By Chris McCann

A ROAR of thousands goes up as the Éire Óg players complete the final sprint of their last strength and conditioning session before the start of London’s club GAA season.

No, the players from London’s most central Gaelic football team don’t attract mass turnouts to watch them train. It’s their location rather than their identity that explains the crowd noise.

Without a floodlit pitch to train on the panel are utilising the facilities of another London football club, by training on the well illuminated concourse outside the Emirates Stadium.

And while the squad are being put through their paces, Arsenal’s Ladies team are playing the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final a matter of yards away in front of a crowd of 10,000.

The space, the steps, the benches and the lighting make the area around Arsenal ground mean it’s utilised widely by the local community, and a group of local teenagers are practicing their skateboarding skills on a ramp adjacent to where John Whyte is taking the Ógs’ training session outside the stadiums North Back. Meanwhile at the Clock End of the ground a roller-hockey team are zipping around cones at their own session.

Club Chairman, Conor Kearney, has popped down to the session to hand back a jersey. The Belfast man retired from playing last summer to take up a new role, leading the club’s committee.

Looking at the 18 players training under the watchful eye of Tony Adams’ statue, Kearney notes that around half of them are new to the club this season. Indeed, seven club debutants started last Sunday’s season opening 5-9 to 3-7 victory over Garryowen. It’s a fact that highlights one of the challenges of sustaining a club right in the heart of one of the globe’s global cities.

“Our particular circumstances do mean that we have to work very hard for continuity. People don’t tend to stay in central London once they get into their 30s. If they haven’t gone back to Ireland, they tend to settle a bit further out of London, where it’s more affordable. You’d have to be doing very well to be able to buy a house anywhere round here.

“The club was 10 years old last year and we are starting to see some players continue to play with us even though they have moved further out of town. But we do have to work hard to bring new members every season as you’re always likely to see a couple of lads move on. It’s just part of the nature of being based in central London that we are in constant cycle of recruitment.

“It also means that we have to work very hard to make sure that we have the funds to run the club, there isn’t a massive membership base to rely upon. We are very much a player driven club and we are very reliant upon our sponsors to keep us running, particularly our main sponsor, Pat Fitzsimmons from the Faltering Full-back (a well-known sports bar in Finsbury Park).”

Based out of Downhills Park in Haringey, Éire Óg is a young club, established in 2011.  One of those who played a key role in getting it up and running is Camlough native Conor McGinn, Club President, now Labour MP for St Helen’s North, just outside Liverpool. He explained how Éire Óg came to be founded.

“There was previously a men’s team based in Finsbury Park, the Holloway Gaels, which folded when emigration dropped off during the Celtic Tiger years. There has always been an established Irish community in Islington and Camden, and in 2011 a second-generation lad called Luke Callinan, whose parents are from Clare, came to the London Irish Centre and asked how he would go about setting up a Gaelic football club. The centre put him in touch with me and we rounded up a few men we knew had an interest in the GAA from watching the games on TV in the pubs around north London.

“The clubs that already existed were doing great work and we never took a single man from any other team when we were setting up or encroached on them. We wanted to do a couple of things differently. Firstly, to build a club around the community in that part of London. Secondly, to bring in lads who had either abandoned the GAA when they moved to London or hadn’t really played much at home alongside the second-generation lads, and thirdly to attract fellas who were working in town or living nearby in central London and couldn’t travel to train with clubs that were further out or east, west or south.

“Paul Maher, another Clareman, started to train the lads. Nigel McDermott from Fermanagh was involved too. Paddy Corbett from Mayo had experience on the administrative side and became the secretary. And I took on the role of chair.”

Getting going was one thing, actually fielding a team presented a whole new set of issues as the county Armagh man recalls:

“The first problem we had was that we had no players. The second was that we had nowhere to train. The third was that we had no money. But apart from that we were optimistic we could make a success of it! We put the ‘Bat Signal’ up around the area, Twitter and even Facebook weren’t what they are now and so we did some old fashioned postering in the pubs, clubs and workplaces and we started to get together on a Sunday. We had hardly a team, but we decided to bite the bullet and try and get affiliated to the county board and enter a team that season. I went out to the county board meeting and made the case and to be fair most clubs were encouraging and supportive.

“Then we had to get a set of jerseys. I had got married the previous year and unbeknownst to my wife – to this day – I dipped into the remaining wedding money and savings to “borrow” a £1,000 to get us kits, footballs, etc. We also had great support from local Irish pubs and the Irish Centre. But the kits didn’t arrive in time for our first game. I’ll always remember the kindness of Eddie Naughten from Cu Chullains club who loaned us their jerseys, it tells you everything you know about the GAA. We added other new faces and important people over that season, not least Patrick Reynolds from Dublin and Nigel Drew from Cork who took on a great deal of responsibility on the playing, management and administration side.”

McGinn also explains how the club settled on the name Éire Óg: “We had gone through several different options, but none seemed to be hitting the mark. Then we thought about why we were doing this and what we wanted to achieve. Éire Óg, meaning ‘Young Ireland’, was originally the name for the group of men who were the early instigators of a cultural revival and awakening of national consciousness that was about pride in Ireland and Irishness. Rooted in that ‘Young Irelanders’ tradition.

“We also thought about the ‘Young Irish’ of today and the fact that we wanted our club to be home for them, whether they are the young Irish men and women who are emigrating or those young second generation Irish who have been born here in London and want to express their identity through our national games. So, Éire Óg sums up who we are and what we are about.”

The often-transitory nature of life in central London might lead you to believe that a GAA club doesn’t necessarily have the same importance as a community hub as it does in a parish in rural Ireland, but in some ways, it actually makes the club even more important as a social network for its members:

“It can actually be quite hard to build a social circle in London. The people you work with can live on the other side of the city, or well outside it and, you wouldn’t know your neighbours the way you do at home,” noted Kearney.

“I moved to London in 2017, after a spell in Dubai, and I knew that London had a bit of reputation that it can be a lonely place. I was a bit apprehensive about that. But I knew a few of the Belfast lads that were playing with Éire Óg, like Ronan Campfield, so I joined the club pretty much straight away. It helped me settle. When you join a GAA club, you pretty much immediately have a social circle of people to mix with, people that you share a common interest with.  I certainly think that I have made friends in the club who will be lifelong.

“As with any GAA club, folk will go out of their way to help you settle and maybe give lads a bit of help on the work front if they can. But I think we really saw the value of the social aspect of the club during the pandemic. The attractions of life in central London are a lot about all the things you have access to – whether it’s bars and restaurants, going to see a show, or watching Premiership soccer at the weekend. When lockdown happened obviously all of that was off the menu and having the support network that the club provided was really important for people.”

The cliched image of the London Gaelic footballer is of a lad who spends his week labouring on a site and plays a bit of ball on Sunday, maybe after a rake of pints of a Saturday night. With Éire Óg’s, that’s certainly not the case and the make-up of the club is in many ways reflective of a modern London Irish identity and indeed the development of Irish society and economy as a whole.

“People probably do have a notion of what it is to be London Irish, of lads coming over to work on building sites, labourers, brickies, joiners, and in some of the more established West London clubs, there’s probably still a bit of that. But given our location, pretty much all our players are graduates and work in what traditionally would have been called white collar industries.

“Myself, I’m a Commercial Manager working in the water industry. Our players work in things like accountancy, IT and business development. In our current side we have a player doing a PhD in neuroscience, we have an actuary, we have software developers as well as what people might see as more traditional professions for London Irish such as teaching and quantity surveying.

“That probably reflects the nature of the 21st century Irish immigrant in London. I think at the start, the background of our panel might have tempted some of the more established clubs to think that Eire Óg might have been a side that could be physically bullied out of a game, but they were fairly and quickly set straight on that point.”

It’s an assessment that Club President McGinn agrees with:

“It’s true that a lot of our players were and are what you might call young professionals and I suppose that reflects how Irish emigration has changed and the Irish community in London has changed. But you could have been the highest-flying banker in the City or the best lawyer in the Temple, but class, background, job, salary, none of that matters when you are wearing your club jersey and sometimes even having to wash it too. And maybe we had a lot of lads join precisely because they were in jobs where there wasn’t a big or natural Irish ‘thing’ and they really benefitted from plugging in to the community and making friends.”

There are three Divisions in London football and in its first few years Éire Óg yo-yoed between Junior and Intermediate status, but in recent seasons have established themselves as a solid Intermediate team.

“The standard of football in London is good, I think intermediate football in London wouldn’t be far off what I’d expect to see from an Intermediate game back home in Antrim. Obviously, we have ambitions to be a senior team. But we also have ambitions to establish a more solid base in the community, we have an affiliation with Holloway Gaels, Ladies football club and with Finsbury Park rugby club.

“We’ve formed a combined charity with a view to raising funds to establish proper clubrooms at Downhills Park, maybe with capacity for a social venue. It’s going to require a lot of a major push on our part, but it will be an important step in really establishing ourselves in the community,” explained Kearney.

For McGinn there are no doubts that ÉIre Óg will continue to grow and thrive:

“My ambition for the club when I stood down as Chair was that we would grow the membership into the community, continue to put our games and values at the centre of everything we do and of course succeed on the playing field. They’ll always be my ambitions for Éire Óg.

“The club has gone from strength to strength and I’m very proud to be associated with it as Club President, even though I don’t get to see many games and I’m sure I wouldn’t know many of the faces now. But that is all part of developing a club in an overseas unit of the Association.

“I did my bit and then I handed it on to people who did their bit and brought it along and then they passed it on now to the current committee and a management team and a squad that have all the ingredients needed to move us on again to the next stage and win a league or a championship. And when we do, I’ll be the proudest man in our association.”

If you are interested in playing Gaelic football in central London or are moving to London and want to link up with a club in anyway, Éire Óg are always on the lookout for new members. You can get in touch by emailing Conor Kearney on chairman@eireoglondon.org