It might only be February 13th, but Offaly are unbeaten in the hurling and football leagues. Their footballers have beaten Sligo at home and Laois away, the hurlers drew with Carlow first time out before beating Laois (again) and Antrim, convincingly, in Tullamore last weekend. They’re top of hurling’s Division 1B, and are second in Division Three of the football league, and I for one welcome Offaly’s imminent return to prominence. The Biffos are back.
I may only have been a babe in arms when Séamus Darby did what he did in 1982, and wasn’t even alive for Johnny Flaherty’s heroics a year before in the hurling final, but I internalised the particular cussedness of the Offaly mindset. I grew up expecting Offaly to laugh in the face of danger, to thumb their nose at history and reputation, and to launch improbable comebacks from the most unlikely of starting points.
This was the way they operated, and they delighted in it. The footballers had a golden extended decade from 1969 to 1982 that incorporated seven Leinster titles and three All-Ireland titles. That period also happened to be the launching pad for an outrageous period of success in hurling – four All-Ireland titles in 18 years, along with nine Leinster titles, between 1980 and 1998. Seven All-Irelands, and 17 Leinster titles between hurling and football in 30 years, for a county with a tiny population base.
They played in the first All-Ireland hurling final of the new millennium, but that is as good as it’s got for them this century. In fact, each year seemed to bring some new humiliation. From being a county that paid scant heed to an opponent’s tradition and history, they became weighted down by their own.
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First indignation set in, then panic, and then, after their relegation from the Leinster championship in 2018, a sense of resignation hung over the hurlers. They were relegated from the Joe McDonagh to the Christy Ring Cup, the third tier of hurling, in 2020, and couldn’t win promotion back up at the first time of asking. People were starting to get scared to say that ‘things couldn’t possibly get any worse’.
The footballers never really gave anyone any excuse to get excited in that time either – like every other team in Leinster, lining up to get hammered by Dublin was never going to set pulses racing.
After a while, it might have crossed Offaly people’s minds that far from their recent struggles being a temporary aberration, that it was in fact the last three decades of the 20th century that was the aberration – that being in Division Three of the football, and in the lower tiers of the hurling championship, was actually a reversion to the mean. What a depressing thought.
Michael Duignan’s appointment as county board chairman in 2019 was an important moment, but before that he’d been involved centrally in another key staging post – the opening of the Faithful Fields Centre of Excellence in September 2017, debt-free on delivery to the county board.
The under-20 footballers won a Leinster final in 2021, beating Dublin 0-15 to 3-3 in Portlaoise. They rolled all the way to the All-Ireland title, beating Roscommon in the final in Croke Park, with their financial benefactor, Shane Lowry, nearly falling off the Hogan Stand in his excitement.
And then there was the arrival of Adam Screeney and company. The Offaly minor hurling team’s march to the All-Ireland final in 2022, when they nearly packed out Nowlan Park only to lose to a heartbreaking last-minute goal against Tipperary, re-energised GAA fans in the county in a way that is difficult to explain to people from larger, more reliably successful counties.
Forget about minor as a development grade for a minute – Offaly people needed to see a team from their neck of the woods going toe to toe with the big guns again. And when many of that team returned to Nowlan Park, on a gloriously sunny day in June of last year, to see them exact revenge on Tipperary to win the All-Ireland under-20 final, there were 26,000 people there in a capacity crowd, without a ticket to be had anywhere. It was one of the undoubted highlights of the GAA year in 2024.
Now Screeney moves on to senior hurling, after another spellbinding year with his club. He may not have had much of an impact in the Joe McDonagh Cup final last year, played just a week after the under-20 final, but he will be an adornment to the Leinster championship this year. In that competition, they won’t fear Wexford, Antrim … or Dublin, their opponents this weekend in the league.
Mickey Harte is in with the footballers, and making a difference already. Whatever about his time in Derry, he showed with Louth that he retains an ability to give a team a sense of purpose, direction and organisation. It might well be enough to propel them into Division Two.
I found a quote this week from the Training Centre Work Group brochure that did so much in the development of the Faithful Fields project. “For over 30 years Offaly – sometimes alone – stood up for the smaller counties, taking on the kings of hurling and football and beating them at their own game …"
With two senior teams now powered by separate, successful, memorable underage teams, they might be at it again very soon.
