Lifting the cup

national | history and heritage | opinion/analysis Saturday September 24, 2005 17:41 by Observer2

Sam Maguire - Irelands most famous Protestant.

At around five o'clock tomorrow evening the captain of the winning team in the 2005 All-Ireland senior football championship will lift the Sam Maguire cup. The name of Sam Maguire has, through our Gaelic Games, become synonymous with Irish culture. But who was the man this prestigious cup is named in honour of?

Sam Maguire was a Protestant from County Cork who captained the London Hibernians gaelic football team in at least three All Ireland senior football finals. However that is only the beginning of the story of this remarkable Irishman from west Cork. From the very outset it would seem that Maguires life would be deeply intertwined with Irelands history. Born in 1879, Maguire attended national school in Ardfield, near Dunmanway. This is the same school later attended by another of Irish historys' leading characters, Michael Collins. Maguire in sitting the British civil service exam successfully and moving to London to take up his position with the Post Office, laid the path that Collins would later follow.

Maguire became involved in the G.A.A in London despite never having been involved with his local club in west Cork. He became captein of the London Hibernians team and led them into three All Ireland finals, notably without a single victory. On finishing his playing career Maguire became Chairman of the London county board and later a delegate to congress and a trustee of Croke Park.It is while serving as Chairman that his path crossed that of another famous Corkman.The man whom the senior hurling championship cup is named in honour of, Liam Mc Carthy, served as vice chair of the London County Board under Maguire.

Throughout the war of independence he served as I.R.B chief of Intelligence in Britain. He was forced to return to Ireland sometime around 1923, after he suspected his cover was blown, and took up a job in the Irish civil service. However he was later to leave the Irish civil service as a result of his conflict with those who insisted on running it as the British had.

Sam Maguire died of tuberculosis on February 6, 1927, at the age of48 but like many Protestant Nationalists before him left his mark on the history and culture of Ireland.

Tomorrow at around five o'clock his name will be spoken by millions of Irish around the world as if to remind us, in our present difficulties in the northern part of the Island, that there is another Protestant tradition. It is the tradition of men like Wolfe Tone, Charless Stewart Parnell, Robert Emmet Dr. Douglas Hyde and Sam Maguire. It reminds us that not all Irish Protestants wear bowler hats and beat big drums. It challenges the lie that there is only one Protestant tradition on this Island. It leaves many of that tradition proud to be ,in the words used by Michael Collins to describe Maguire, "bloody southern Irish prods" tipping our hat to neither London nor Rome.