Search Results for 'Harry Anderson'

Nearly every day since the pandemic commenced, two great servants to Galway sport gather behind so called enemy lines to talk about football and life.

In 1940, Shantalla was just green fields with an occasional farmhouse. A decade later, it was a sprawling housing estate with a large young population. They were slowly developing a sense of community, but sadly, they had no facilities such as parks or pitches to play games on.

The distinguished historian Gerry Hayes McCoy, a graduate of the Bish, once wrote of his alma mater: “Going to school is the greatest emotional experience of a lifetime, the greatest and least forgettable. Do you remember how the sun shone through that wire-meshed window, shone in on your childhood, the bright sun of long ago? Do you smell again the smell of school-warm varnish, leather, bread and butter, ink, powder, books, boys? Do you remember the flinty yard, tree-shaded; the speaking river; the screaming seagulls on a frosty morning? How cold could it be! Do you remember the lighting of the fire — how it smoked without heat, how it smouldered. Do you remember the wonderful morning when the key of the school was lost and who-was-it was sent up town to the shop where — how unsporting — they kept a box of keys to thwart just so delirious a possibility.”

St Michael’s Club was formed in 1956 after Galway won the All-Ireland football final. The first AGM was held in Tom Connolly’s house in Lower Shantalla Road, and they played their first game in 1957. Among those who founded the club were Pa Boyle (whose brainchild it was), Mick O’Toole, John Duignan, Mick Higgins, Liam Cunningham, and Sergeant O’Toole. They started as a dual club, but after a few years they concentrated solely on football.

The All-Ireland Minor Gaelic Football Championship for under-18 boys was introduced in the late 1920s by the GAA, the first champions were Clare in 1929.