BACK IN 1976, the fledging Cuala GAA club was only a mere two years old – officially – and the boys and girls around that area were enchanted by the oval ball.
CBC Monkstown won their only Leinster School’s Rugby Senior Cup and, by his own admission, “All the girls were mad about the rugby lads and I was this wierdo with my GAA.”
Still, devotion would run deep with Des Cahill. The RTÉ presenter has waited a long time to see it, but Sunday’s brought Cuala’s first ever Dublin championship.
To win it as they did – overcoming a Con O’Callaghan red card and a Kilmacud Crokes team drenched in success and tempered by dozens of close battles – made it all the sweeter.
To understand where they sit today, on top of the pile, then Cahill brings us back to 1972, before the club was even formed.
To Tom Holden, a man with Kilkenny heritage, uprooted from Mullinavat to south Dublin. He started a juvenile gather-up, among them his son Mick who would later become a darling of the Dublin faithful and win the 1983 All-Ireland.
Soon, this brand new group were flying. But they needed a proper pitch. In nearby Dalkey, there was a hurling club that were limping along at Junior level.
The two entities joined up. The Holdenites got a full-size pitch. The Dalkey Mitchels crowd got a steady stream of talented young enthusiasts. They called it Cuala. There was no downside.
Sort of.
In 1991, they won their second senior hurling championship.
The day after, they were touring the trophy around the pubs of Dalkey. The questions came from barmen.
Eventually, they got fed up of explaining that it was the Dublin senior championship, and that they were Cuala. And, yes, there was a hurling club called Cuala. No kidding.
“Translate that to now,” says Cahill.
“We have mini All-Irelands that parade through the town and kids all with their banners up and the Artane Band. Everyone in Dalkey and Dun Laoighre now knows it.
“None of the schools were playing GAA at one point. But you have Blackrock College, CBC Monkstown are really strong rugby schools. And Sallynoggin were playing soccer.
“So there were an awful lot of people but they weren’t all GAA people. What’s changed now is Cuala’s identity, which wasn’t easy to build up.”
On Sunday, Cuala had chartered their own DART to ferry supporters in the direction of Parnell Park. It was a fiesta, a ceilidh and a Mardi Gras all rolled into one.
And then they only went and won the damn thing.
You can easily imagine how special it is for the likes of Cahill, an ex-chairman of the club.
15 years ago, he was part of the management team that won the county U-21 championship with Michael Fizsimons and Luke Keating from the present senior team. As coincidence would have it, they beat Kilmacud in that final. On Cahill’s 50th birthday.
The year after he went into senior management. And he remained there for 13 years until the year before last.
“The reason I had to take a break from it was that teams could not get on pitches,” he explains.
“They literally were operating off half a pitch here and there and people were coming to me about it. So I just needed a break from it.”
Last year, Cahill was chatting through something with the manager Austin O’Malley when they figured it out. The team were excellent at forcing turnovers and working the ball out of the first line of tackles. After that, they weren’t so good at getting the ball up to the forceful group of forwards.
And that was because they were conditioned to playing on half a pitch. As Fitzsimons mentioned in his post-match TG4 interview, a club like Cuala are not rich in real estate. Occasionally they will find themselves doing a warm up after 9pm at the 4G pitch of Bray Emmets. They train on the hoof, because that’s all they can do.
“We don’t need meetings to get motivated or to understand why we do it. We don’t need to talk about it — we just look at each other's sacrifices”
— Dublin GAA (@DubGAAOfficial) October 20, 2024
Go-Ahead Ireland Man of the Match Michael Fitzsimons chats to @SportTG4! #GoAheadDSC pic.twitter.com/CWNcGfdnfi
The 0-14 to 1-10 win now gives them three weeks to digest what has happened.
When they do, the scale of this achievement will take some sinking in. Crokes have owned Dublin since 2021 and in that time, gobbled up three provincial titles and an All-Ireland.
It’s not that Cuala don’t know what the big time is. Their hurlers won back to back All-Ireland hurling championships in 2017 and 2018.
So they understand that in coming out of Dublin they have a serious chance of further success. The three week block is kind to them and they will be facing Kildare champions, either Naas or Celbridge in the 9 November quarter-final.
There’s partying to be done before all that. On Sunday night, Cahill fielded calls from Cuala people scattered across the globe.
He spent time on the phone with Jennifer Dunne, the only woman to win an All-Ireland (Dublin) and the Grand Final of Women’s Australian Rules Football (Brisbane Lions) in one year. Her grandfather was Pete Dunne, known as ‘Mr Football’ in the club.
On Monday morning, he gathered up all the pictures of the homecoming and was sending to former Dublin hurler David Treacy.
Then he took time to get into all the various What’s App groups essential to the running of a club and tell every mentor or every boys and girls team to meet them for a drink at 7pm this evening.
“Our club is so big, I wouldn’t know some lads who help the U-11s. People think that’s weird but we might train on a pitch six miles away from where they train. We might never bump into them,” Cahill explains.
“But the old thing is that it takes a village to raise a child. Every mentors group, boys and girls, we are inviting them for 7pm in Dalkey, so why don’t you join us!”
You’d imagine they won’t have to explain themselves to the barman this time.
