Guest post: Mayo wins All-Ireland; ends 75-year curse

Leave a reply

(Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my ancestral roots in County Kerry. So it is in the spirit of good sportsmanship and friendship that I am delighted to publish this guest post by County Mayo historian Daniel Carey. MH) 

It’s an Irish sporting story that’s been heard round the world. Former US President Joe Biden has sent his congratulations. The New York Times has written in depth about it. And a lot of people who thought Mayo was only a thick, creamy sauce now know it’s also the home of the All-Ireland Gaelic football champions.

Daniel Carey, left, and Eamonn McConnon of DCU Research enjoy a post-match drink.

Mayo’s victory in the final against defending champions Kerry (who were seeking a record fortieth title) marked the end of a long wait. This title, Mayo’s fourth, came 75 years since their last success in the premier competition for Gaelic football. Since 1951, when they last triumphed, Mayo have been to the All-Ireland final eleven times, and came up short every time. Until 2026.

Much of the international coverage of Mayo’s triumph has been framed around the ending of a curse to rival that of the Bambino (Babe Ruth and the Boston Red Sox, 1918-2004), or the Chicago Cubs billy goat (1945-2016). In Ireland, the story goes that overly enthusiastic celebrations in the wake of the 1951 success disrupted a funeral in the Mayo town of Foxford, which prompted an enraged priest to announce that Mayo would never win an All-Ireland title while the players involved were still alive. The fact that there is no record of any such funeral taking place, or any account of an alleged curse dating back further than the 1990s, were, of course, mere details. A series of hard-luck stories in finals had made the curse a part of Mayo lore. The last surviving member of the squad died in 2023.

Curse or no curse, Ireland in 1951 was a very different place than today. The major political scandal that year involved the resignation of Minister for Health Noel Browne, whose efforts to introduce free maternity care (the so-called Mother and Child Scheme) faltered in the face of opposition from the Catholic Church hierarchy and the medical establishment and a cabinet happy to have the bishops dictate social policy. Mass attendance (more than 95 percent among Irish Catholics in the early 1950s, according to historian Louise Fuller) was then a rite observed by virtually all match attendees on Sunday morning. Not that there was a shortage of Mayo prayers in 2026: the day of the final coincided with Reek Sunday, an annual day of pilgrimage in which thousands come to Mayo to climb Croagh Patrick, a holy mountain on which Saint Patrick is said to have fasted for forty days on the summit.

Ireland is not only a less religious society three-quarters of a century on, it has also been transformed by technology. Much of Mayo was without electricity in 1951, the rural electrification scheme having only begun in 1946. Running water and indoor toilets were also beyond the reach of many. People sharing accounts of attending the 1951 final describe journeying the width of the country by bicycle. One thing remains the same: though they may train like professionals, then as now the players are amateurs; they receive travelling expenses, but not pay for play.

Unemployment and emigration were facts of life in the impoverished west of Ireland in the mid-twentieth century. The Commission on Emigration and Other Problems report, released in 1954, found that Mayo had experienced net emigration of 52,200 between 1926 and 1951. The destinations may have changed – young adults now head for Dubai or Australia rather than Boston or Cleveland – but Mayo people can still be found all over the world. In his post-match speech, Mayo captain Jack Coyne specifically mentioned those living far from home. “To every young boy and girl across Mayo and our diaspora across the world,” he said, “never stop dreaming, stick your chests out and be proud to be from Mayo.”

There was barely a dry eye in the house as Coyne uttered those words, having moments earlier lifted the Sam Maguire Cup (a trophy named for a Cork-born Irish republican, a replica of the famous Ardagh Chalice). While fans of the losing team generally leave before the formal presentation, most the 83,000-plus crowd remained in situ to watch history being made.

Irish newspapers reported Mayo’s victory in the 2026 All-Ireland Gaelic football final, ending a 75-year “curse” since the county’s last win in 1951.

In the absence of television (which would not arrive in Ireland for another decade), footage of the 1951 final appeared on newsreels. Television was, of course, the medium of choice in 2026 for those watching live, but social media has dominated the dissemination since. Mayo manager Andy Moran, a celebrated former player, himself referenced the two-minute clip of the final stages of the game as heard on the local station, Midwest Radio. Mayo fan Shane Fitzgerald was captured on camera blessing himself, bursting into tears and collapsing to his knees at the final whistle. Congratulatory messages came in to this writer’s phone from all parts of Ireland … and from Indian, Iranian and American friends who have been introduced to the Mayo story and been captivated by it.

The county anthem ‘The Green and Red of Mayo’ (sung by the Saw Doctors, a band from neighbouring County Galway) got not one but two outings over the Croke Park public address system after the final whistle … and has been heard hundreds of time since. Twenty-four hours later, approximately 60,000 people were at MacHale Park, the Mayo stadium in the county town of Castlebar, to welcome home the team (and the Sam Maguire Cup). Joe Biden was referencing the eponymous trophy when he shouted “Mayo for Sam” on a visit to his ancestral home of Ballina in 2023. Three years later – nay, 75 years later – Sam is finally in Mayo. And there’s been no talk about disrupted funerals.

(Daniel Carey is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Communications in Dublin City University. His current project, funded by Research Ireland, examines the archives of the Catholic Standard newspaper, published in Ireland between 1928 and 1978. A native of Mayo, he spent 11 years as a print journalist with the Westport-based Mayo News.)

On printing, and reproducing, the 1916 Easter Proclamation

Leave a reply

Scituate, Massachusetts, USA, part of the South Shore Irish Heritage Trail. (October 2022)

The three men inside Dublin’s Libery Hall surely heard the church bells tolling on Easter Sunday, even over the cacophany of their printing press. Perhaps the trio reflectively straightened to bless themselves. But they quickly returned to their ink-stained work, laboring from midday Sunday until early Monday morning. Hours later, in front the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, Pádraig Pearse read aloud from a copy of their finished work: the 1916 Easter Proclamation:

“IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom. …”

Before that signal moment, the three workers–printer Christopher Brady, and compositors Michael Malloy and Liam O’Brien–produced the Proclamation in two stages, top and bottom, due to lack of type. The two sections are identifiable by different line spacing. The tempramental rollers of their old Wharfdale Double-Crown printing press meant uneven pressure smudged some letters, while others appeared too faint. See images and videio at this online exhibition from University College Cork.

Copies of the Easter Proclamation proliferated quickly. Fascimiles and newly typeset versions appeared in the American press within days of the British military supressing the uprising. More copies appeared after the execution of the rebel leaders.

From the front page of Fall River (Massachusetts) Daily Globe, May 19, 1916. Press reports as early as May 1, 1916, quoted the Proclamation in full.  

About 60 origional copies of the Declaration are know to have survived from a press run estaimated at no more than 1,000.  That’s 6 percent, 110 years later. As context, there are 26 origional copies of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, known as the Dunlap Broadside, from a press run of 200. That’s 13 percent, 250 years later.

About half the surving origional copies of the Procalamation are held at public institutions in Ireland, including UCC and Trinity College Dublin. But the document has been widely reproduced, including public monuments on both sides of the Atlantic. See top and below.

Dungarvan, County Waterford, Ireland. (June 2026)

Leon Uris’s ‘Trinity’ at 50

Leave a reply

I am traveling and working on several projects this summer. New posts will be infrequent. The piece linked below appears in the July/August issue of the Dublin-based History Ireland magazine. MH

American author Leon Uris released his eighth novel, Trinity, shortly before St Patrick’s Day 1976 and the deadliest years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In promotional interviews Uris emphasized that readers would ‘better understand the headlines coming out of Ireland today, because the past of Ireland is being constantly repeated’. This was a paraphrase of his novel’s soon-to-be-famous last sentence, that ‘in Ireland there is no future, only the past happening over and over’, which modified a line from Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Read ‘When Irish History, And News, Became Best-Selling Fiction’ at History Ireland.

 

Three postcards from Ireland, summer 2026

I am traveling and working on several projects. New posts will be infrequent through the summer. I’m happy to be in Ireland at the moment. Three postcards below. MH

Looking northeast from the 10th floor of the Central Plaza building in Temple Bar, Dublin: construction cranes at left; the Ha’penny pedestrain bridge over the tree-lined north side of the River Liffey, center left; the Spire of Dublin on O’Connell Street, near the historic General Post Office, and top portion of Croke Park, center horizon; and the 17-story Liberty Hall, once the tallest building in Ireland, at far right. View through glass panel.Round towers at the Glendalough monastic ruins in County Wicklow.The Waterford Greenway, right, looking southwest about 6K outside Dungarvan, County Waterford. Not a drop of rain fell during my cycle.

TCD offers Davitt exhibit onsite & online through June

Davitt

“Michael Davitt was a prolific writer, keeping diaries of his ideas and impressions while working as a freelance journalist for most of his career. Many of his articles took the form of letters to the press, which were later published as pamphlets. Through his journalism, Davitt practiced a form of activism, using his writing to highlight the struggles of society’s most marginalised and advocate for reforms and support.”

The quote is from the Character is better than wealth: The enduring legacy of Michael Davitt exhibition at Trinity College Dublin. It was curated by Ciara Daly, a project archivist at TCD, which holds some 7,000 items from Davitt’s lifetime, 1846-1906. He visited the United States six times between 1878 and 1901.

I spent a few days in February 2018 reviewing a portion of the Davitt archive, and visiting the Michael Davitt Musuem in Straide, County Mayo, where he was born and buried. The research related to my “Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited” project, mentioned in the previous post. See the posts Meeting Davitt and More Davitt. My piece “1888: An American Journalist In Ireland Meets Michael Davitt & Arthur Balfour” also published on The Irish Story later that year.

Davitt’s grave, Straide, County Mayo, February 2018.

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. I can be reached via contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

An American journalist’s connection to Ireland and Egypt

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. I can be reached via contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

What does a 3,500-year-old Egyptian red granite obelisk in New York City’s Central Park have to do with Ireland or Irish America? Nothing. But there are indirect connections.

Hurlbert

William Henry Hurlbert, a late-nineteenth century editor of the New York World, determined the city should match London’s acquisition of a similar object. His campaign resulted in the June 1880 arrival of the seven-story (69 feet) obelisk, seen below. It was raised in February 1881 on a small hill behind the Metrololitian Museum of Art, which opened about the same time. The MET holds one of the world’s largest Egyptian collections under its roof, in addition to the so-called “Cleopatra’s Needle” in the park.

The link to Ireland comes through Hurlbert, who traveled throughout the island in early 1888. Later that year he published the book, Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. The conservative Hurlbert was pro-landlord and anti-home rule. Read about his work in my 2018 blog series: “Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited.”

I have visited numerous places in Ireland that Hurlbert described in his book. I was pleased to remember his connection to the obelisk as I walked through Central Park on my way to the American Irish Historical Society. Founded in Boston in 1897 (Hurlbert died two years earlier), the Society since 1940 has been located at 991 Fifth Avenue, directly across from the MET, barely a five-minute walk from the granite tower.

American journalist William Henry Hurlbert led an 1880 campaign to bring this Egyptian obelisk to Central Park in New York City. Eight years later he wrote a book about Ireland.

Car bombs raise terrorist threats in Northern Ireland

UPDATE:

“No matter ‘how scaled down’ the New IRA is, there will always be dissidents married to the idea of the ‘long war’ and prepared to ‘carry the flame’ of violent republicanism from one generation to the next, regardless of the contrary views of the overwhelming mass of the population.” Nice roundup piece by Gerry Moriarty at the Irish Times. … A 66-year-old man has charged with several crimes in the Dunmurry episode.

ORIGINAL POST:

An April 25 car bomb explosion outside the Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, police station appears similar to an attempted attack on the Lurgan police station in March. The bomb did not explode in the earlier episode.  No one has been killed or injured.

Nationalist and unionist political leaders have condemed both episodes, which are being blamed on dissident Irish republicans. Whether the attacks signal a new upsurge in paramilitary violence remains to be seen. The annual tensions of the unionist community’s marching season and bonfires begin in two months.

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. Reach me from the contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

Ireland’s 1926 census released to the public

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. Reach me from contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

—

More than 700,000 digitized pages of 1926 Irish Free State census return sheets have been released by the National Archives of Ireland. The sheets show names and individualized details such as religion, education, and occupation. They are a gold mine for historians and genealogists.

I located my relations in less than a minute. Begin your search here.

January 1926 US newspaper headline over Hearst story about census on both sides of the Irish border.

The 1926 census was the first headcount in Ireland since 1911. The 15-year stretch included the First World War (1914-1918), Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), and Irish Civil War (1922-1923).

“Matters were too disturbed in the country from one end to the other in 1921–the date of the last British census–for such an operation to be possible at all in Ireland,” Hearst’s International News Service explained to American newspaper readers in a January 1926 story. The return of the census signaled “another hopeful sign of the better relations between the long divided sections of Ireland, growing out of the amicable settlement of the boundary dispute, that they can agree to take their censuses on the same day, that is engage in the peaceful pursuit of counting heads instead of breaking them.”[1]”Irish Census To Be Completed Soon”, New Castle (Pa.) News, Jan. 20, 1926, and other papers.

Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 ”Irish Census To Be Completed Soon”, New Castle (Pa.) News, Jan. 20, 1926, and other papers.

Elegy for an Irish American Catholic Family

I wrote the piece linked below for Pittsburgh Quarterly. It’s personal and poignant.

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New content will be posted infrequently through the spring and summer months. Contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

 

Fact-checking St. Patrick’s desnaking of Ireland

Those dang fact-checkers; always deflating a good political talking point or ruining a cherished legend. And so with St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. An online search of “St. Patrick” and “snakes” today returns this AI overview:

The legend of St. Patrick driving snakes out of Ireland is a popular myth symbolizing his eradication of paganism, not a factual event. Scientifically, snakes never inhabited post-glacial Ireland due to cold temperatures and surrounding oceans. The story first appeared in literature centuries after his life.

But the popular press of a century ago also fact-checked the legend. The clipping below is from the March 17, 1926, edition of the Washington Evening Star. William Montana Mann (1886-1960) was director of the National Zoo from 1925 until 1956. As an entemologist, he specialized in ants, not snakes. William Shepard Walsh (1854–1919) was an American folklorist and author. Walsh died seven years before the Evening Star quoted from his 1897 book, Curiosities of Popular Customs and of rites, ceremonies, observations, and miscellaneous antiquities. See page 790.

Washington Evening Star, March 17, 1926.

The Washington Post of a century ago gave a softer, cartoon treatment to the legend of St. Patrick, sans snakes, in addition to news coverage of the day’s festivities in the US capital. The graphic says Patrick baptized “over 12,000 people.” AI says “over 100,000, up to 130,000.”

Who really knows about such things?