Born: October 18th, 1944
Died: February 6th, 2025
Paddy Cullen’s death after a long illness in February was a cause of sadness for many Dublin football supporters, especially those old enough to recall his exploits in goal for one of the game’s most charismatic teams.
That side, brought from almost nowhere to win All-Ireland titles under the management of Kevin Heffernan, throughout the late 1970s pursued a famous rivalry with Kerry and reinvigorated Gaelic games in the capital.
He was a well-known member of that team, partly because of the performances that brought him four All Star awards but also because of his extrovert personality and quick-witted humour.
This also made him a popular member of the dressingroom where his warmth and optimism infused training sessions and team meetings. “He was a friend to everyone on the panel,” according to his team-mate, the late Brian Mullins, speaking on TG4’s Laochra Gael in 2014.
It also informed one of the more famous anecdotes about him, referred to in his eulogy at the funeral by team-mate Alan Larkin and originally published by David Walsh in a famous 1989 portrait of the team in Magill magazine.
“Partly because he was an optimist and a dreamer, it was Paddy Cullen who first considered that Dublin might be going somewhere. During training at Parnell Park, jets flew overhead and he spotted them. Turning to whoever was nearest, he would say, “See that, we will be on one of those off to America next year.”
He had been an All Star replacement a year or so previously and regaled his team-mates with what a brilliant trip it had been. Now, he determined that they would win an All-Ireland and take the same journey together.
At the time it must have felt to the other players that they were as likely to grow wings and fly there themselves, so lowly and disregarded was Dublin’s place in football’s pecking order. It started as a joke but gradually became a motif, a focal point for their dreams and hardening ambition.
A member of the O’Connell Boys club, Paddy Cullen made his senior competitive debut as goalkeeper in the league semi-final against Meath in April 1967 and played in that year’s home final against Galway.
He would win three All-Ireland medals, two national league and six Leinster titles, becoming the most recognisable ‘keeper’ in football.
From Oxmantown Road, Dublin – the family later moved to Seville Place – he was born on October 18th, 1944, one of 10 children of Jim Cullen, a carpenter from Wexford, and Dublin-born Lily Kennedy who grew up in Carlow, and was educated in St Laurence O’Toole’s and later Bolton Street.
Paddy Cullen became an electrician with McNaughton’s, moving on through positions with different companies, each bringing a bit more responsibility from Merchants Warehousing to Swiss engineering group Brown Boveri, which gave him the opportunity to go into management, initially working as a liaison with trade unions. He later became personnel officer for Musgrave’s Cash and Carry.
In 1984, he and a friend acquired the pub in Ballsbridge, Dublin, which he later bought out and which to this day bears his name, even though he sold it in the 1990s and bought the Manor Inn in Swords.
His team-mate from playing days with Dublin and later one of his selectors, Jim Brogan identified why Paddy Cullen was so successful in business.
“In a way his pub was very much Paddy. People would go there to see Paddy Cullen and meet him. If you said ‘howya’ to him, he would open up his eyes and for however long the conversation, you were the most important person in his world at that time.
“I’m sure success made a big change to his own personal life in terms of who he was and what he was and the resulting opportunities. But he was a good guy. There are anecdotes that when he was in sales, he was really understanding about other people’s personal situations and that was one of his special qualities. He could show empathy that others might not be able to.”
Two major events from his playing days have grown almost to define his career. In his Dublin team’s first All-Ireland final in 1974, opponents Galway were awarded a penalty in the second half.
Paddy Cullen stopped Liam Sammon’s kick. The save is a study in sharp reflexes, waiting until the last second to move to his left and extending his arm to deflect the ball to safety.
“I would place three men as Dublin’s heroes of the day on the same pedestal, Paddy Reilly, David Hickey and Paddy Cullen,” wrote Paddy Downey in his report of the final for The Irish Times.
Galway led at the time and there has been plenty of speculation that had Sammon scored, they may well not have been caught and had Dublin not won that day, their football revolution might have been stillborn.
Then there was the free kick awarded against him in the 1978 final, a turning point in the rivalry with Kerry. Robbie Kelleher handed the ball to Mikey Sheehy as Cullen protested and the quickly taken free sailed over the hastily retreating goalkeeper and into the net, inspiring Con Houlihan’s timeless description that Paddy “dashed back towards his goal like a woman who smells a cake burning.”
In keeping with his self-deprecating sense of humour, Paddy Cullen mounted a display of eight photographs, detailing the incident, on the wall of his pub in Ballsbridge.
The controversy nonetheless troubled him and he was particularly happy to be awarded his fourth goalkeeping All Star the following year.
Although never seen as the most obvious candidate for management, he was appointed Dublin manager in 1990 and together with selectors Dr Pat O’Neill and Jim Brogan, led the county to a league title in 1991 and a Leinster championship the following year, which also saw Dublin back in an All-Ireland final for the first time in seven years.
Although favourites, they lost to Donegal and in the fallout, Paddy Cullen made things easier for everyone by graciously stepping aside. “I had tried. I thought that I could do it and I didn’t do it and it was time to let somebody else do it,” he reflected in 2014.
One of the highpoints of his management was the four-match epic against Meath in the 1991 Leinster championship, which attracted full houses to Croke Park, culminating in a then-rare televised Saturday fixture. The series was credited with reasserting Gaelic games as box-office attractions just a year after the sporting and social phenomenon that was the Italia 90 World Cup.
The years that followed passed happily, a story of business success, family, the conviviality of maintaining contact with the 1970s team as well as the various philanthropic fundraisers they organised, most notably the Dublin Charity Golf Classic, which brought in hundreds of thousands of euro for good causes.
Although unwell, he was able to attend last year’s 50th reunion of the 1974 All-Ireland winners. “That made it a very special day for everybody that he turned up,” recalled Jim Brogan.
He is survived by his wife Ann (Walsh) and children Anthony, Elizabeth and Andrew.
