20/03/2023 - The Weekly Update

This weeks 50/50 lotto results

Jackpot of €565 was won by Peggy McCrann, Fairymount. 
Seller: Newsround
Next draw will be held on Sunday night 26th March.
Your support of our weekly draw is greatly appreciated!
Tickets for the 50/50 draw can be purchased online by clicking here or directly from businesses throughout the town. Make sure to have your entries done before 9PM on Sunday 5th March to enter. 

Annual GAA 50/50 lotto ticket

An annual 50/50 ticket, giving entry into every draw for a year, is available to purchase online by clicking here. 

Senior Championship draw

The 2023 senior championship draw has drawn up some very intriguing ties for our senior team. The first game is an away visit to Claremorris, the same venue where Ballagh finished their 2022 campaign with a strong win against Davitts. Next up is a challenging draw against current county champions Westport at home. And the third tie of the group stage is the real eye catcher. Described by Con Moynihan as the East Mayo El Classico our seniors will take on Charlestown what could be a deciding game. We cannot wait for the summer ball to unravel!. 

Sigerson football team of the year

Today Cian Hanley was announced on the 2022/2023 Sigerson football team of the year. Cian who played for TUD lost out in the Sigerson Semi final and missed that game due to an injury. Nevertheless Cians impressive performance to that date secured him a place at wingback on team. All in the club are immensely proud of Cians achievement and look forward to seeing him in the white and green of Ballagh in 2023.

GAA community mourne after sudden death of Offaly manager

The sudden death of current Offaly manager Liam Kearns has shocked the GAA world. He was 61 years of age. Kearns, Limerick-based but originally from Kerry with whom he won an All-Ireland minor title in 1980, has been one of the highest profile football managers over the last two decades, having taken charge of Limerick, Laois and Tipperary before replacing John Maughan in Offaly last autumn. All at Ballaghaderreen GAA Club would like to send our sincere and deepest sympathies to Liam’s family, friends, teammates, and all our fellow Gaels who mourn at this time. It’s at dark times like this the importance of the GAA family really shines brightest. May he rest in peace

Nathys change their tune to take home Colleran cup

A late flourish from St.Nathys college helped them to prevail in an extremely close Colleran Cup Final in the COE today (Monday). Nathys who were well favorites came under extreme pressure throughout the game and found themselves 5 points behind with 15 minutes to go. The introduction of Harps man Jim Molloy was the tide turner as the Sligo Minor brought calmness to the game and was the focal point of many attacks in the dying moments. Nathys came out eventual winners by 3 points, Ballaghs Callum Coleman kicking a crucial point to put them ahead with 5 minutes to go. Ballagh were well represented in the panel who now finish the year with a Connacht championship and Colleran Cup medal. Congratulations to all involved. 

Mayo secure League Final spot

Mayo are into the Allianz League Division 1 final after demolishing Donegal at MacCumhaill Park, Ballybofey. The 11-point defeat almost guarantees that Donegal will drop to the second tier next season after a difficult season for new manager Paddy Carr. Apart from the opening quarter Mayo always looked like winners with Matthew Ruane impressive at midfield and Aidan O'Shea giving them a real focus at full-forward. They looked much fitter than Donegal and the introduction of Tommy Conroy in the second half gave their big travelling support even more to cheer about. Mayo remain unbeaten in the league and look the form team in the country at the moment.

Mayo GAA Bord na nóg introduce a silent Side-Line

Mayo GAA are introducing a Silent Side-Line for all U8, U10, U12 and U14 games for the coming season. The objective of this initiative is to create a more fun, positive and calmer environment where young players are afforded the opportunity to concentrate, make their own decisions, make mistakes without fear of criticism and learn the game in a natural manner. With the usual stream of noise eliminated the young players will have the opportunity to communicate more with one-another during the game. A Silent Side-Line has already been implemented across all U 11 fixtures in 2022 & has been a great success to date. 

We would request that all parents/guardians and other support the Silent Side-Line initiative.

Aims of the silent side-line 

• To promote a positive, fair and enjoyable environment in our games.
• To eliminate any negative behaviour towards and between players, match officials and supporters.
• To encourage parents not to get emotionally involved in the game.
• To allow the children's voices to be heard when playing our games.
• To enable young players to develop their communication & decision making skills.
• To allow our young players to make mistakes without fear of being ridiculed.
• To remove any pressure on players during games.
• To support our match officials & to encourage new referees to come on board for the future.
• To promote the importance of the GIVE RESPECT - GET RESPECT Awareness Campaign. 

Benefit to the Young Player

• With the sideline quiet our young players can think and focus on what they are about to do.
• Young players will have more opportunities to communicate with each other on the field of play.
• A quieter Side-line will enable our young players to develop his own decision making as well as problem solving & communication skills.
• The young player can make mistakes without fear of criticism.
• A Silent Side-line will help ease any pressure on the young player and will allow him to simply play.

Rules & Guidance 

• Clubs MUST promote Silent Sidelines within their structures and communicate the initiative to all their coaching teams up to Under 14, club officers, members, parents, supporters, players etc.
• Clubs SHOULD, following templates from County Board erect signage on their club grounds to promote the initiative.
• One designated coach per team can speak to players giving positive encouragement and directions during the game.
• The designated coach to wear a bib for identification purposes.
• Medical person may enter the field of play to attend to a player
• All other spectators and management refrain from directing instructions to the players during play.
• Positive clapping and cheering is permitted from all supporters.
• Supporters should be assigned to a designated area to watch the game.
• No encroachment onto the field of play.
• The Referee may PAUSE the game if the above is not adhered to and

1. If a Sideline Issue – Referee Calls in both managers to speak to them about their responsibilities and resume game
2. If a Supporter Issue – Seek a representative from the supporters club to have a word with the relative person and resume game

Mayo GAA want to ensure that all our underage games are promoted and played in a positive, fair and enjoyable manner where Players, Coaches, Spectators and Referees Give Respect - Get Respect from each other.

Andy's High Flying Leitrim for for promotion

After a battle royal, Leitrim managed to overcame Laois in Carrick-on-Shannon thanks to points late on from Mark Plunkett and Keith Beirne ('45'). The win keeps Andy Moran side's promotion hopes alive provided they defeat Sligo in their final Div 4 round game on Sunday next when the Yeats County has to journey to Carrick-on-Shannon.

Easter camp filling fast

Ballaghaderreen GAA Clubs Easter Camp is filling quickly and we advise anyone who wishes to sign up their children to do so before it’s too late. The week long Easter Camp will be filled with lots of fun activities including Bouncy Castles, Easter Egg Hunds, Sports Day Style Events and of course some GAA Coaching.
It will also feature visits from our 3 guest coaches, two Mayo Senior footballers David McBrien and Paul Towey and Current Leitrim Senior manager and former footballer of the year, Andy Moran.

Dates: April 10th-14th
Times: 10:15-1:30 daily.
Who is it for: Catering for all children aged between 4 years old all the way up to to 13 year old.

You can sign up by clicking here.

Quick fire questions with our senior and minor players

Name: Conor O Gara
Knickname: Cheeky
Age: 15
Position: Full Forward 
Dream Date:  Anne Hegerty from the Chase. 
Favourite GAA ground in Mayo:  Ballagh because it’s the only ground I’ve scored in
Biggest Achievement playing for Ballaghaderreen: Winning a county title but bar that I don’t have many achievements taking into account I only joined last year. 
Best Memory in a Ballagh shirt? Watching Callum Horgan get his nose broken by the smallest player on the pitch. Really hurt his pride.
Dream 5 aside club team: Callum Coleman said he dreamed of a team of 5 Gooches I disagreed and told him 5 Kyle Dooneys.
Biggest influence on your career: David Mchugh because he forced me to come to join football! 
If you could transfer any player to your club who would you transfer within Mayo?Aiden O Shea we would would make the perfect twin towers!
Piece of advice to all underage footballers in Ballaghaderreen: It is never too late to start playing. 

Quiz question of the week

In What year did Ballagh last win a Minor “A” county title?
Last weeks answer:  Andy won 3 Sigerson Cups

Local Primary Schools Head for the Dome

This coming Thursday the Local Primary Schools, St Attractas NS, Brusna NS, St Aidens Monastraden, St Colmans Dernabrook and members of the EROC centre will take to the Dome to take part in Ballaghaderreen GAA Clubs “Local Primary Integration and Inclusion Blitz”. The fun and games kicks off at 12PM and will be a day to remember for all involved. We’d like to wish everyone the best of luck and enjoy the day. 

Cheesy Joke of the week

"Did you hear about the two thieves who stole a calendar?
They each got six months."

Blast from the past

The little part of Roscommon that will, for GAA purposes, be forever Mayo

Published ahead of the 2011 Connacht final; The strange situation of Ballaghaderreen

John O’Mahony, Fine Gael TD, answers his phone. There’s a reporter on the other end. Wants to chat about a piece for the Connacht final. No problem, says Johnno, fire away. “It’s about the frontier town of Ballaghaderreen,” you say.

“Oh Jesus,” says the deputy for Mayo. You get the feeling he half wishes you were ringing about a hospital closure somewhere.

Ballaghaderreen is an outpost, a glitch in the system. Send a letter to the nice people there and you’ll write Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon on the envelope. But wander into the market square and you’ll see a Mayo flag hanging from the front of Durkin’s Bar.

Open your Connacht final match programme tomorrow afternoon and underneath the name of Mayo vice-captain Andy Moran will be Bealach An Doirín, county champions in 1972 and 2008. Mayo county champions, that is.

Four and a half miles inside the Roscommon border, it runs neck and neck with Castlerea for the title of third biggest town in the county. It is administered by Roscommon County Council, its road swept and its streets kept by same. The local soccer team plays in the Roscommon league. When the children of the town go off to compete in the Community Games, they do so in the primrose and blue of Roscommon.

In every conceivable facet of life, they are Roscommon people. Except when it come to the GAA.

For GAA purposes, it is Gaza. A little part of Roscommon that will be forever Mayo. Maybe the most famous Mayo footballer of them all came from here – Seán Flanagan, still one of only six men to lift the Sam Maguire twice. You grow up in the town, you have no choice but to cede part of your identity. That’s just how it is.

“People would be split, absolutely,” says O’Mahony. “There would be people in the town who consider themselves Roscommon people and people who’d say they were Mayo people. There’s a lot of people in the club itself who would count themselves as Roscommon supporters.

“There’ll be people going to this Connacht final who would work together, training the same teams in the club, but who will wear opposing colours on Sunday. Some will be supporting Mayo, some will be supporting Roscommon. That’s the way it always has been.”

Seán Kilbride grew up in Ballaghaderreen in the 1950s, the only child of two Roscommon parents. His father was a Ballintubber man – a county councillor, as it happened – and his mother came from Ballinlough. When he was about eight, his old man gave him the price of his first bit of football gear and sent him off down the town. To keep the peace, he came back with a Mayo jersey and Roscommon socks.

“The only flag in the house was the Roscommon flag,” says Kilbride. “From the 1962 All-Ireland final. My father used always refer to ‘home’ but when he said it, he meant his home in Ballintubber. I don’t think he ever really saw Ballaghaderreen as home. So I would have grown up with very strong Roscommon links and my roots were really Roscommon.

“So that was the context I was faced with when I was brought in for a minor trial in 1966. The club was playing juvenile football in Mayo and you were good enough to be asked to try out for the Mayo team. You just had no choice in the matter. You grow to accept that that’s the reality of it.”

Kilbride was neither the first nor the last of his kind in a town where the two counties thread and plait through each other without pausing for thought. When O’Mahony oversaw a St Nathy’s College team to win an All-Ireland B championship in 2000, he had players from both sides of the divide on the team.

Not only was Andy Moran on it but his cousin Derek Moran, who later went on to play a few league games for Roscommon was there too. Derek was Western Gaels, Andy was Ballaghaderreen – two clubs separated by no more than six miles and not even a county boundary between them.

The origins of the anomaly lie in the fact that Ballaghaderreen was, once upon a time, part of County Mayo. It became a Roscommon town under the Local Government Act of 1898. Stories clash as to just why this came to pass. One account has it that the Mayo local authority of the time owed a sum of money to its Roscommon counterpart and basically just handed over the bustling market town so that the people who lived there could pay off the debt through their rates.

The opposing account holds the local MP of the time felt the rates charged by the Mayo local authority were too high, certainly in comparison to those paid to the Roscommon authority and so he summarily had the boundary redrawn to place the town in the next county to the east.

One way or the other, Ballaghaderreen had a new home and that meant the GAA club of the time – Faugh A Ballagh – had to decide its future. Records show it played one year in the Roscommon championship before heading back to play in the Mayo one again, where it has stayed until this day.

Kilbride says there wasn’t very much of a Mayo-Roscommon rivalry at all in the town when he was growing up, purely because the local club was a junior club and it was rare they had a player good enough to be called up to the county team. He and O’Mahony came through within a couple of years of each other, however, and though it never caused O’Mahony a second thought – he’s always said he lives “in the last house on the Mayo edge of the parish” – Kilbride had to wrestle his conscience a little.

“I was very honoured to be thought of as good enough to play for Mayo and I was fully committed to them at every level from minor to under-21 to junior to senior. I had long since abandoned any desire to play for Roscommon because it just never came into the reckoning because you knew it was never going to be on. But there was definitely part of my mind that was conscious of the fact that my identity was very much Roscommon.” 

In time, he got the chance to flesh out that identity. Life pushes you and prods you in directions you can’t always control. After his father died, Kilbride took over the family farm in Ballintubber. Although he combined it with playing for Mayo, after a while he was dropped from the panel for missing league games.

He was friends with Dermot Earley through his time being stationed in the Curragh, however, and Earley asked him would he like to join the Roscommon panel.

“Part of me was worried because it would have been seen as a controversial move at the time. But there was another part of me that was thinking that it would have fulfilled my father’s wishes in many ways. And I also felt that I would be playing for my own county finally. Of course, the first game was against Mayo.”

Kilbride went on to have a hugely enjoyable Indian summer with his adopted (readopted?) county. He picked up Connacht medals in 1978 and ’79 but missed the run to the 1980 All-Ireland final with a broken leg. He tried a comeback in ’81 but his time was up. He threw himself into Roscommon GAA and trained teams at every level. Tomorrow(2011 Connacht final), his son Senan will line out at full forward and another son, Ian, will be on the bench. His Ballagh days are long ago now.

“I don’t think the Ballaghaderreen club will ever change or be brought in to play in the Roscommon championship. But I do believe that players growing up should have a choice whether they want to play with either Roscommon or Mayo. If you grow up in a household with a Mayo sense of identity, then okay, you ought to be able to play for that county. But for those like myself who grew up in a Roscommon household with a Roscommon sense of identity, they should be allowed to choose, especially since it is in their own county.

“I think it would be good for Ballaghaderreen too. I think you would have more players getting county trials and playing at county level. Roscommon has less than half the Mayo population so inevitably there would be more players getting trials and call-ups. As well as that it would be the right thing to do. Because there is a resentment in Roscommon that the second biggest town in the county is lost to it in GAA terms, even though the town is administered by Roscommon and in every way is a Roscommon town.”

There have been a few moves down the years to either get the club moved back into the Roscommon fold or to start a new one from scratch in the Roscommon championship but they never got off the ground. For the most part, people are happy enough to rub along and see the town for what it is. A glorious quirk, an Irish solution to a question nobody but the Irish would even ask.

As O’Mahony points out, Ballaghaderreen isn’t unique. Obama’s home club Moneygall is an Offaly club playing in the Tipperary county championship and just 20 miles up the road from Ballagh itself is Ballymoe, a County Galway village whose club plays in Roscommon. But those places actually straddle borders whereas Ballaghaderreen is relatively deep behind enemy lines.

“Well, there are actually parts of the parish that are in Mayo, Sligo and Roscommon if you want to be exact about it,” O’Mahony says. “Noel Durkin, who was an All Star with Mayo in 1989 when I was manager, he’d be the last house in the Ballaghaderreen parish next to Sligo. And Keith Rogers, who played in the 2009 Mayo minor team that made the All-Ireland final, he lives in the parish of Ballaghaderreen but he actually lives in the Mayo part of it.”

Ah Johnno, stop now. As if the thing isn’t complicated enough.

Allianz Football league results round 6

Division 1:
Galway 1-8, Armagh 1-6.
Kerry 1-12, Roscommon 0-12.
Monaghan 0-13, Tyrone 2-15.
Donegal 0-9, Mayo 1-17.

Division 2:
Limerick 2-7, Kildare 3-10.
Louth 1-10, Cork 0-10.
Derry 0-14, Clare 0-4.
Meath 1-11, Dublin 2-19.

Division 3:
Down 1-19, Longford 1-14.
Fermanagh 0-15, Westmeath 2-8.
Tipperary 0-13, Offaly 2-14.
Antrim 1-17, Cavan 2-12.

Division 4:
Leitrim 2-14, Laois 0-18.
Sligo 2-10, Carlow 0-11.
Waterford 2-9, London 2-5.
Wexford 0-19, Wicklow 2-13.

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