Cuala supporters celebrate a first half score during the Dublin County Senior Club Football Championship final match between Cuala and Kilmacud Crokes at Parnell Park in Dublin. Photo by Daire Brennan/Sportsfile.
By John Harrington
Cuala GAA club are often presented as a modern success story, but their history goes back much further than the club’s foundation in 1974.
Through their excellent social history project - ‘Cartlann Digiteach Cuala’ – the club has amassed a treasure trove of information that traces a much longer lineage of Gaelic games in the borough of Dun Laoghaire.
A variety of teams operated in the area from the late 1800s, but the formal history of the club really began in in 1918 with the formation of Cuala Hurling Club.
From there the family tree includes off-shoots like St Begnet’s GAA Club, Dalkey Mitchells GAA Club, Roger Casement’s GAA Club, Cuala Boys GAA Club, Cuala Casement’s Hurling and Football Club, and St. Mary’s Camogie club until Cuala as we know it was founded in 1974 and the family was finally completed in 1979 when the Camógs of St. Mary’s also joined the club.
The roots of Gaelic games in the area run deep, but since the turn of the millennium the club really began thriving and now has blossoming tendrils in every nook and cranny of their sprawling catchment area of South Dublin.
This has been largely thanks to the success the club has had in welcoming new families to the fold, many of them with no prior history of involvement in Gaelic games.
It’s fitting then that the curator of Cartlann Digiteach Caula should be someone like Michael Goodwin who has put countless hours into the project with the zeal of the converted.
“I was born and raised in Monkstown and had no understanding even of the GAA,” he told GAA.ie. “I was in a rugby-playing school and if you didn't excel at that there were no other sports you'd get involved in. So I had no involvement in GAA until my son went in to the Cuala academy.
“At the time Johnny Sheanon and Karl Schutte were the big movers and shakers in the Academy. At some point they called out for help from parents and I was the slowest one to step back!
“I love telling that story because it epitomises so much about the GAA. Johnny Sheanon once asked me did I know the best way to get people to do things in the GAA. I said, 'What?' He said, 'Ask them!" And he was so right, I see that in Cuala the whole time.
“It's extraordinary the amount of people who have come into the club who I know have no GAA background whatsoever. Each of them brings some sort of skills with them.
“Some of them may have a background in other sports like rugby, soccer, or tennis, and others just bring in skills the club needs like financial skills or legal skills or whatever.
“I never cease to be amazed how quickly a new wave of parents will step up to the plate and do stuff and do it better than the previous lot.”
The Cuala Casements team that won the 1973 An Corn Plant, a year before Cuala GAA club was formed. 1
The aforementioned Johnny Sheanon is now President of Cuala GAA club and represents the other side of the Cuala coin – the small knot of families who have been promoting Gaelic games in the area through multiple decades and generations.
He was born in New York but moved to ‘The Borough’, as they call it in Dalkey and Dun Laoghaire in 1963. His father Paddy was a passionate GAA man and immediately got involved in Gaelic games in the area, and Johnny was soon togging out for Cuala Boys.
“Back in the 1960s this was a bit of a GAA wastleland, the Dun Laoghaire/Dalkey area,” says Sheanon. “There were teams but there were no great juvenile teams.
“It was a soccer and rugby area. Soccer was huge in the borough of Dun Laoghaire and there was a lot of rugby as well in Blackrock College and clubs like Monkstown.
“So GAA was fighting a battle here but it succeeded in fighting it and gained its own place in the borough and probably is the leading sports club now in the area. That's been a big success to me, the way the GAA found its place in the area and now provides a great outlet for people that wanted to support GAA.”
“CBS Dun Laoghaire back in the 1960s was probably where it really started because the Christan Brothers were big into the GAA that then fed into Cuala Casements. That's where the start of the juvenile teams came from.
“They had great success in the 60s then it just progressed from there. It's had its ups and downs but there has been a strong club in the area all the way back to the 1970s and it’s just gotten stronger and stronger.”
The 1988 Cuala team that contested the club's first every Dublin SFC Final.
Sheanon’s two sons, Colum and Cillian, were part of the Cuala panel that won back-to-back All-Ireland Senior Club Hurling Championships in 2017 and 2018.
Were they to now win an All-Ireland Club Football Final on Sunday, Cuala would become only the second ever club to win titles in both codes along with St. Finbarr’s of Cork.
For someone like Sheanon who has given seven decades of service to Cuala and seen it grow from humble enough beginnings, it’s a remarkable prospect to consider.
“It's really incredible,” he says. “It would have been very hard to imagine that we could ever win two All-Ireland club titles in hurling and now to be playing in an All-Ireland senior club football final. It's just amazing.
“I've been saying to people that if they win on Sunday I don't really care anymore. If they win, that's it, it's all over, there's nothing left to live for!
“There's a great buzz. It's a short week since the semi-final so it's a condensed buzz. When we got to the hurling final a few years ago it went on from January all the way to March. This is really very intense.
“It's an exciting time and for me beating Kilmacud Crokes in the county final was the ultimate. To beat them by a point, to have Con O'Callaghan sent off, to concede a late goal, and to be standing there in that 30 seconds when we got the winning point I just said to myself, 'This is the greatest moment of my life, to beat our local rivals'.
“They're going to beat us plenty of times and we'll have to take it, but that one moment was just fantastic. Everything since then has been a bonus.
“When I was younger I just wanted to win this or win that. But now I'm just content with what we do in this area. We have succeeded in promoting the ideals and aims of the association here and I love it. You're competing, you're winning, you’re losing, that's the whole thing. You have to take your defeats as well.”
Cuala supporters make their way out of Newbridge train station to the stadium before the AIB Leinster GAA Senior Club Football Championship quarter-final match between Naas and Cuala at Cedral St Conleth's Park in Newbridge, Kildare. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile.
Sheanon takes as much satisfaction from the community that Cuala have created off the pitch as the successes they have had on it.
Dalkey village is festooned in red and white bunting, two and a half thousand people will travel to the All-Ireland Final together on two Darts, and the club is now a lightning rod that electrifies countless families.
They will soon commence building a new state of the art clubhouse that will give them a physical home at the very heart of their community in Dalkey that will be a gift for further generations to come.
So as much as Sheanon hopes with every fibre of his being that Cuala can ink another famous chapter in their history by beating Errigal Ciaran on Sunday, he feels like they’re already winners no matter what the result when he considers where the club has come from since he first represented it himself.
“It should be a cracking game," he says. "Croke Park is just a different sort of game, it's a big open pitch and you just have to go out and play there. Fingers crossed
“I heard Enda McGinley say winning it is not the be all and end all and we've done very well to get to the final and I feel like that too. It's not the end of the world if we don't win. If we give a good account of ourselves and we play, whatever happens.
“We'll still be playing Division 1 League in a few weeks' time and the girls will be playing Division 1 football and we'll all go and support them again.
“That's the whole beauty of it. Maybe I'm speaking a bit philosophically because of my age, because I've seen it all, but I just find it very enjoyable no matter what sort of match it is now, whether it's an All-Ireland football final in Croke Park or a hurling match in Shankill.
“I've been lucky to watch my kids play, the O'Callaghans are nephews of my wife. I've gotten a great innings out of the whole thing and so have many others."
