Search Results for 'Jimmy Joyce'

John O’Dowd got the inaugural juvenile soccer league (for boys under-16) underway in Galway in 1931-2. The clubs competing included; Crusaders, Hotspurs, Reds United, Emmetts, Unknowns, Bective Rangers and Hibernians. The swamp was the only soccer pitch available in Galway at the time. The league was a big success and this prompted the organisers to run a minor league in the 1932-33 season.

Cyril Mahony was born in February 1913 in the family home on Prospect Hill. His mother was Mary Teresa Cunniffe from Loughrea and his father Gerry was a member of the RIC who at one time was stationed in Belfast. He eventually left the force and came back to his mother’s house on Prospect Hill. She was Anne Flaherty from Conamara, a native speaker and a well-known maternity nurse.

Now that we are reaching the end of saturation coverage of the World Cup and watching some of the best soccer players in the world, you might wonder where it all began for some of them, how they got themselves on to the world stage, and how much they owe to the unsung people without whom they would never have succeeded, the referees whose dedication to the game make all of those matches possible.

Now that we are reaching the end of saturation coverage of the World Cup and watching some of the best soccer players in the world, you might wonder where it all began for some of them, how they got themselves on to the world stage, and how much they owe to the unsung people without whom they would never have succeeded, the referees whose dedication to the game make all of those matches possible.

It is fairly certain that rugby football was being played in Galway before the formation of the IRFU, but the lack of surviving minutes of meetings or records makes it difficult to pinpoint the actual beginnings of some clubs. We know that in 1886 there were four clubs in existence, Queen’s College (now UG), The Grammar School, Galway Town, and Old Galwegians. These latter two clubs amalgamated in the 1909/10 season and called themselves Galway Town. They were a successful club. World War I and its aftermath ruled out competitive rugby but in the resumption, in 1921/22 they again won the senior cup and then, for some reason, decided to change the name again, this time to Galwegians RFC.

In the year 1527, it was decreed in one of the Galway Statutes that “At no time to use ne occupy ye hurling of ye little balle with the hookie sticks or staves, nor use no hand balle to play without the walls, but only the great foot balle”. It seems the authorities of the day were trying to limit the playing of hurling, but they might as well have tried to hold back the tide.