The Highlights: The Best of Frank Keating by Keating Frank

Author:Keating, Frank [Keating, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783350209
Publisher: Guardian Faber
Published: 2014-05-13T05:00:00+00:00

Tracking down Tullamore

3 February 1978

It is not even on the main road. If you drove due west from Dublin to see the sun go down on Galway Bay you would have to turn off after about 70 miles and meander across the low green sodden carpet of County Offaly towards the Grand Canal and Port Laoise prison.

Tullamore (pop. 7,000) is one long high street. There are, naturally, a number of bars, but only one poshish hotel. Willie John McBride made the place slightly famous round the world, for when the mood took him he liked to order Tullamore Mist, a sensitive, delicate brew, wondrously evil, which combines the warming, heart-good aroma of smouldering turf of Tommy Keirnan on form.

Tullamore is a typical, drowsy small town/big village. Like anywhere else in the green and pleasant there are a lot of black-and-white mongrels about – folk are of the mind that they make for a cheaper dog licence – and like everywhere else they have their donkeys, their tinkers and lots of girls with green eyes. Nothing but the Mist factory and the aforementioned Hayes Hotel makes Tullamore any different from the thousand other market towns.

Until this week, that is. Tullamore today stands proud in the world of sport. And I kid you not. I do mean the world. International big business is still catching its breath. For on Wednesday tiny Tullamore Harriers (membership 325, best athlete, the under-14 cross-country runner Johnny Wrafter) ceremoniously cut the first sod in a field near the town before building a full-sized eight-lane tartan running track – ‘Sure boy, exactly the very same thing the fellows ran on at the Mexican and Montreal Olympics.’

Tartan, a subsidiary of the giant 3M company, have laid 306 tracks around the world but never ever had even one inquiry from an amateur athletic club. No wonder, even in America or Japan or Germany, only sponsored institutions can remotely afford them, for you get scarcely any change out of £1 million. Peanuts, said Tullamore. If that French geezer made a fortune out of writing Clochemerle , what in heaven’s name might he do with the yarn of Tullamore’s Tartan track?

Tullamore Harriers were founded just before Christmas 1853. Their first year’s balance sheet read – Income £92 1s 6d. Expenditure £92 2s 9d. Loss 1s 3d. They were not long in the red. Plonked (and I choose the word) in the very middle of a very thirsty land, they were ideally placed to cater to men’s needs in that direction.

The little band of athletes did their thing too – for instance Noel Gowran won the Irish cross-country title in 1957, though I could not substantiate yesterday that Tullamore’s tug-of-war team were once disqualified in the national championships – for pushing! Anyway, by the start of the 1970s the Harriers had 300 athletic members aged from six to 60 – and over 12,000 social or drinking members – nearly twice the whole population of the town.

In 1971 they opened a spanking new clubhouse to fit in an extra few miles of bar.

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