Spa GAA
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Founded: | 1948 | ||||||||||||||||
| County: | Kerry | ||||||||||||||||
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| Club Colours: | Blue & Gold | ||||||||||||||||
| Grounds: | Tullig, Killarney | ||||||||||||||||
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Spa GAA is a Gaelic football club based in Killarney in County Kerry.
[edit] History
1948: Spring 1948, Casey's Farmhouse. A long way and a far cry from Hayes Hotel in Thurles in 1884! Rationing from the war hadn't quite died away. Emigration was cutting a swathe through the ranks of Kerry youth. News was spreading that Lissivigeen Football Club was defunct.
No matter - leather had been flying over O'Keeffe's and John Kearney's (now Johnny Doyle's at Lissivigeen Cross) fields for many years and would continue to do so. The men gathered at Casey's that night were determined of it, and theirs was a resilience unbroken by famine or war or the hard, unrelenting poverty of the times. Easy talk now with the Celtic Tiger of the "good old days" - any student of Irish history will tell you that they weren't that great, but the people, including that gathering of men like Jerry Donoghue, Jamesie Donoghue (as a small boy I accepted "penny bars" as my right and due when I was sent down to Jamesies Shop for messages), Donie O'Leary, Mick Fitzgerald, Larry and Archie Cronin, Pats Casey......the people were a lot greater than their circumstances. They named their fledgling outfit Spa.
They knew they had good footballers - The O'Keeffe's Denis and Thado had helped Dr. Crokes to the County title in 1901 and wore the county jersey in 1902. Young lads knew that John Kearney wouldn't be too cross with them for kicking ball in his field at the foot of the Pike Hill - he won the county with Crokes in 1913/1914. Among those young lads were the likes of Pat Doherty, Jack O'Sullivan, Tim Loughnane, Dan Gleeson, Jamesie Donoghue of Sheheree, and Dan Doherty -the latter trio were regulars on the East Kerry team, while Dan Doherty also won a Cork title with Clonakilty. In 1936 returning emigrant Mike Fitzgerald presented the astonishing gift of a real, actual, leather football to Master O'Reilly of Lissivigeen NS (my own father, like everybody else at the time, remembers taking cows bladders from the cast-off offal from the slaughterhouse at the top of Market Lane and inserting a hollow stick to temporaily inflate it. The law of diminishing returns in terms of distance kicking meant that games were interrupted regularly for re-inflation. No doubt Tadghie Lyne, that great Legion and Kerry exponent of long kicking, played similar games when he was small!). In 1940 a collection was held for black and white jerseys, with Major McGillicuddy being a huge contributor.
The foundations were sound, the roots of football ran deep in Lissivigeen, Minish, Tullig, Tullorum, and the likes. These men intended to nurture that fertile soil. Almost three score years later, the generations that have passed through the blue and gold continue their proud legacy - county footballers like the legendary Tadhg "The Master" O'Sullivan, Paudie O'Mahony, the Gleesons Jim and Mick, Donie O'Sullivan, Paddy Casey, Tim Regan, and Mike McAuliffe proud and rightly proud to stand as equals in Spa beside great neighbours like John Kelly, Johnny Batt Cronin, Ger and the rest of the "Shina" Cronins, Mossie, Seanie Kelliher, Dave the Panther and Willie Herlihy, John Sullivan, John Wickham, Eileen Casey, Hannah Moynihan, Sean Moynihan, John O'Leary and his sister Mary, Sheila McCarthy, Triona Mangan and our Irish Dancing champions, the great Doolan family, the Caseys, Michael and Sean Cronin, the late and much-loved Aidan Cronin and Patrick Corcoran, and the thousands more that have made Spa so much the heart of the community.
