Ciarán Murphy on the power of Old Parish
- Dermot Keyes
- Sep 20
- 6 min read
“Well, it was cheaper than a red Corvette,” joked Ciarán Murphy when asked what forces propelled him to take up hurling on the north side of 40.
Easing into a couch at the Park Hotel, the ‘Second Captains’ co-presenter explained the appeal of commencing so complicated a sporting apprenticeship at such a relatively senior – well, Junior B – time of life.
“The thought of playing hurling was something that had been burrowing away in the back of my mind for years,” he began. “I’ve spent so long talking and writing about hurling in a professional capacity yet I’d never played a match or taken part in even an organised training session. So by not playing, by not being intimately accustomed to the game at first hand has always felt like a gap in my knowledge – not that I subscribe necessarily to the idea that you have to do something to know about it or talk about it.
“But that longing to experience hurling in a different way, given the pure enjoyment I’ve extracted for years from just pucking a ball back and forth with friends and even between myself and our dog, all of which became such a part of my life during Covid, left that thought about playing hurling lingering. I couldn’t really shake it off.”
Ciarán, an Irish Times columnist and author of ‘This is the Life: Days and nights in the GAA’, was approached by Penguin Ireland about a follow-up to Book One, plainly putting it to him: ‘give us another idea’.
"It's as if the stars aligned for this to come together."
“This was in February 2024, about five months after the first book had been published – and it all happened that fast, literally. Sometimes you could have an idea knocking around in your head for years and nothing might come of it. But in this particular case, it was as if the stars had to align for it all to come together – and thankfully they did.
“I was 41 at the time, heading for 42 and I realised that there weren’t going to be too many more summers where I could physically take on something like this – to be honest, getting through any summer at this stage playing sport is pretty miraculous! Euro 2024 was the major international event of the summer but I knew that we’d be doing a lot of our ‘Second Captains’ recordings from home so signing for An Sean Phobal and moving to Waterford wasn’t going to be massively disruptive when it came to my podcast work.
“Thus, the seed was set: to play hurling for a summer with An Sean Phobal, which my father’s family has been connected to since my grandfather’s time back in the 1930s. I transferred from my football club in Dublin, Templeogue Synge Street, to An Sean Phobal where I would become – or attempt to become – a hurler – and that’s when the idea of writing a book about the whole experience came to mind. A friend of mine, whom I mention in the book, said she thought it was brilliant that I was perfectly willing to be terrible at something in my 40s…
“An ego-free thing to do."
“It was almost a childlike feeling that was driving me to take this on – but I knew that this was a completely ego-free thing that some part of me felt I had to do. I knew I was learning from the bottom and had to accept that I wasn’t going to morph into something miraculous at this stage of my life. The confines of a GAA pitch, where the lines are the same, the teams look the same, the jerseys look the same – this is an environment that I’ve been traditionally comfortable in.
“Yet this was completely different for me as football was all I’d known competitively until the summer of 2024. So sticking on a helmet and picking up a hurley was naturally uncomfortable yet there was a liberation to it at the same time – it was a real eye-opener. I learned to celebrate the one good moment and swiftly make peace with the four terrible things that would inevitably occur after that. Let’s just say that I came to embrace the small wins!”
But the true revelation and the ultimate victory shared with readers of ‘Old Parish’ lies in the profound awakening of Ciarán’s sense of self amongst his father Tony’s people, overlooking Dungarvan Bay.
“The fact that I had that family toehold in An Sean Phobal was a gigantic help, absolutely,” he happily acknowledged. “Michael Hogan, who is a first cousin of my Dad’s, is a cornerstone of Old Parish. My uncle John (one of the book’s most gregarious characters) has been involved with the GAA Club for 60, 70 years and I can honestly say that I never, not for one moment, felt like a blow-in whereas I’ve always been a blow-in with Templeogue Synge Street, albeit in the most affectionate sense.
“And not having any sense of that was down to the people of An Sean Phobal. From the very first training session, I felt an immediate and beautiful sense of acceptance – as if I felt I was always going to do this – which is, on the face of it, an absurd thought given that I grew up 130 miles away in Galway and have lived in Dublin for 20 years.”
The Old Parish hand of friendship
Ciarán continued: “I had a ridiculous hand of friendship extended to me right from the get-go; the warmth of the welcome I received was instantaneous. Within three to four months of living here, my wife Gill and I both spoke about finding some way of spending meaningful time in An Sean Phobal and West Waterford for the rest of our lives - and I don’t mean just the odd weekend or two. It’s such a beautiful place. I hadn’t anticipated just how blown away I’d be – that we’d both be – by its physical beauty, the change of pace and the warmth of its people who became our new neighbours. It’s left such a profoundly positive mark on my life and that’s something I never anticipated feeling when I first moved here.”
What’s Tony made of his son’s great hurling experiment? “He initially said it seemed like a daft idea but he told me just as swiftly to go for it. He was genuinely thrilled and was keen to find out about ‘such and such a person’ and how they were getting on, not that I knew all the names during those initial enquiries. This is the world that Dad grew up in, it’s responsible for so much of what makes him the man he is, so for me, to be part of that world and to get to know so many people that he has stayed in touch with, to meet people that Dad has known for 60, 70 years, that’s been genuinely wonderful.”
‘Old Parish: Notes on Hurling’ is a celebration of our most chaotic and complicated national sport. It’s also a tribute to who we are, where we come from and why a sense of place matters. Ciarán Murphy may not have morphed into a hurling giant with An Sean Phobal but this beautifully considered book soars on every level. Talk about the pride of Old Parish.
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Review: Growing up in the Galway village of Milltown, where football has ruled the roost for most of the organised playing history of Gaelic Games, the opportunity to play hurling didn’t present itself at an early age to Ciarán Murphy.
Yet given his lifelong love of hurling and subsequent media career, such consistent exposure to the sport led the author to contemplate appreciating hurling in a different way: by becoming a hurler at the age of 41.
When asked by Penguin to contemplate a follow-up to his maiden book, ‘This Is The Life: Days and Nights in the GAA’, a germ of an idea began to develop.
That idea ultimately took root among his father’s people in Old Parish, catalysing the birth of a hurling career at a grade where most of its practitioners are in the competitive departure lounge: Junior ‘B’!
There’s not a dull paragraph to be found in ‘Old Parish’. From the author’s self-confessed ‘watery touch’ with camán and sliotar to describing one particular week spent exploring West Waterford as being “lifted straight out of a Rockshore ad”, Murphy’s love for this project is palpable.
His deeper appreciation for hurling and well-articulated contention that “it’s a miracle that it’s played at all” is woven into the warmth of the welcome he received in Old Parish and the grá he swiftly developed for the area.
A love letter to the joy of family, sport and community, the appeal of this evocative, fulsome and beautifully composed work will extend well beyond Gaeltacht na nDéise.
This interview orginally appeared in the September 19th edition of the Dungarvan Observer
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