Clare selector Fr Harry Bohan tells Keith Duggan why he has never seen any flame as powerful or unifying as the Clare hurling team

By the time Anthony Daly and Fr Harry Bohan had packed their bags and exited the changing rooms after a tense, unflattering National League win over Laois, they were the last men in the ground.

Dusk had fallen over Ennis, a sharp February wind cut through Cusack Park and nobody was hanging around for autographs. Nor could they be blamed.

"It was one of those situations where we just had a little laugh to ourselves," remembers Fr Bohan now. "There is a saying that it is the supporters that make a team. I feel the opposite is true, that the team is always the galvanising source for the supporters. The public takes its lead from the team and I think we will see them responding to this Clare team in Ennis on Sunday."

Immersed in Clare hurling for most of his life, Fr Bohan is convinced that the present group of senior hurlers means as much to the public now as was true during the hot, tremulous summer of 1995. It hardly seems like 10 years since Daly was in the first flushes of a great captaincy and Ger Loughnane was preaching a new gospel. Clare, like the rest of the country, have undergone inordinate changes during that period and Fr Bohan is not alone in believing that sport, particularly Gaelic games, matter greatly to people precisely because they are recognisable and unchanging.

"I was asked just the other day if the Church could learn anything from the GAA. And straight away, I said 'Belonging'. Much of what has happened in this country has been for the good and parts of Clare have enjoyed phenomenal growth, really extraordinary development. But all that fluctuation and change has left a vacuum too and I think that the very fact of people gathering together in Cusack Park, from urban estates and country farms, from hills and valleys is something special in itself. It is a connection to a way of life that some people find hard to locate now."

Fr Bohan is not simply adding to what has become a fashionable interpretation of contemporary society. As far back as 1978, he produced a paper entitled Have We Forgotten Something? which examined the negative consequences of urban development during that period.

Furthermore, he took out a loan of £1,500 and embarked on a building scheme with the ambition of safeguarding the existence of the villages which were being abandoned post-haste.

Back then, he faced protestations from the very local authorities that today are driving housing schemes in those same areas. It was extraordinarily successful and raised issues still pertinent today, from parenting to the notion of how to develop a community from a bunch of houses clustered together in a field. Sport, of course, has always been one way to bridge that sense of alienation.

Not long ago Fr Bohan gave a talk at a seminar chaired by Tomás Mulcahy entitled Sport and Spirituality. Elite GAA teams are almost unique forces now in their sense of shared vision and faith and in the selfless dedication to an ideal - because winning the All-Ireland is, for most counties, an ideal.

Clare are a particularly strong example of this.

Fr Bohan's involvement as a selector under Daly has reminded him just how radically hurling has changed as well. He took part in the recent training expedition to La Manga, a venture that would never have been dreamt of even in the evangelistic era of Loughnane.

"It was extraordinary. We think it went very well and Johnny Glynn had it planned out rigorously and the training and bonding worked. But just the fact of bringing 30 guys away, you are always taking a risk. But I suppose it made me wonder just how much further the game can bring these guys.

"It was an eye-opener to see them operating in this fully professional set-up, training twice a day, every hour accounted for and they totally absorbed in what they were doing.

"I think a week was plenty long and that we were all ready to come home but it was a terrific and unusual experience, one I suppose was completely new to me."

It also came smack in the middle of Clare's league renaissance but it did not interrupt their form as they registered a third victory on the trot, against Tipperary last week.

After suffering a trimming at the hands of Galway in their third league outing, the Clare players responded terrifically to Daly's stinging comments outside the dressingroom afterwards.

In typically honest and blunt terms, the Clarecastle man said his team either had to change fast or else forget about the season.

Grimacing as he looked ahead to Clare's visit to Nowlan Park, he warned that Kilkenny might wipe the floor with them.

"It could be six," he said. That turned out to be one of the best bad predictions of the year as Clare played as if transformed.

One of the pleasures for Fr Bohan of this involvement has been studying the way Daly has made strides as a manager, taking his former friends and team-mates in the dressingroom with him.

"I don't know what it is about Clare but we fall into a kind of a lull sometimes. I think that accounted for the early part of the season. But I mean, the respect for Anthony Daly would be something incredible and his commitment to this Clare team means a lot to the players.

"But I honestly do find this particular team to be full of incredible people. You see the Lohans and Davy Fitzgerald, Seanie McMahon, men with a couple of All-Ireland medals behind them still wanting to hurl their best for Clare and you wonder how and from where they continue to get the inspiration.

"I think some of it has to do with Anthony returning. But they all love the game and want to keep playing at the top level."

That sense of cause and spirit is what makes Fr Bohan so convinced that Clare hurling matters as much in the county as it ever did.

Winning or losing tomorrow against Cork is not the be-all and end-all but any sign that Clare are on the threshold of something special still provokes excitement. That is why it didn't matter so much that they felt as though Clare had been deserted that night after the Laois game.

Fr Harry Bohan has been passionate about getting people involved as a community for all his life but has never seen any flame as powerful or unifying as the Clare hurling team.

"It is impossible to imagine the county without them."