There was a feeling of a new dawn in the room on Saturday morning.
Not the forced optimism that can accompany the unveiling of a new manager, but something more genuine. A sense of positivity. A sense of possibility. And standing at the centre of it all was Eamonn Fitzmaurice, the new Galway senior football manager, back in the inter-county arena after an absence of seven years.
There is something wonderfully incongruous about Fitzmaurice being the man to lead Galway into this next chapter. He is Kerry through and through. He has won an All-Ireland as a manager and player with his native county. He has spent years immersed in Kerry football, from managing the senior team to coaching at club and school level. Yet here he was on a Saturday morning, talking enthusiastically about Galway, its football tradition and its potential, while preparing himself for the inevitable day when he will walk into Croke Park wearing a Galway top and face the county with which his name has become so closely associated.
It is, in many ways, a story about football. But it is also a story about life. Fitzmaurice is returning to the inter-county game as a different person to the one who left it.
Seven years is a long time in any life. In his case, it has been a period of profound change. His father died. His wife Tina lost her mother. He and Tina became parents to two children. And while all of that was happening, Fitzmaurice was learning a different kind of leadership in his day job as principal of a busy school in Dingle.
He spoke about it with characteristic understatement.
“I’ve probably matured a lot in the meantime,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot about myself and about life in general.”
It was perhaps the most revealing line of the morning. When Fitzmaurice was appointed Kerry manager in 2012, he was only 35. He admitted himself that he felt he was too young for the job. He had the energy, the ambition and the football knowledge, but there are some things that only time can teach.
Now he is approaching 50. The football knowledge remains. The ambition certainly remains. But there is another layer to him now, built through the experiences that happen away from the pitch and cannot be found in any coaching manual.
Nine years as a school principal have taught him plenty about people. Every day literally is a school day. There are children to deal with, parents, teachers, problems, pressures and the ordinary unpredictability of modern Ireland.
That experience, perhaps, will be just as valuable in Galway as any tactical innovation. Because Fitzmaurice is not arriving claiming to have all the answers.
He talked about having “loads of ideas” in his head over the past fortnight, admitting that the adrenaline of getting the job had even interfered with his sleep. But he also displayed a maturity that comes from knowing that an idea is only an idea until it works at the highest level.
He wants to bring a fresh voice, fresh energy and fresh challenges to Galway. And there is a sense that he believes the timing is right. Galway have been close several times over the past few years. He isn’t embarking on three years of seven hour round trips along the west just to win another Connacht title.
Different this time
When Galway chair Paul Bellew contacted him after Padraic Joyce stepped down, Fitzmaurice had initially expected little more than another conversation. He had received approaches over the previous couple of years and nothing had come of them.
This time was different.
“I suppose, it’s never gone beyond the phone call, but for whatever this time, my head was turned,” he said.
The practical considerations were substantial. There was the family. There was the job as principal in Dingle. There was that mammoth commute from Kerry to Galway. And then there was the most emotionally complicated issue of all: the fact that he would be managing against Kerry.
None of it was taken lightly.
But Galway itself proved difficult to resist. Fitzmaurice has watched plenty of Galway football over recent seasons through his work in the media. He has seen a team win four Connacht titles in succession, reach two All-Ireland finals and repeatedly come within touching distance of the ultimate prize.
He sees a county with established leaders, players in their prime and an emerging generation coming through. He sees a football project. And, perhaps crucially, he sees possibility.
That is why this appointment feels less like a manager simply returning to the game and more like a man arriving at a moment in his life when he feels ready for it.
“I feel I’m young enough, and I have enough energy to go at it,” he said. There is an honesty in that which is worth noting.
Inter-county management consumes people. Fitzmaurice knows that better than most. His previous spell in charge of Kerry came with the intensity that accompanies the job at the highest level. Since then, he has experienced life without that obsession.
He described his years in the media as giving him almost the best of both worlds: he could travel around the country, watch the biggest games and remain immersed in football without carrying the pressures of an inter-county manager.
He continued coaching too, with Fossa, his own club Finuge and school teams. In other words, he never really left football. He simply stepped away from the centre of its storm.
Now he has chosen to walk back into it. The Kerry issue was perhaps the most difficult part. Fitzmaurice did not try to dress it up. He talked about the players he had coached, the young Kerry footballers whose first starts he had given, and the bonds that are created over years.
“I wrestled with it a lot,” he admitted. The thought experiment that finally brought home what the decision meant was brutally simple.
He imagined his own two children watching Galway play Kerry in an All-Ireland semi-final or final, with him standing on the sideline wearing a Galway top.
Could he accept that? He decided that he could.
He also found comfort in the history of Kerry managers who had crossed the county boundary before him. From Dick Fitzgerald onwards, there is a tradition of Kerry football people becoming involved elsewhere.
There will be stick. Fitzmaurice knows it. “I mightn’t be flavour of the month for the next couple of years,” he said.
But there was no bitterness in it. Rather, an acceptance that life and football sometimes take people in directions they never expected.
And perhaps that is another reason this feels like a different Fitzmaurice.
The younger man might have viewed such a decision through the prism of football alone. The older man has family, work, memories, responsibilities and experiences to weigh alongside it.
That doesn’t make the decision easier. It simply makes the person making it more rounded.
Respect
Galway, meanwhile, have appointed someone who arrives with enormous respect for the county.
Fitzmaurice spoke about Galway’s history with genuine admiration. He remembers facing the great Galway teams of 1998 and 2001, and the respect that existed for players such as those who formed the backbone of those sides.
He knows the frustration too.
Galway have only won two All-Ireland senior football titles since 1966, despite remaining one of the traditional powers of the game. In recent years, however, they have repeatedly positioned themselves at the top table.
Fitzmaurice sees no contradiction between respecting that history and demanding more from the present.
His ambition is clear. The All-Ireland is the goal. But he was careful not to reduce everything to a trophy.
“In any kind of high-performance environment, what you’re trying to do is create an environment where the players can get the absolute best out of themselves,” he said.
That distinction matters.
The manager cannot control the final result. He can control the environment he creates, the standards he sets and the relationships he builds.
And building those relationships appears to be central to what Fitzmaurice wants to do.
He knows many of the Galway players as footballers. He has watched them. He knows their characteristics and their strengths. Now he wants to know the people behind the footballers.
“Getting to know the people behind it and what makes them tick,” he said, “that kind of thing, that’s exciting for me.”
Again, it is the language of someone whose understanding of leadership has developed beyond the whiteboard.
The football will come. So too will the inevitable arguments about systems, selections and the new rules. Fitzmaurice has plenty of views on those, having served on the Football Review Committee, but he is prepared to wait and see how some of the changes work in practice. A backroom team has to be appointed. There have been names bandied around. Stephen Rochford, Paul Galvin (his brother in law ), or maybe a left field from Kerry to share the journey with, and chew the fact as they make the way back to his home in Tralee over the next three years.
He is also conscious that he is entering a county whose internal dynamics he does not yet fully understand.
There will be lessons in Galway football politics. He will have to learn the geography, the personalities, the traditions and the expectations.
And he knows it. For all the confidence and energy of his arrival, there is an appealing humility in that acknowledgement.
He is not pretending to know Galway. He is coming to learn it.
The practical challenges are considerable too. There is the commute. There is the principalship. There are the demands of family life.
Yet Fitzmaurice believes he can manage it. His school has supported him. His deputy principal Elaine (Briain O Beaglaoich’s mother ) will help. Fridays offer some flexibility. There is a strong community around the school.
And, as he put it, once you make a decision like this, you get on with it.
That may be the defining characteristic of Fitzmaurice’s return.
He has thought about it. He has wrestled with it. He has considered the consequences.
And then he has decided to embrace it.
Seven years ago, Eamonn Fitzmaurice was a young Kerry manager with an All-Ireland title to chase and a career still ahead of him.
Today, he is a husband, a father, a principal, a man who has experienced loss and learned from it, and a football manager who believes he has arrived at the right moment in his life.
He comes to Galway with ideas, energy and ambition. But he also comes with perspective. And perhaps that is the most intriguing part of this new dawn.
The Galway job has not simply been handed to the same Eamonn Fitzmaurice who left inter-county management seven years ago.
And now, with Galway believing once again that the door to glory is open, he is ready to find out what this version of Eamonn Fitzmaurice can do with it.
“Why not us?” is the question being asked across a lot of football counties after Mayo’s breakthrough this year.
Fitzmaurice does not need to provide the answer just yet.
For now, he is simply asking the question with them.
