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Gort GAA Club, Galway

Last update - Thursday, June 7, 2007, 00:00 By Metro Éireann

 Jeremiah Sheehan, secretary of Gort GAA Club, is part of an institution which boasts of being one of the longest-serving in the GAA. Robert Carry reports 

Gort GAA (hurling) club is one of the oldest in the Galway region and, as might be expected, has a seriously illustrious history. It was founded in its current form around 1900 when a regional diocese shake-up created parish boundaries, but hurling was being played in the area well before then.

Extracts from the 18th-century newspaper Pue’s Occ-urrences described a match in which a Galway side went up against a team from Clare in October 1759 for a purse of 100 guineas. Another early reference to Gort hurlers came from John Gormally, secretary of the Galway County Board in the early part of the 20th century, who noted: “The men of Gort went on horseback to play the men of Offaly in Athlone on 15 August 1854. The team comprised of 21 players, and Gort won by 2 goals to 1 goal.”

This long tradition of hurling translated into success at all levels for Gort’s early hurlers, representing Galway at inter-county level regularly over the last 100 years. Despite a relative lull in Gort’s high-end successes in recent times, club secretary Jeremiah Sheehan says it is still very much a thriving club.

“We have around 250 people and eight teams,” he says. “There’s the senior team, two junior teams, then under-21, 18, 16, 14, 12 and under-10s. We’ve also got a camogie set-up and although there’s no adult team, we do have a number of junior sides.”

Notably, the club also boasts three playing pitches, one of which is of inter-county standard and features a 1,000-seater stand. Sheehan, who has been involved with the club for the past 25 years, adds: “We’re in the process of building four new dressing rooms, so our facilities are improving all the time.”

As is so often the case in rural areas, Gort GAA Club has come to be seen as a focal point for the local community. “There’s no doubt about it, the GAA always was the social life of the locality,” says Sheehan, “and Gort is no different. You can’t understate how important it is to people. It’s like a religion.”

The senior team’s last match was against Sarsfields, and some of the passion GAA supporters have for the games leaked through as Sheehan gave a rundown of how the match played out: “We were 9 points ahead with 10 minutes before the end, after having lost one of our players around halfway through the second half. He was double yellow-carded so we were down to 14 men. Somehow we managed to regroup and with a 9-point cushion and 10 minutes to go we looked safe. Unfortunately, we lost concentration and the opposition went into injury time 1 point up. Happily, we came back and in the last minute of the game one of our forwards was able to tap over an equaliser!”

Gort has become widely known in recent years for the massive Brazilian community that has opted to call the small, wind-battered west-coast town its home. The new community has just started to take an interest in GAA and there are now two Brazilian girls playing in the camogie set-up, and one young man playing with the underage hurlers.

But despite this relatively modest start, Sheehan believes they will eventually get more fully involved. “Given time they will get into the swing of things,” he says. “It’s a new culture for them but they’re eager to get involved in the community generally so it’s only a matter of time.

“Brazilians are probably the best athletes to be found anywhere in the world so we would love to have more on board.”
Sheehan is currently working on a report for a community development course he is taking in University College Galway which examines the causes of, and possible solutions to, the decline in the number of people getting involved with the GAA in the Galway region.

The former player does not believe that immigrants can fully fill the gap, feeling instead that the association needs to try to adopt some of the professionalism of its soccer and rugby rivals in order to attract and retain potential future athletes.

Sheehan comments: “It’s a case of needing to professionalise the structures in the clubs and adopt a more professional coaching system. The presentation of our games hasn’t matched rugby and soccer. You can go to a venue for a game and you might see teams strolling out after the appointed time. That doesn’t happen in other sports.”

But although it may at times need polishing up a bit, Gort is still very much in love with the GAA. Hopefully the town’s newest arrivals will come to think of it in the same way.

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