Castleknock GAA knocking on heaven’s door

Johnny Corcoran pushes his glasses back on his nose and scrolls down through an email on his phone, skipping past what seems like thousands of addresses to get to the text. "You want to know about what a club is?" he says. "Wait till you have a read of this. Ah here, what am I doing? Where's the message? Have I to go through all that stuff to read it? Right, here we are.

"Look! Look! Fixtures, reams of them. All levels, all ages. Instructions for care of the pitch. This fella Michael Fehily, a Galway man, he does all this and he does the pitches as well. He has a big high-pressure job working for the Yanks and he's such an enthusiast for the club. He spent the full day with me putting up flags the other day and getting the colours out for the final. Look! Look! He deals with all the pitches. Talk about giving a busy man another job. He sends out this email every two days, pages and pages of stuff. Look! What sort of paint needs to be ordered, all that stuff. Some man. I mean, would you?"

Corcoran talks like his thoughts are train carriages crashing into the back of each other, somehow arriving alive through the carnage. In the Castleknock story, he is Adam. You'd be afraid to ask him who he'd nominate as Eve.

He was one of Heffo’s heroes away back in the day, a squad man on the team that changed GAA in the city forever. Life blew him down from Finglas and Erin’s Isle to Leixlip for a while before he settled in Castleknock in the mid-1990s just as the boom was getting boomier. He was in construction and his company alone had big plans to build houses in the area so he knew it was a place that was going to thrive over the coming decades.

‘Fair play’

He tells the story of how he got Castleknock up and running like it’s something out of Le Carré. It started with a schools football competition run by St Brigid’s for under-10s. He fishes out a booklet that says March 22nd 1998 on the front of it. “That’s an important piece of paper,” he says, handing it over.

Inside are printed hundreds of names of kids, all under-10, all from the locality. “Brigid’s was bursting at the seams,” he says. “Look at all those names. That was a well-run competition, fair play to them, but there was just too many kids and not enough chances for them to play. There was no game for a lot of kids. And it just dawned on me that there had to be another club for the area.”

He mentioned it to the county chairman at the time, John Egan, who gave him the name of a Monaghan teacher called Fergus Hamill who had previously been on to Egan with the same idea. Corcoran found him training a hurling team down at the park in Castleknock one afternoon. When Hamill's final whistle blew, Corcoran propositioned him. Maybe he's Eve, then.

They arranged a meeting upstairs in Myo’s, the village pub. They both said they’d gather up a few heads apiece to get it started. Corcoran figured the best place to find said heads would be the local boozers. So he did the rounds.

‘Soccer tournament’

“I went to the pubs, asking around. I went into Kavanagh’s and asked the barman if there was anybody into the GAA. And Charlie – he’s still there – he said: ‘Yeah, sure we’re all into it.’ I said there’s not many in tonight. ‘Ah yeah,’ he says, ‘they’re all up playing a soccer tournament in Coolmine’. So I went over to Coolmine – it was snowing. And I said to the goalie: ‘Anyone here interested in GAA?’ Ah yeah, sure we all are, he says. And there’s lads from that night still involved to this day.”

He hustled names and faces and bodies. He shouted in through a car window at John Conroy, an ex-Erin's Isle man who he knew had two sons who weren't getting a game in Brigid's. From that conversation, he had his club secretary. Just as good, he had an ally who was friendly with county secretary John Costello.

So they had a committee. They knew they’d have players once they got going, no problems on that score. This was April and the vote to ratify them as a club with the county board would take place in September. Before then, they needed somewhere to train and somewhere to play.

"There was a big green area out the back of Castleknock Community College and it was owned by Park Developments, who I worked for. It was a green in an estate, basically. So I asked our boss could we use it. And like all bosses, his initial reaction was to say: 'Leave it with me.' None of these guys ever agree to anything off the top of their head, you know? So I annoyed him about it later in the same week and he said we could have it on two conditions. One, no soccer – Gaelic games only. And two, you can't put up permanent posts.

"To this day, we leave the square better than we get it. We drag up our own posts and we take them away afterwards. Everybody that's playing in the final on Saturday night came through Tír na nÓg. That's where everybody starts. That's where Ciarán Kilkenny started, Rory Corcoran, all these guys. Every Saturday morning, that's where we are. There's an Insomnia coffee shop beside it that takes on extra staff on a Saturday because we bring so many people."

That was training pitch sorted. Playing was a different matter. But he found a way.

"I knew there were pitches down in Porterstown. I knew Brigid's used one and I knew that Erin Go Brágh used one. But I walked past the other one one day and I saw grass under the crossbar in the goals. And what does that tell you? It isn't being used. So I said nothing and went into the council. It turned out the subs hadn't been paid on it so I threw down £20 and that was the pitch sorted for the year. I found out later that Brigid's used it but someone forgot to pay the subs, so that was a stroke of luck."

If all politics is local, GAA politics is local squared. In those early days, the push-me-pull-you with St Brigid’s was pretty tasty. Not unreasonably, Brigid’s saw them coming to park their tanks on their lawn and didn’t like it one bit. Corcoran says he suspected a spy at their second meeting and they were careful on the door from then on.

‘Huge resistance’

“There was huge resistance from Brigid’s. They had been getting players in Castleknock for donkeys’ years and they saw us as a threat. Then when they saw we were getting on our feet, they thought we’d be a feeder club for them. But we didn’t intend that at all.

“We started off being called Castleknock hurling and football club. And a few months later, Costello said: ‘Lads, will ye do something about the name, Brigid’s are going bananas over it.’ They basically wanted to be known as the Castleknock club. And the county board were saying: ‘Look, they were here before you so you can’t be just bulldozing in.’

“So we said fair enough, how about we be called Castleknock St Thomas’s Hurling and Football club. One of the local schools is St Thomas’s. It was a big long handle but we wanted to show willing to the county board. Like, we had a lot of stuff already printed with the original name on it but we said we’d change just like that if that’s what it took.

“About 18 months later, Brigid’s objected to the name St Thomas’s at a county board meeting. I think they mightn’t have wanted the school becoming synonymous with our club. So we said grand, fair enough, we’re delighted, we’ll take it out. And there and then, we scratched St Thomas’s and said we’ll just be known as Castleknock and left it at that. Sure we were delighted.”

By then, they were up and running. Out of his bag, Costello produces a raggedy old page torn from The Star, from August 1998. An under-10 training session at Tír na nÓg, a month before the county board meeting where they were ratified. The meeting was on a Monday night – on the Sunday, Corcoran rang 50 different clubs to make sure he had the numbers. Erin's Isle proposed, Garda seconded. St Brigid's objected but couldn't get a second. Castleknock were born.

“The thing was, it actually helped everyone. Brigid’s had nothing to fear from us at all. We had a small catchment area really in the scheme of things compared to what they had. And it spurred them into action. They got the finger out. They won the double Féile four years ago, football and hurling All-Irelands at under-14. Phenomenal achievement, really incredible. Every one of those kids were born in 1998. That’s no coincidence – come on now.”

From there to here is a massive distance in a ludicrously short space of time. Castleknock have 72 different teams now, around the same as Brigid's. Famously, everyone on the team that meets St Vincent's on Saturday night in the county final is older than the club itself. Two of the squad members are among the kids who featured in that Star article 18 years ago.

Built pitches

In time, they built pitches in Somerton Park, just off the Porterstown road. They have no dressing rooms – yet. “We could have built a clubhouse but we spent the money on the pitches. I said: ‘Lads, what do we want? Good pitches or a clubhouse where we can sit and have a pint and look out the window at grass with thistles all over it?’”

They are, like every club, a work in progress. But in Parnell Park, when they line-out for the final of the country’s most competitive county championship, Corcoran and his people can sit for a stolen moment and reflect on the progress of their work. “They’re saying the Artane Band might be there, you know?” he says. “This is big stuff.”