Clare's fairytale rise in 1990s changed the county's people utterly
"I have a picture up in the house of my father lifting the cup that night. We were not exactly the sports family of the parish. We almost felt like 'is it right that we're here?' but there we were, at the centre of it.''
By then, Maura O'Connell had been a professional musician for 15 years. Starting out with De Danann in 1980, she made an instant impact, and that translated to America too.
O'Connell decided to base herself in Nashville and, by 1995, she'd collaborated with everyone from Nancy Griffith to Van Morrison to Roseanne Cash. That was a particularly hectic summer for O'Connell but, on Sunday, September 3, any thought of fatigue or getting a rest went out the window.
Clare were in their first All-Ireland hurling final in 81 years. O'Connell is a native of Ennis and, though she was thousands of miles from Croke Park, she was there in spirit.
"I was in California with my band, and we were travelling from a festival to the airport in San Francisco,'' she said.
"None of us had a mobile phone. They weren't common at the time. And I kept getting the bus to stop at diners along the way to use the pay phone.
"I'd ring home and go 'what's the score?' We stopped a few times and then I got the final score. I roared into the diner 'Clare have won the All-Ireland!'."
O'Connell's band was made up of American musicians who wouldn't have been up to speed on hurling, Biddy Early's curse, the Clare shout and Ger Loughnane's wild-eyed mischief.
But the singer was determined that they would toast the success with her.
"I was actually pregnant with my son but, when we got to the airport, I made the band have a drink to celebrate,'' she said.
"They kept saying 'why are we drinking at noon?' I said, because I’m pregnant so ye have to do it for me. Fun day.''
Nobody ever summed up the sport better than Anthony Daly, Clare's on-field leader in '95.
"Sure look, hurling, a thousand mad things and someone comes out on top."
But binning the curse of Biddy Early that never really existed - she died 10 years before the GAA was founded - changed Clare in ways that went beyond hurling.
To Mark O'Halloran, it had a transformative effect. He is the actor, writer and filmmaker celebrated for his work on 'Garage', 'Adam and Paul', 'The Virtues' and 'Viva'.
READ MORE:Brian Lohan feared that Shane O'Donnell wouldn't return to play after concussion
READ MORE: Davy Fitzgerald 'turned down Galway job' but leaves door open to county management return
"I grew up in a big family that was quite sports' orientated but my Dad was a rugby player and, because of that, I think he had a slight bitterness towards the GAA,'' he said.
"Because he took up rugby, he wasn't allowed to play GAA and that led to a bitterness that was institutionalised in my family.
"Growing up in Ennis, I just wanted to rebel against what I thought was wrong in the country.
"I was interested in lounging around, reading pretentious books, and wanting to be in a rock 'n' roll band and listen to The Velvet Underground. I thought that the GAA was everything that was hick in the country.
"I couldn't be bothered with it, but the summer of '95 changed that for me, in loads of ways. It actually set off a whole different career path for me."
O'Halloran had started a science degree in UCG but abandoned the course after a year.
He was dabbling in acting but not getting anywhere. An idle few months in '95 might well have been the making of him..
"It was a very long, hot summer in Ireland. I remember getting up and going 'oh, my God, there's another day of this sunshine','' he said.
"I was completely and utterly unemployed. I was living in a bedsit in a house on Sherrard Street in Dublin and the house was full of Ennis people.
''Clare started winning, and we never won anything. Then, suddenly, this was happening and, from watching the games, you realise that hurling is elegant and beautiful.
"There were these heroic figures too - Anthony Daly, the Sparrow - it felt as unstoppable as the summer was. It just didn't end.''
In some ways, O'Halloran felt like an imposter coming late to the party so didn't go looking for tickets for the big games in Croke Park.
But the magic of those special Sundays still lingers with him.
"Those of us who didn't get tickets watched the final in Sherrard Street. Then this wildness took off, it was one of the greatest days ever. Heading to The Big Tree to start and then following these crowds of people into town. It just became epic craic,'' he said.
"The year afterwards, I got the biggest part I'd ever got - in a play called 'Rosie and Starwars' written by Charlie O'Neill.
"He was from Kilkee and I played a young hurler from Clare in the play, and it was all about the Clare win in '95.
"Out of that, I got good recognition and got work in the Gate. At its heart, it had this amazing monologue which got me the attention of producers in town.
"It started off with: "Hurling is ballet for Paddies'' and it ends with this boy shouting ''I love it, I need it, I crave it, I fucking hate it!''.
"In lots of ways, 1995 transformed my own life, it transformed the way I looked at the GAA, for sure.''
Martin Hayes is a native of Feakle, Loughnane's village. He is a fiddler who is world renowned - especially for his work with the late Dennis Cahill and The Gloaming.
Hayes put his energy into music, rather than hurling, but that didn't mean 1995 passed him by, not by a long shot.
"I was living in Seattle but was back from America that summer touring and the flags and colour in the towns of Ennis...oh, my God, I just couldn't get over it,'' he said
"But I was braced for disappointment, I was conditioned to expect that.
"Oddly enough, the night before the '95 final, I was playing up north somewhere and I just made it back to Dublin - a very quiet Dublin - because the game was on.
"I made it to the house of my friend, Amy Garvey, and that's where I watched the match.
"It was unbelievable, really. I ended up with the Clare team and with the Liam MacCarthy Cup in my hand that night.
"They were staying in the Berkeley Court Hotel and the Tulla Ceili Band were asked to play at the banquet.
"Anthony Daly's cousins and his granduncle would have been members of the band.
"I have a picture up in the house of my father lifting the cup that night. We were not exactly the sports family of the parish. We almost felt like 'is it right that we're here?' but there we were, at the centre of it.''
To Rachael English - the RTE presenter and novelist - it felt like a sort of homecoming.
When she was in primary school in St Conaire's NS in Shannon, a twentysomething Ger Loughnane came into her orbit.
"I remember he even had the All Stars' poster stuck up on the wall. We used to go into him for PE and, in a way that wouldn't have been common then, he treated boys and girls the same,'' she said.
"In Shannon, there was a sense that it was a conflicted place but that changed with '95.
"If you said you were going into town, you meant Limerick, not Ennis.
"It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that people viewed Clare as the place in between Limerick and Galway, that it was playing fiddles and the Cliffs of Moher...
"But it was the first time that I found people were envious that you were from Clare. It was actually quite cool to be from Clare.
"The team were different. They were all so young, the fact that Ger had a certain amount of charisma.
"All of the players were new and not that well known outside of Clare. That seems ridiculous now, that there was a time when Davy Fitz wasn't well known.''
English spent 12 months working for Clare FM but was five years in RTE by the time 1995 came around. It felt good to be a Clare woman in Dublin then.
"There was a certain amount of character there, people were fascinated by them,'' she said.
"There was the whole mythology about them training on the Hill of Shannon. It didn't feel like other teams had the same kind of story.
"On the news at the time, far more than in other years, there were just endless feature packages about Clare.
"It just seemed fresh. Think of the time that it was too - it was 1995, a lot was changing, anyway, in '95. Remember Liam Griffin said that Clare couldn't have won an All-Ireland until the emigration stopped.
"Even going back 10 years, if those players had been around then, they probably wouldn't have been in Clare.
"I genuinely think '95 changed Clare as a county. You feel almost foolish saying that, it was just a handful of matches.
"But it did give people confidence, it did put a spring in their step. If you said you were from Clare, people immediately talked about the hurling team. Immediately.
"It did lead to a certain amount of optimism around the place.''
Hayes is an original thinker. Anyone who saw him being interviewed by Tommy Tiernan on the latter's RTE chat show would recognise that.
And, in Ger Loughnane, Hayes sees a kindred figure.
"He's a great character, Ger Loughnane. A very powerful figure. There's a strain of independence and free-thinking that he has that I enjoy a lot,'' said Hayes.
"A sports team representing a county represents some element of the pysche of the whole place.
"It also engenders a kind of confidence, a sense of finding your place in the world, and not being the poor relation.
"It was important for the psychology of the county, in the same way that Ireland in the World Cups seemed to have a significant impact on the psyche of the nation.
"Clare had a sense of pride around hurling, a sense that they were a good hurling county, but we had no proof of it.
"I lived in Chicago and it reminded me of the baseball team, the Cubs. There was a lot of same mythology around about them being cursed.
"They won the World Series after 108 years and the reaction was very similar to that which happened in Clare.''
To Hayes, it mattered that the All-Ireland win was tied in with Clare's other great passion.
"In his speech after the game, Anthony Daly had mentioned traditional music,'' he said.
"The fact that they had the Tulla Ceili Band playing in Dublin that night as part of the celebrations was lovely, it was great to be part of that, and I felt connected to it.
"Every now and then I'd meet Ger and we have a very good mutual friend in my sound engineer, Matt Purcell - a cousin of Ger's and a very close friend.
"Matt would always be filling me in on 'Ger said this' and 'Ger said that'.''
To O'Halloran, it's simple. It was the best of times.
"In a way, it's the Clare version of Italia '90.,'' he said.
"It set off something. This idea of us being largely overlooked....I don't think Clare would be what it is now without 1995 happening.
"It just felt really nice to say 'yeah, I'm from Clare'. That hadn't been there before.''
Get the latest sports headlines straight to your inbox by signing up for free email alerts.
Related
Share this page
Guest Posts by Easy Branches
