Ned: the Shamrocks rover who always returned to Springfield

Having lived the first four years of his life in Galway (understandably, he has only flashbacks from that time) and the other 56 in Westmeath, there is no shortage of maroon blood in Ned Moore’s veins.

However, it is the green colours of Mullingar Shamrocks that will forever be linked to the football-mad plasterer who was reared in Tudenham, some 4.5 miles from his long-time domicile of Mullingar.

All of his male siblings are also well known in sporting circles - Martin (a legend of Mullingar Town AFC, with which Ned himself played with great success for ten years), Jim (a two-time Flanagan Cup winner with The Downs), Tom (a former Mullingar Golf Club captain and father of internationally renowned mimic par excellence, Conor), and John (a long-time stalwart of the GAA in New York). His only sister Breda entertained us all in her pub in Ballinascreen in October 1997 when Ned was a Westmeath selector for the NFL clash against Derry.

The other green connection in Ned’s life came through his late mother Patty, whom he describes as “a very proud Meath woman”, adding that “we didn’t bond with her in terms of Gaelic football - we were very much behind Galway as our father Eamonn was a diehard, and Sean Purcell and Frank Stockwell were gods in our house”.

Ned continues: “By the time we could walk, the GAA was part of our DNA. We were always called westerners by the locals when we came up here, but we were proud to be called it. ‘Ye came up in a convoy across the Shannon in a Wanderly Wagon with a piebald ass tied behind it’, my good friends in The Downs would shout at me,” with no mention of what action was taken against the shouters!

All of Ned’s education came via the Christian Brothers in Mullingar. Appropriately enough, Galway’s three in-a-row full forward from 1964 to 1966, Sean Cleary, taught in Coláiste Mhuire secondary school and was “a huge presence” in Ned’s football career.

His first club up to the age of ten was St Colman’s, an amalgamation of Gainstown and Milltownpass, under the tutelage of the late primary teacher, Mick Lynch. Ned takes up the story: “We loved playing football after milking the cows by hand. I then started playing in the Mullingar Town Leagues.

“The late Sam Austin used to drive out to bring me in to play for Patrick Street, and I caught the eye of Terry O’Dowd, the same man who is still managing in Shamrocks. Tommy Gilhooley, Tommy Lennon and Brendan Kirwan, all now sadly deceased, were other great men who kept the underage going.

“I was lucky enough to win all underage medals with Shamrocks, from U14 in 1973 up, culminating in our first U21 title in 1979. We were only starting to come as a club that time. When we won minor in 1977, we had lost six finals in-a-row before that. I played senior for first time in 1978, and the club reached the county final in 1979 but lost to Athlone. I had started my apprenticeship in Dublin and could not get down for training.

“Paddy Cole was the father figure of that team, an outstanding player and a pure gentleman. The team included a young ‘Spike’ Fagan, the best player I ever played with, and John and Denis Corroon, who went on to be legends of the club.”

Ned is at pains to emphasise all the hard work and change of mindset needed to bridge a 20-year gap between Mullingar Shamrocks’ second (1966) and third (1986) Flanagan Cup successes. He reflects: “Mullingar would have been considered a soccer town, but when Dessie Doolin was chairman he brought in ‘Spike’ McCormack and Tom Gunn, two army men, as trainers to improve discipline.

“Football was different then, and in the Shamrocks’ dressing room one lad would be passing around the oranges and another lad would be passing round cigarettes. Lads would be smoking looking at the manager! Tom and ‘Spike’ banned cigarettes, and that sort of attitude started making Shamrocks into a serious club.

“Richie (O’Donoghue) took over as manager in 1985. We lost to The Downs in the championship, but we won the then-prestigious Towns Cup by beating Leixlip, including Jack O’Shea, and the Feis Cup. There was a recession biting hard then. I had a wife and three kids, no job, and paying 18/19 per cent interest on a mortgage, so I went to New York. I said to Terry (O’Dowd) before I left, ‘it would be my luck that Shamrocks would win the championship while I’m away’.”

And win it they did, with the men in green and white retaining their crown in 1987, by which time Ned was back, but he did not get to play in the final. “It was touch and go whether I’d come back at all, but I did not want to bring up a young family in the States”, he clarifies.

“We had a very strong team, backboned by a lot of lads from Coláiste Mhuire’s Leinster-winning side of 1983, the likes of Tom Ormsby, Mickey O’Reilly and Seanie Hynes. We were definitely good enough to win a Leinster title, but injuries and bad luck conspired against us at various times,” he opines, in particular recalling – like so many of us present on a fateful Sunday afternoon in Newbridge in December 1990 – the appalling injustice of a one-point defeat to a powerful Baltinglass outfit, which prompted the Irish Independent to famously use ‘Daylight Robbery’ as its headline on the match report the following day.

This came two months after Ned had won his first on-field SFC medal after a one-point defeat of Coralstown/Kinnegad, whose star forward Larry Giles is rated by Ned as “having all the skills of Dessie Dolan”. He also recalls the attacking talent of Ger Heavin (Moate All Whites), and his own club colleague Meath legend, Bernard Flynn (“I never saw anything like him when I marked him in training”), before adding, “the out and out corner forward is a role that is gone from the modern game”. Other Westmeath players of yesteryear whom he singles out for praise include Willie Lowry (St Malachy’s) and Eddie Tynan (Shandonagh).

Alongside Micheál Conlon, Ned jointly-captained his beloved Mullingar Shamrocks in Páirc Chiaráin in 1992 to the first of a wonderful Flanagan Cup four in-a-row, and he was captain in his own right for the next three successful years in Castletown-Geoghegan.

Some other eminently laudable campaigns in Leinster ensued. He recalls having a “nightmare in 1992 against Kevin O’Brien” in a narrow defeat to Baltinglass in Aughrim on a day that the incomparable Bernard Flynn was badly injured. The following year saw a memorable win against a star-studded Skyrne team in Castletown-Geoghegan when “Mick O’Dowd gave me the worst wallop I ever got in football – it took me six months to get over it”.

While, naturally, Ned would love to have been presented with the cup in Cusack Park (then undergoing major renovations), he had the significant satisfaction of seeing his son Eddie doing so in 2018 when Ned wore the bainisteoir bib.

Ned was a 40-year-old sub when Shamrocks regained the senior title after a five-year absence in 2000 and, remarkably, he won a junior ‘B’ medal two years later with his son Gary as a teammate before hanging up his football boots as a player.

By then, Ned had cut his teeth into management with underage teams in Springfield. “Along with Des Maguire, I managed a top-class group of young lads. We beat a very fancied St Loman’s team to win the U14 in 1999 with Enda Monaghan as captain, and we went on to win all the underage titles along the way. The U14 victory was my most memorable prior to the 2018 senior win. Micheál Curley was the only link all through.

“Enda coached the 2018 Flanagan Cup-winning side and Des’s son, Barry, was a selector. It was a pity more of that original team didn’t win the 2007 senior final against Tyrrellspass before emigration due to another recession took some of them away, as I thought we were going to win all in front of us,” Ned states.

With Westmeath, Ned served as an U21 selector alongside Eunan McCormack under Barney Rock (“an absolute gentleman”), and for the senior team under Brendan Lowry, ironically recalling Messrs Rock and Lowry bringing their now-famous sons, Dean and Shane respectively (“two shy young lads”) along to training at the time.

Incidentally, Ned rates Dean and his current Dublin colleagues as “the greatest team I ever watched”. He feels that John Connellan’s strongly worded letter about the Metropolitans’ finances and a proposed motion to Congress in that regard are “disingenuous, as their success is mainly down to hard work and dedication, and the Dublin lads are like machines”.

Ned would highly recommend to any prospective managers to start at underage level. While vowing never to manage against Mullingar Shamrocks, he ventured away from Springfield for a number of years and had happy spells in Croghan in Offaly (“a small little place, but what they did for the GAA was incredible”), St Mary’s, Rochfortbridge (losing an IFC semi-final), Carrickedmond in Longford (losing the 2013 IFC final after a replay), and Na Fianna in Enfield (“an incredible team who lost the SFC semi-final to Ashbourne in 2014”).

A call from the aforementioned Bernard Flynn brought Ned back home as a selector in 2015, but a disappointing SFC semi-final loss to St Loman’s was the outcome. Nearby Bunbrosna beckoned for two years with “an ageing team, but as good a bunch of lads as you will ever come across”.

It was back to Springfield then in the bainisteoir’s bib and the never-to-be-forgotten winning campaign of 2018. Ned takes over again: “I wanted that job, and we got the bit between our teeth right through the ‘B’ group and a great quarter-final win against The Downs. We love local derbies in Shamrocks. A penultimate round win against Tyrrellspass set up the first all-town final.

“It was a great occasion with St Loman’s going for a four in-a-row. It rounded off my career to win that game with my son Eddie as captain and my nephew Dean scoring five points. We had the majority of the support as underdogs, in contrast to the early 1990s. We needed that win for our survival as we are picking from just the centre of the town.

“Last year I thought we’d win another title, but the wheels came off and we were stuck in a relegation battle which, thankfully, we survived. I resigned then, and was deeply touched when I got a phone call from none other than John Heslin the following night. Shamrocks still have a strong team and I wish Jack Sheedy well as manager. People say we shouldn’t have taken on an ‘outsider’, but Richie O’Donoghue, Frank Mescall and Ray Smyth all won senior titles having never played with the club,” Ned adds.

He is also effusive in his praise of the massive contributions to Shamrocks of Gerry Nohilly and Tom Hunt since their respective moves to Mullingar from Galway and Waterford in the 1970s.

His only Leinster SFC game as a player with Westmeath was a heavy loss to Laois in Portlaoise in 1991 (“I couldn’t usually commit to the county due to my small family”). He again mentions Kevin O’Brien (Wicklow) in his list of toughest opponents outside the Lake County, as well as Dessie Barry (Longford) and Stefan White (Louth).

Well known as a teak tough defender, Ned never forgot the lesson he learned “around 1980 when I was naïve, and Noel Cleary from The Downs caught me when I was wide open - and I was never caught again.” Ned respected many of Cleary’s colleagues in black and amber, such as Dom Murtagh, Mick Carley, Jimmy Tuite and Seamus Conroy.

“Characters are dying out of football, the likes of ‘Dobsey’ Prendergast (Athlone) and ‘Skinny’ Fox (Coralstown/Kinnegad), fellows who knew how to rile lads. They are great friends of mine now despite all the tough battles. The fun has gone out of football in ways, as there is no socialising with opponents after a match anymore,” he opines.

And when euphemistically asked, ‘Were there any managers you had words with on the sidelines?’, Ned instantly replies: “I don’t think there is a manager that I didn’t have a word with! I always fought my own corner. Pat Flanagan was a serious man on the line, but what we would have said to each other will remain between us. Likewise, with Luke Dempsey, as we had played together, and I hugely respected his managerial CV. It was great to come out on top against him in 2018. In my time in Meath, I came up against both Paul Clarke and Graham Geraghty. I respect all the people who patrol sidelines. It is a hard job.”

Ned often ‘had words’ with referees also, but he accepts the tough nature of the task of those with whistle in hand. He lauds local officials Damien Maher, Niall Ward, Pat Fox (“even though I don’t think I ever managed to win a match when he was reffing, despite always knowing how he was going to ref a game”), Brendan Keena and Sean Carroll.

Ned confirmed that he has declined “umpteen offers” from both inside and outside Westmeath to return to management in recent months. “That part of me is done and dusted,” has been his standard reply, while nonetheless flattered to have been approached in the first instance. In conclusion, Ned states: “I have got immense satisfaction and joy from being involved in Gaelic football. It was always with great players. The manager can’t be in front pulling the team, the team has got to pull itself and then you can manage it. I only enjoy watching certain games now, as many of them would put you to sleep with some lads just like robots. It has become a game of runners.

“A lot of the skill levels are gone out of it. Even at club level, the fun has gone out of it and players have to live a certain lifestyle. Some lads just can’t give the time. We trained hard when I was playing, but still had the craic, the buzz and the camaraderie. We left everything on the field. The GAA needs to rectify this, or they will start losing players.”

While dreading the thoughts of any form of professionalism, he concedes that “the money being bandied around for managers and background people these days, and the players getting nothing, is tough for lads to see. The first rule in the GAA is that it is amateur.”

Ned is delighted to have on record the love and support he has received over the years from his wife Patricia and his “incredible kids”, Gary, Eddie, Keith and Jolene. With five grandchildren in tow, and two more en route please God, he has more than enough to occupy his spare time, even in these Covid times when his work is severely curtailed.

Always interested in politics but “too old to go into it”, Ned describes himself as favouring “a very green Fianna Fáil”. Indeed, one suspects that if he was an elected politician, a promise would be fulfilled. There was never any waffle or false promises out of Edward Moore Esq!

– Gerry Buckley