This article is from page 39 of the 2014-08-05 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 39 JPG
SEANIE McMahon take a bow.
Your influence stretches long beyond your status as one of the greatest hurling men to ever have the number six on your back.
“Has there ever been a better centre-back in the world” thundered Michéal Ó Muircheartaigh in one of his commentaries on Clare back in the day.
It was rhetorical, of course. And it was preaching to the Clare converted, even all the way out Miltown Malbay way, deep in football country.
Yes, there was always a bit of a hurling enclave here thanks to Tom Malone’s Clonbony, while there was a county hurling final played there in ’99. And, it’s there that Conor Cleary would have seen Seanie McMahon in hurling flesh.
“It was Seanie, Seanie McMahon,” he says minutes after becoming a Munster championship winning centre-back like his hero. “I took to him as a young lad and it was the team he was a part of and the success that they had that got me interested in hurling.
“To be part of a Munster championship winning team! Growing up seeing the likes of Seanie McMahon and the lads doing it in the late 1990s, it’s just a dream come through. Little did I think when I started hurling that I’d end up here. To win a Munster title on the field of play – it’s incredible, it means so much,” he adds.
The first Miltown man to win a Munster hurling medal on the field; Martin Flynn and Karl Walsh were part of the football win in 1992; Clare is the latest in a long line of Munster champions from Miltown that includes famous names like Eddie Carroll and PJ Killeen, who were on the 1917 football team and Georgie Comerford was the hero of the 1929 minor football team.
“It’s all the people who have helped me down through the years,” says Cleary. “It was my father, the people in Kilmaley and there’s great thanks to Davy (Fitzgerald) for bringing me into the seniors this year. For a while I didn’t know where I was going with my hurling and being in the senior panel really brought me on a lot.
“Paul Kinnerk always says to us, ‘at the start of every game, get your hands on the ball as early as you can’. That happened for me and we tried to set down a marker, not to let any ball pass the half-back line. Nine times out of ten it worked. It’s incredible to be part of this.”
Incredible too that Clare’s hurling revolution is now touching the west Clare coast.
Thanks to Conor Cleary, who can take a bow with Seanie McMahon.