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35cm x 45cm. Dublin Extraordinary moment captured in time as a seemingly cordial Eamon De Valera & Michael Collins plus Arthur Griffith and Lord Mayor of Dublin Laurence O'Neill enjoying each others company at Croke Park for the April 6, 1919 Irish Republican Prisoners' Dependents Fund match between Wexford and Tipperary. Staging Gaelic matches for the benefit of the republican prisoners was one of the ways in which the GAA supported the nationalist struggle. How so much would change between those two behemoths of Irish History-Collins and De Valera over the next number of years.
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63cm x 125cm Limerick Large iconic poster from the glory years of Munster rugby ,when they were at the top of the tree in European Club Rugby.This particular promotional poster dates from the 2000 Final,Munster's first final appearance. Northampton 9-8 Munster Despite thunder, lightning, and torrential rain earlier in the morning, the sun rightly appeared to shine on the capacity crowd at Twickenham for what proved to be a magnificent occasion. It was the fifth European Cup final, and the first time a French side had not featured, but the lack of Gallic flair took nothing away from a thrilling match. Munster scored the only try of the match - but in a tale of two boots, Northampton secured a historic victory thanks to the ever-prolific Paul Grayson.This has been a big season for the players and to have come this close and not won a trophy would have been a major disappointmentNorthampton rugby director John Steele
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Vintage wooden clock from 1995 commissioned to mark Clare's historic All Ireland win in 1995.cm x cm Scarriff Co ClareViewed from a distance of two decades, maybe the most remarkable thing about the hurling summer of 1995 is just how unpromising it was roundly agreed to be at the get-go. The previous year had been airily dismissed as something of a freak – never more freakish than in that harum-scarum end to the All-Ireland final when Offaly overturned Limerick with a quickfire 2-5 in the closing minutes.Put to the pin of their collars, most judges shrugged and presumed the Liam MacCarthy would find his way back around to the blue-bloods in the end – probably to Kilkenny who had just beaten Clare in the National League final, maybe to Tipperary if they got their act together. If there was going to be a yarn, Limerick might provide it. But nobody had an inkling of what was around the corner. Or if they did, they weren’t shouting about it. Nobody was shouting about very much of anything. Hurling was what it was – guarded like the family jewels in certain parts of the land, barely amounting to a rumour in others. Tipp, Kilkenny and Cork had split five of the previous six All-Irelands between them and in a given year, you could just about half-rely on Offaly or Galway to keep them honest. For everyone else, the door looked shut. For all the sweet words and paeans that followed the game around, the championship was reduced each year to four or five games. This was pre-qualifiers, pre-back door of any kind. Galway walked into the All-Ireland semi-final each year and Antrim did the same before providing whoever they met with more or less a bye into the final. The Munster championship had its adherents but they weren’t all just as committed as they let on – when Clare met Cork in Thurles in June 1995, they did so in front of just 14,101 paying guests. The game needed shaking up. If not everyone admitted as much at the time, it didn’t escape the notice of the association’s then general director Liam Mulvihill. In his report to Congress earlier that year, he had scratched an itch that had been bugging him for most of the previous 12 months. The 1994 football championship had been the first to benefit from bringing on a title sponsor in Bank of Ireland and though an equivalent offer had been on the table for the hurling championship, Central Council pushed the plate away. Though the name of the potential sponsor wasn’t explicitly made public, everyone knew it was Guinness. More to the point, everyone knew why Central Council wouldn’t bite. As Mulvihill himself noted in his report to Congress, the offer was declined on the basis that “Central Council did not want an alcoholic drinks company associated with a major GAA competition”. As it turned out, Central Council had been deadlocked on the issue and it was the casting vote of then president Peter Quinn that put the kibosh on a deal with Guinness. Mulvihill’s disappointment was far from hidden, since he saw the wider damage caused by turning up the GAA nose at Guinness’s advances. “The unfortunate aspect of the situation,” he wrote, “is that hurling needs support on the promotion of the game much more than football.” Though it took the point of a bayonet to make them go for it, the GAA submitted in the end and on the day after the league final, a three-year partnership with Guinness was announced. The deal would be worth £1 million a year, with half going to the sport and half going to the competition in the shape of marketing. That last bit was key. Guinness came up with a marketing campaign that fairly scorched across the general consciousness. Billboards screeched out slogans that feel almost corny at this remove but made a huge impact at the same time . This man can level whole counties in one second flat. This man can reach speeds of 100mph. This man can break hearts at 70 yards Of course, all the marketing in the world can only do so much. Without a story to go alongside, the Guinness campaign might be forgotten now – or worse, remembered as an overblown blast of hot air dreamed up in some modish ad agency above in Dublin. Instead, Clare came along and changed everything. In the spring of 1995, Clare were very easy to stereotype. These were the days when the league wrapped around Christmas and in the muck and the cold and the drudgery, Clare had a fierceness to them that took advantage of any opposition that fancied a handy afternoon with the summer well off in the distance. A pain in the neck if you met them on a going day in the league but not to be relied upon on the biggest days. They had a recent, ill-starred record in Munster finals to bear that out. Heavy beatings from Tipp and Limerick in 1993 and ’94 were bad enough on their own; piled on decades of hurt going all the way back to their last title in 1932, they were toxic. On the day before the league final, new manager Ger Loughnane outlined what the coming summer would mean to them. “I’d swap everything for a Munster title. The whole lot. My whole hurling life. These fellas today, they have the chance. They can get out there and realise that this is what it is all about, that this is what you play hurling for. They can build on that and win their Munster title. That means so much to us all. They won’t have to look back and regret.” When Clare promptly lost 2-12 to 0-9 to Kilkenny in that league final, you didn’t have many takers for Loughnane’s assertion that this could be the group to turn everything around. Loughnane had been involved in 12 Munster finals as a player and selector at various levels down the years and he’d lost them all. Big talk was fine and dandy but what was there to believe in? Come the Munster championship, Clare were quietly but firmly dismissed by all and sundry. Cashman’s bookies in Cork priced their championship opener thus: Cork 2/5, Clare 9/4. A bar in Ennis had sent the Clare squad a cheque for £250 so they could have a pre-championship drink together. Anthony Daly took it instead and slapped it down on Clare to win the Munster championship at odds of 7/1. Anyone with half an interest in the game knows the rest. Or at least knows bits and pieces of it. That summer was a blazing one, the hottest for decades, and in the mind’s eye Clare’s summer is a jigsaw of sun-scorched fables and legends. Seanie McMahon and his broken collarbone, playing out the last 15 minutes against Cork at corner-forward. Ollie Baker’s bundled goal to win that game in injury-time. Limerick swept aside in the second half of the Munster final. Bonfires across the county on the Monday night. Galway put to the sword in the All-Ireland semi-final. Offaly just squeezed out in the final. Eamonn Taaffe’s goal, whipped to the net with his only touch of the sliotar all summer. Daly’s 65, Johnny Pilkington’s reply just flicking the post and missing. A first Clare All-Ireland senior title since 1914. It was all just so unlikely. After the Cork game, the cars heading home for Clare were stuck in traffic. A group of Cork teenagers stood at the side of the road as they passed, chanting Tipp, Tipp, Tipp – presuming Clare would meet and be beaten by them next day out. The notion that this was the beginning of a golden era, or that these Claremen were about to popularise the sport as never before, would still have felt ludicrous And yet here they were, All-Ireland champions in a year when hurling caught the wider imagination in a way it rarely had up to that point. The Guinness campaign had made its mark and allied to Clare’s rise, the sport was grabbing people again. Not before time. “The game had gone stale,” wrote Jimmy Barry-Murphy in The Irish Times in the run-up to the final. “This All-Ireland was one that game needed very badly. Interest was waning and this was reflected in the attendances at finals. “There was no comparison to football where the arrival of the Ulster counties as major powers generated enormous interest and a new awareness of the game. Clare have had many setbacks but they have kept battling and are now being rewarded. They have done hurling a great service.” The depth and breadth of that service became more and more apparent as the decade wore on. Attendances at the hurling championship matches ballooned. From an aggregate total of 289,281 in 1994, they rose to 543,335 in 1999. There were plenty of factors, of course – more counties with more hope, more matches with the introduction of the back-door, a growing economy, those Guinness ads. But it was Clare’s summer of 1995 that sparked it all. They weren’t a pebble in a pond that caused a few ripples. They were a boulder that landed from the clear blue sky and left a crater on the landscape. Everything changed after ’95. Not forever, just for a while. But for long enough for the game to stretch itself and grab hold of imaginations outside the usual places of worship. On the Monday night they brought Liam MacCarthy home, one of the towns that got a good rattle was Newmarket-On-Fergus. In the bedlam, the home club put up a stage and stuck any living Newmarket man who ever put on a Clare jersey up there as the backdrop while Daly and Loughnane grabbed the mic out front. One unusual face cloistered at the back of the stage was then Wexford manager Liam Griffin. Of the multitude of stories excavated by Denis Walsh for his towering book Hurling: The Revolution Years, maybe that night in Newmarket captured the giddiness of the time the best. Griffin’s father was from Clare and he’d lived there for a time in his early 20s, long enough to play club hurling and get called up to the Clare under-21s. Thus were his bona fides established for an appearance – however reluctant – up on-stage. Griffin had been in charge of Wexford for a year at that point and their summer had ended with a limp exit against Offaly away back in June. By the skin of his teeth, Griffin had survived an attempted county board putsch in the meantime and was almost certainly the only man alive who thought that the riches showering down upon Clare heads could be Wexford’s 12 months later. “Clare came and I thought, ‘This is fantastic,’” Griffin told Walsh. “I thought, ‘Jesus, the team I have are as good as these,’ and I went through them man for man. There’s no way we’re not as good as these guys. Then Clare won the All-Ireland and I went straight to Clare the following morning because I wanted to see the homecoming and now I understand why. I wanted to drive it into my own psyche.” As the speeches finished and the stage began to clear, Loughnane turned and caught Griffin’s eye. “It could be you next year,” he said. Whether he meant it or not, Griffin’s mind was made up already. He drove home convinced that Wexford could reach out and grab some of that for themselves. The next day he rang around and organised training, 51-and-a-half weeks shy of the 1996 All-Ireland final. In a world of endless trees and branches and roots, it’s obviously simplistic to say that Clare’s All-Ireland begat Wexford’s which begat all the rest of it. But what is inarguable is this – in that sun-drenched summer of 1995, everything felt possible.
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Vintage J.J.Corry's Finest Matured Irish Whiskey Framed Advert 27cm x 35cm Corofin Co Clare
Kilrush,Co Clare was synonymous in the 1800s with a renowned whiskey bonder called J.J. Corry. J.J. was an innovator and a man before his time. His little shop at 63 Henry St. Kilrush was a key part of the local community and the only place where you could buy J.J.'s pride whiskey, "Corry's Special Malt." It was available by the glass for 3 pennies or by the jar.
J.J Corry : A Man Before His Time
J.J. was a true entrepreneur and innovator, born on a farm close to our brand home. Because he was not the first born son he was forced to make this own way in the world. We know that he dabbled in auctioneering before he set up his shop in 1890. Once he acquired the premises, and, after marrying the girl from the pub next door, he immediately set about developing his own brand. The town of Kilrush was a busy international port in the 1890s and J.J. would have purchased goods from all over the world directly from the ships’ Captains fresh from their travels. He sold tea from India, Rum from the Caribbean, Wine from France and Port from Portugal in addition to musical instruments, guns, ammunition and bicycles. As well as a pillar of the community, J.J. was also a true renaissance man and an early adopter of technology. As the social secretary of the town cycling club he even went as far as inventing his own bicycle, ‘The Gael’, after which we named our first whiskey. Most of all, J.J. was known for his hospitality and of course, his whiskey.
What is Irish Whiskey Bonding?
There was a time when every town in Ireland had its own particular flavour of whiskey. The Golden Age of Irish Whiskey (the late 19th century) saw hundreds of distilleries operating on the Island of Ireland. Most did not have their own brands of whiskey at that time, rather the distilleries simply made their whiskey and sold it wholesale to the Bonders. Bonders would have been jacks of all trades, the publicans, grocers, mercantile owners. They would travel to their local distillery with the empty barrels they’d have from their pub trade, fill them up with new make spirit and then cart them home and store them for ageing and blending. This business model was extremely accessible as there was no expense in building or running a distillery, which meant that there were Whiskey Bonders in every town across Ireland. Because so much of whiskey's flavour comes from the barrel in which it is aged in and from the climate where that barrel is stored, this meant that there was huge variety of regional flavours within Irish Whiskey. The Irish Whiskey industry collapsed in the early 1900's and with it came the closure of all but 4 distilleries in Ireland. Those distilleries since bought by multinational organisations have made almost all the Irish Whiskey produced ever since. They created individual whiskey brands and turned off the tap to Grocers thereby shutting down the practice of Whiskey Bonding.
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36cm x 29cm The An Post GAA Hurling Team of the Millennium was chosen in 2000 to comprise, as a fifteen-member side divided as one goalkeeper, three full-backs, three half-backs, two midfielders, three half-forwards and three full-forwards, the best hurling team of all-time. The team, announced by GAA President Seán McCague on 24 July 2000 at a special function in Croke Park, was selected by a special committee, comprising five past GAA presidents - Joe McDonagh, Con Murphy, Paddy Buggy, Pat Fanning and Séamus Ó Riain - as well as GAA director-general Liam Mulvihill and four Gaelic games journalists: Paddy Downey, Mick Dunne, Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin and Jim O'Sullivan. The initiative was sponsored by An Post, who issued special commemorative stamps of the millennium team members.
Controversy
While universal agreement on such a team would prove impossible, the selection committee came in for some criticism regarding omissions and changes from the earlier GAA Hurling Team of the Century. Kilkenny's D. J. Carey was seen as a shock omission from the team. As the holder of a then record seven All-Stars, Carey, whose inter-county career began in 1989, was seen as one of the greatest goal-scorers of his era and was hotly tipped to get one of the half-forward spots for which he was nominated. The 1990s were regarded as a golden age of hurling with many new teams emerging, however, this was not reflected in the team. Clare's Brian Lohan had been tipped for full-back but Wexford's Nick O'Donnell held on. There were no places for any of the Clare team that emerged to win two championships in the nineties. Brian Whelehan was the only player from the previous 20 years to make the team. An absence of players from Galway also sparked off major controversy in that county where the selection committee were accused of belittling the county by not recognising any of its heroes. There was anger too in Wexford over the dropping of full-forward Nicky Rackard from the Team of the Century. Former midfielder Dave Bernie, who won an All-Ireland medal in 1968, when Rackard was a selector, said Wexford fans were stunned by the news he had not been included. -
Great collectors item here - a picture of the 1977 Clare Hurling Team which won the National Hurling league Title.Note a young Ger Loughnane present in the front row and the later addition of a not exactly to scale man in the back row! 34cm x 40cm Kilmaley Co Clare (From the Examiner Newspaper) One of the 1970s’ great hurling forces was the Clare team of 1976 to 1978. They made three NHL Finals in a row, winning in 1977 and 1978. Their brand of play lit up many matches, leaving indelible memories for supporters and spectators. They reached the 1977 and 1978 Munster Finals, losing on both occasions to Cork. Next Monday evening, Councillor Tom McNamara, Chairman of Clare County Council, will host a Civic Reception to honour these players and their mentors. Fr Harry Bohan was manager, with Justin McCarthy acting as coach for the 1977 and 1978 seasons. Among the players, Séamus Durack (Feakle/Éire Óg) and Jackie O’Gorman (Cratloe) were mainstays during this period. Born in June 1951, Durack won three All Stars as goalkeeper (1977, 1978, 1981). He was first choice for Munster in the Railway Cup between 1973 and 1979, when they won the competition twice (1976, 1978). Born in October 1943, O’Gorman offered a powerful presence at wing back and corner back, appearing for Munster in 1972 and 1973. They spoke this week toabout their careers. It is 40 years ago, just about, since the 1978 Munster Final in Thurles. What do ye remember about the build-up, the day itself? The build-up was unbelievable. There was no other topic of conversation in Clare. The level of expectation, especially after losing the Munster Final in 1977, jumped right off the charts. A massive crowd went to Thurles. 54,000 was the official attendance, and I think 5,000 people weren’t even let into the ground. We couldn’t get in the gate when we arrived at Semple [Stadium]. There was a lad inside and he wouldn’t let us in. I remember saying to him at one stage, and it coming close to the game: “Look, after another minute, we’ll make a decision and we’ll be gone back down that road and there’ll be no game here today, and it’ll be you who has the problem then.”
I saluted every one of them, and not one of them was capable of saluting me back. They were in a frenzy, a pure frenzy.
They thought Clare were going to win the Munster Championship for the first time since 1932. They were in a zone apart, going in to get their seat to see it all. So there was a tension-filled trip on the bus, followed by more tension at the ground. There was nothing that could have been done about it. I think the officials were overwhelmed by the amount of people that simply turned up, hoping they might get in. -
Origins : Scarriff Co Clare Dimensions: 32cm x 20cmViewed from a distance of two decades, maybe the most remarkable thing about the hurling summer of 1995 is just how unpromising it was roundly agreed to be at the get-go. The previous year had been airily dismissed as something of a freak – never more freakish than in that harum-scarum end to the All-Ireland final when Offaly overturned Limerick with a quickfire 2-5 in the closing minutes.Put to the pin of their collars, most judges shrugged and presumed the Liam MacCarthy would find his way back around to the blue-bloods in the end – probably to Kilkenny who had just beaten Clare in the National League final, maybe to Tipperary if they got their act together. If there was going to be a yarn, Limerick might provide it. But nobody had an inkling of what was around the corner. Or if they did, they weren’t shouting about it. Nobody was shouting about very much of anything. Hurling was what it was – guarded like the family jewels in certain parts of the land, barely amounting to a rumour in others. Tipp, Kilkenny and Cork had split five of the previous six All-Irelands between them and in a given year, you could just about half-rely on Offaly or Galway to keep them honest. For everyone else, the door looked shut. For all the sweet words and paeans that followed the game around, the championship was reduced each year to four or five games. This was pre-qualifiers, pre-back door of any kind. Galway walked into the All-Ireland semi-final each year and Antrim did the same before providing whoever they met with more or less a bye into the final. The Munster championship had its adherents but they weren’t all just as committed as they let on – when Clare met Cork in Thurles in June 1995, they did so in front of just 14,101 paying guests. The game needed shaking up. If not everyone admitted as much at the time, it didn’t escape the notice of the association’s then general director Liam Mulvihill. In his report to Congress earlier that year, he had scratched an itch that had been bugging him for most of the previous 12 months. The 1994 football championship had been the first to benefit from bringing on a title sponsor in Bank of Ireland and though an equivalent offer had been on the table for the hurling championship, Central Council pushed the plate away. Though the name of the potential sponsor wasn’t explicitly made public, everyone knew it was Guinness. More to the point, everyone knew why Central Council wouldn’t bite. As Mulvihill himself noted in his report to Congress, the offer was declined on the basis that “Central Council did not want an alcoholic drinks company associated with a major GAA competition”. As it turned out, Central Council had been deadlocked on the issue and it was the casting vote of then president Peter Quinn that put the kibosh on a deal with Guinness. Mulvihill’s disappointment was far from hidden, since he saw the wider damage caused by turning up the GAA nose at Guinness’s advances. “The unfortunate aspect of the situation,” he wrote, “is that hurling needs support on the promotion of the game much more than football.” Though it took the point of a bayonet to make them go for it, the GAA submitted in the end and on the day after the league final, a three-year partnership with Guinness was announced. The deal would be worth £1 million a year, with half going to the sport and half going to the competition in the shape of marketing. That last bit was key. Guinness came up with a marketing campaign that fairly scorched across the general consciousness. Billboards screeched out slogans that feel almost corny at this remove but made a huge impact at the same time . This man can level whole counties in one second flat. This man can reach speeds of 100mph. This man can break hearts at 70 yards Of course, all the marketing in the world can only do so much. Without a story to go alongside, the Guinness campaign might be forgotten now – or worse, remembered as an overblown blast of hot air dreamed up in some modish ad agency above in Dublin. Instead, Clare came along and changed everything. In the spring of 1995, Clare were very easy to stereotype. These were the days when the league wrapped around Christmas and in the muck and the cold and the drudgery, Clare had a fierceness to them that took advantage of any opposition that fancied a handy afternoon with the summer well off in the distance. A pain in the neck if you met them on a going day in the league but not to be relied upon on the biggest days. They had a recent, ill-starred record in Munster finals to bear that out. Heavy beatings from Tipp and Limerick in 1993 and ’94 were bad enough on their own; piled on decades of hurt going all the way back to their last title in 1932, they were toxic. On the day before the league final, new manager Ger Loughnane outlined what the coming summer would mean to them. “I’d swap everything for a Munster title. The whole lot. My whole hurling life. These fellas today, they have the chance. They can get out there and realise that this is what it is all about, that this is what you play hurling for. They can build on that and win their Munster title. That means so much to us all. They won’t have to look back and regret.” When Clare promptly lost 2-12 to 0-9 to Kilkenny in that league final, you didn’t have many takers for Loughnane’s assertion that this could be the group to turn everything around. Loughnane had been involved in 12 Munster finals as a player and selector at various levels down the years and he’d lost them all. Big talk was fine and dandy but what was there to believe in? Come the Munster championship, Clare were quietly but firmly dismissed by all and sundry. Cashman’s bookies in Cork priced their championship opener thus: Cork 2/5, Clare 9/4. A bar in Ennis had sent the Clare squad a cheque for £250 so they could have a pre-championship drink together. Anthony Daly took it instead and slapped it down on Clare to win the Munster championship at odds of 7/1. Anyone with half an interest in the game knows the rest. Or at least knows bits and pieces of it. That summer was a blazing one, the hottest for decades, and in the mind’s eye Clare’s summer is a jigsaw of sun-scorched fables and legends. Seanie McMahon and his broken collarbone, playing out the last 15 minutes against Cork at corner-forward. Ollie Baker’s bundled goal to win that game in injury-time. Limerick swept aside in the second half of the Munster final. Bonfires across the county on the Monday night. Galway put to the sword in the All-Ireland semi-final. Offaly just squeezed out in the final. Eamonn Taaffe’s goal, whipped to the net with his only touch of the sliotar all summer. Daly’s 65, Johnny Pilkington’s reply just flicking the post and missing. A first Clare All-Ireland senior title since 1914. It was all just so unlikely. After the Cork game, the cars heading home for Clare were stuck in traffic. A group of Cork teenagers stood at the side of the road as they passed, chanting Tipp, Tipp, Tipp – presuming Clare would meet and be beaten by them next day out. The notion that this was the beginning of a golden era, or that these Claremen were about to popularise the sport as never before, would still have felt ludicrous And yet here they were, All-Ireland champions in a year when hurling caught the wider imagination in a way it rarely had up to that point. The Guinness campaign had made its mark and allied to Clare’s rise, the sport was grabbing people again. Not before time. “The game had gone stale,” wrote Jimmy Barry-Murphy in The Irish Times in the run-up to the final. “This All-Ireland was one that game needed very badly. Interest was waning and this was reflected in the attendances at finals. “There was no comparison to football where the arrival of the Ulster counties as major powers generated enormous interest and a new awareness of the game. Clare have had many setbacks but they have kept battling and are now being rewarded. They have done hurling a great service.” The depth and breadth of that service became more and more apparent as the decade wore on. Attendances at the hurling championship matches ballooned. From an aggregate total of 289,281 in 1994, they rose to 543,335 in 1999. There were plenty of factors, of course – more counties with more hope, more matches with the introduction of the back-door, a growing economy, those Guinness ads. But it was Clare’s summer of 1995 that sparked it all. They weren’t a pebble in a pond that caused a few ripples. They were a boulder that landed from the clear blue sky and left a crater on the landscape. Everything changed after ’95. Not forever, just for a while. But for long enough for the game to stretch itself and grab hold of imaginations outside the usual places of worship. On the Monday night they brought Liam MacCarthy home, one of the towns that got a good rattle was Newmarket-On-Fergus. In the bedlam, the home club put up a stage and stuck any living Newmarket man who ever put on a Clare jersey up there as the backdrop while Daly and Loughnane grabbed the mic out front. One unusual face cloistered at the back of the stage was then Wexford manager Liam Griffin. Of the multitude of stories excavated by Denis Walsh for his towering book Hurling: The Revolution Years, maybe that night in Newmarket captured the giddiness of the time the best. Griffin’s father was from Clare and he’d lived there for a time in his early 20s, long enough to play club hurling and get called up to the Clare under-21s. Thus were his bona fides established for an appearance – however reluctant – up on-stage. Griffin had been in charge of Wexford for a year at that point and their summer had ended with a limp exit against Offaly away back in June. By the skin of his teeth, Griffin had survived an attempted county board putsch in the meantime and was almost certainly the only man alive who thought that the riches showering down upon Clare heads could be Wexford’s 12 months later. “Clare came and I thought, ‘This is fantastic,’” Griffin told Walsh. “I thought, ‘Jesus, the team I have are as good as these,’ and I went through them man for man. There’s no way we’re not as good as these guys. Then Clare won the All-Ireland and I went straight to Clare the following morning because I wanted to see the homecoming and now I understand why. I wanted to drive it into my own psyche.” As the speeches finished and the stage began to clear, Loughnane turned and caught Griffin’s eye. “It could be you next year,” he said. Whether he meant it or not, Griffin’s mind was made up already. He drove home convinced that Wexford could reach out and grab some of that for themselves. The next day he rang around and organised training, 51-and-a-half weeks shy of the 1996 All-Ireland final. In a world of endless trees and branches and roots, it’s obviously simplistic to say that Clare’s All-Ireland begat Wexford’s which begat all the rest of it. But what is inarguable is this – in that sun-drenched summer of 1995, everything felt possible.he 1995 Munster Senior Hurling Championship Final was a hurling match played on 9 July 1995 at Semple Stadium, Thurles, County Tipperary. It was contested by Clare and Limerick. Clare claimed their first Munster Championship since 1932 and fourth ever after beating Limerick on a scoreline of 1-17 to 0-11. Clare were leading the game by 1-5 to 0-7 at half time. With the scores at 0-5 to 0-3 in Clare's favour in the first half, Davy Fitzgerald scored from a penalty five minutes before the break, crashing the ball high into the net at the town end before sprinting back to his goal-line. In 2005 this penalty goal came fifth in the Top 20 GAA Moments poll by the Irish public. Clare were captained by Anthony Daly and managed by Ger Loughnane in his first year. Clare had defeated Cork in the semi-final by 2-13 to 3-09 to reach the final, while Limerick had defeated Tipperary by 0-16 to 0-15 in their semi-final. The match was screened live by RTÉ as part of The Sunday Game programme with commentary by Ger Canning and analysis by Éamonn Cregan.July 9 Final
Clare 1-17 – 0-11 Limerick J. O'Connor (0-6), P. J. Connell (0-4), D. FitzGerald (1-0), C. Clancy (0-2), S. McMahon (0-1), F. Tuohy (0-1), F. Hegarty (0-1), S. McNamara (0-1), G. O'Loughlin (0-1). Report G. Kirby (0-6), M. Galligan (0-3), P. Heffernan (0-1), F. Carroll (0-1). Referee: J. McDonnell (Tipperary) -
Huge Guinness All Ireland Hurling championship unframed advertisement from the first year of sponsorship in 1995. 38cm wide x 150cm long . It was not until 1994 that the GAA decided that the football championship would benefit from bringing on a title sponsor in Bank of Ireland. Although an equivalent offer had been on the table for the hurling championship, Central Council pushed the plate away.Though the name of the potential sponsor wasn’t explicitly made public, everyone knew it was Guinness. More to the point, everyone knew why Central Council wouldn’t bite. As Mulvihill himself noted in his report to Congress, the offer was declined on the basis that “Central Council did not want an alcoholic drinks company associated with a major GAA competition”. As it turned out, Central Council had been deadlocked on the issue and it was the casting vote of then president Peter Quinn that put the kibosh on a deal with Guinness. Mulvihill’s disappointment was far from hidden, since he saw the wider damage caused by turning up the GAA nose at Guinness’s advances. “The unfortunate aspect of the situation,” he wrote, “is that hurling needs support on the promotion of the game much more than football.” Though it took the point of a bayonet to make them go for it, the GAA submitted in the end and on the day after the league final in 1995 , a three-year partnership with Guinness was announced. The deal would be worth £1 million a year, with half going to the sport and half going to the competition in the shape of marketing. That last bit was key. Guinness came up with a marketing campaign that fairly scorched across the general consciousness. Billboards screeched out slogans that feel almost corny at this remove but made a huge impact at the same time . This man can level whole counties in one second flat. This man can reach speeds of 100mph. This man can break hearts at 70 yards Its been Hell for Leather. Of course, all the marketing in the world can only do so much. Without a story to go alongside, the Guinness campaign might be forgotten now – or worse, remembered as an overblown blast of hot air dreamed up in some modish ad agency above in Dublin.Until the Clare hurlers came along and changed everything." Malachy Clerkin Irish Times GAA Correspondent The All Ireland Senior Hurling Championship, known simply as the All-Ireland Championship, is an annual inter-county hurling competition organised by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). It is the highest inter-county hurling competition in Ireland, and has been contested every year except one since 1887. The final, currently held on the third Sunday in August, is the culmination of a series of games played during July and August, with the winning team receiving the Liam MacCarthy Cup. The All-Ireland Championship has always been played on a straight knockout basis whereby once a team loses they are eliminated from the championship. The qualification procedures for the championship have changed several times throughout its history. Currently, qualification is limited to teams competing in the Leinster Championship, the Munster Championship and the two finalists in the Joe McDonagh Cup. Twelve teams currently participate in the All-Ireland Championship, with the most successful teams coming from the provinces of Leinster and Munster. Kilkenny, Cork and Tipperary are considered "the big three" of hurling. They have won 94 championships between them. The title has been won by 13 different teams, 10 of whom have won the title more than once. The all-time record-holders are Kilkenny, who have won the championship on 36 occasions. Tipperary are the current champions. The All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship final was listed in second place by CNN in its "10 sporting events you have to see live", after the Olympic Games. After covering the 1959 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Final between Kilkenny and Waterford for BBC Television, English commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme was moved to describe hurling as his second favourite sport in the world after his first love, soccer. Alex Ferguson used footage of an All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship final in an attempt to motivate his players during his time as manager of Premier League soccer outfit Manchester United; the players winced at the standard of physicality and intensity in which the hurlers were engaged. Since 1995 the All Ireland Hurling Championship has been sponsored. The sponsor has usually been able to determine the championship's sponsorship name.
Period Sponsor(s) Name 1887−1994 No main sponsor The All-Ireland Championship 1995−2007 Guinness The Guinness Hurling Championship 2008−2009 RTÉ Sport, Etihad Airways, Guinness The GAA Hurling All-Ireland Championship 2010−2012 Centra, Etihad Airways, Guinness The GAA Hurling All-Ireland Championship 2013−2016 Centra, Etihad Airways, Liberty Insurance The GAA Hurling All-Ireland Championship 2017−2019 Centra, Littlewoods Ireland, Bord Gáis Energy The GAA Hurling All-Ireland Championship -
Out of stockJohn Skelton was born in Armagh in 1925. A very talented artist who delighted in portraying the ordinary men and women of Rural Ireland, his works are on permanent display in the Joyce Collection of Northwestern University of Illinois,the headquarters of the ESB,Bank of Ireland and the Embassy of South Korea. Skelton started his professional career in London, where he came under influence of Euston Road School in the late 1940s. In 1946 he married Caroline, settling four years later in Dublin. He worked initially in advertising as Art Director and illustrator of books, most of them educational. After 1975 he worked full-time as a painter. He had numerous one man shows in Dublin; two in Belfast, one in Los Angeles and one in the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Up to the late 1980s, Skelton was a frequent exhibitor in group shows, particularly the annual Royal Hibernian Academy and the Watercolour Society shows in Dublin. In recent years, however, his work was in such demand that he contributed to these less often. During the 1970s and earlier 1980s he earned a reputation as a gifted teacher and lecturer in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. John Skelton's grave can be found at Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold's Cross, Dublin, Ireland. Origins:Co Mayo Dimensions :29cm x 36cm
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48cm x 59cm. Borrisokane Co TipperaryIt seemed as if most of Croke Park had been caught on the hop. A cameraman was still scrambling for the sideline as the Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, Dr Morris, threw the ball in and the game was only clearing its throat when Wexford were hit with a pair of blows that would have felled a team buttressed by lesser men. “Two goals in eighty seconds set champions for victory,” was the sub-heading in the Cork Examiner the next day. The paper's correspondent detailed how reporters were still straightening their papers and spectators in the crowd of 75,039 were finding their seats, or a perch on the terracing, when the drama spilled over like a boiled kettle. Close to 58 years have passed since the two counties lit up what was a dull and sometimes wet September afternoon in the capital but the fog of time clears in an instant as Tom Moloughney recalls those opening credits. Both goals are broken down play by play. The only aspect that ever escapes him was his opening score's wider significance. “I never heard any talk of it really,” Moloughney explained yesterday. “One fella reminded me of the TV thing lately. I had forgotten.” Everything else? Crystal clear. His slice of history began with a sideline cut from Theo English that found its way to him after Liam Devaney tangled with an opponent. The finish was, by all accounts, a blistering one from a man whose superb second-half goal for Kilruane MacDonaghs against Thurles Sarsfields in the 1959 Tipperary North final had been one of the prompts for the county to turn to him in the first place. Wexford had more coming.
Roughly 500 people had arrived at Shannon Airport from the States and Canada on the morning of the match. A Swissair jet carrying 67 members of Toronto GAA Club was another visitor to Irish shores and these international waves were replicated on the ground. CIE laid on 25 special trains and road works on O'Connell Street made traffic jams inevitable.