they’re unique,” says John Keegan, Clontarf GAA Club’s public relations officer, speaking of the games he has played since he was a 10 year old. The 40-year-old recalls: “I grew up in Clontarf and I was brought to Croke Park every other Sunday. The first match I went to was in 1974 when Dublin were doing well, so I got interested from there.”
Membership of a GAA club is often for life, but the relatively young Clontarf GAA Club, which was founded in 1961, catered only for footballers for most of its early years, and this caused problems for John. “Back then, hurling would have been my first love,” he remembers. “I had to move to O’Tooles GAA club at under-16 [level] because there was no hurling in Clontarf at that level. That’s not the case now, though.”
When his sojourn at O’Tooles came to an end, John returned Clontarf, where he played football up until he moved to the US for work in 1991. Although he remained in southern California for the following seven years, it certainly did not mean the end of his involvement with the GAA.
He got involved with an LA-based GAA club called Cúchulainns, where he quickly moved up the ranks. “I ended up being chairman,” says John. “I became president of the GAA in southern California, and stayed in that role for four years until I came back to Ireland in 1998. There were about 600 members broken up between seven teams in southern California at the time.”
John says of the ex-pats playing the games under the California sun: “We didn’t play all year round, but for three months of the year it would be extremely competitive.”
But it wasn’t just Irish emigrants and people of Irish stock who were taking to the field. “It was mostly Irish, but there was a number of players from the States and elsewhere who played,” he says. “Around 10 to 20 per cent of the players who got involved were non-Irish.”
John returned home in 1998 and slipped straight back into playing with Clontarf. In fact, he continued playing right up until last year, while also managing junior football teams.
However, the workload became something of a struggle and he was forced to pare back – John’s playing career was the first to go, followed by his higher-level managerial commitments.
But while he may not be taking up as many high-profile positions within the club, John is still very much part of the set-up. “I’m on the club executive since 2004 and one of the duties I have is to look after the PR,” he points out. “It involves working on the website, which is a huge focus at the moment, [as well as] communications, distributing information and keeping members updated. I also take photos on behalf of the club.”
While a lot of GAA clubs are struggling to keep membership numbers high, Clontarf has identified a possible solution: “We’ve had a tremendous uptake at our nursery level and that has been the key. Noel McCarffrey, who played for Dublin, was one of the main people who revamped it, and it has been a huge success story. We’ve managed to double our membership in the space of five years.”
Among those arriving into the swelling ranks of Clontarf’s younger teams have been a number of non-Irish nationals. “We’re starting to get a few at the underage level,” says John. “And we’re expecting a lot more over the next few years.”
