'All Ireland knew him as John Joe, a born leader of men'

The passing of one of Cavan football's icons

Continuing our series looking at some of the seminal moments in the history of Cavan football, Paul Fitzpatrick looks back at the passing of the iconic John Joe O’Reilly, who played his last match for Cavan 68 years ago this month.

The news broke on the morning of Saturday, November 22, 1952.

It led the bulletin on Radio Éireann at 8am – Cavan football had lost its leader.

The GAA world had spun off its axis. At 34 years of age, the greatest captain football had known was gone. How it happened has been the subject of speculation for six decades. What is known is that he took a blow playing in a Kildare championship match for The Curragh against Ardclough.

For the majority of John Joe’s senior career, he was based in Kildare, where he and his wife Olive lived with their four children.

After he married, his younger brother, Frank, came to visit and ended up staying in Naas, training as a chemist and establishing his own practice. The O’Reilly’s Kildare links are strong to this day.

In the early 1950s, he decided to build a home away from the Curragh camp. He chose Kilcullen, whose local GAA team he had helped to win an Intermediate Championship.

He or his family would never move into the house. By the time it was ready, John Joe had departed.

There was bad blood between Ardclough and the Cavanman. John Joe had refereed a quarter-final in 1950 between Ardclough and Sarsfields, a game which attracted a record non-final attendance of 7,730. It broke another record, too – the Leinster Leader described it as “the worst exhibition of dangerous play seen in the county for many years”.

Three players were injured and O’Reilly reported that Ardclough “adopted a very threatening attitude towards myself and questioned all my decisions”.

Some refused to give their names and the match ended, he said, with one player throwing the ball at him and another threatening to “cut the side of the head off me”.

The entire Ardclough team was handed a three-year suspension, although many were reduced on appeal.

Fast forward two years and John Joe was lining out in the colours of the Curragh. At some stage in the game, or so the story goes, he fell to the ground and received a kick.

The following day, he called to his brother’s pharmacy in Naas, complaining of pain. His kidney was damaged, catastrophically so as it turned out. By that stage, he was reaching the end of his playing days, with 16 years of service at senior inter-county level behind him, and the kidney, and an ankle injury, were ailing him.

He didn’t play in the early rounds of the Ulster Championship, although in June he did travel to Cavan to play in the official opening of Breffni Park against Kerry. Cavan lost the match but the local reporter described his return to action as an “auspicious” one.

It wasn’t. Slotted in at corner-back, John Joe struggled with the speed of the game. He was old in footballing terms at the time but the truth was, he wasn’t well.

That morning, he had travelled down from Dublin in the company of teammates Simon Deignan and Aidan Corrigan, a sub on the Cavan team at the time. On the way, he stopped half a dozen times to go to the toilet. Something wasn’t right.

Before reaching Cavan, he had a job to do. John Joe had been instrumental in having a memorial to PJ Duke, his All-Ireland-winning teammate who had died in 1950 aged 25, erected at Laragh ceremony, and he officially unveiled it on the morning of the match, before heading to Breffni Park. Poignantly, it would be his final match in the blue jersey.

A new-look Cavan team won the Ulster title anyway and on the Monday before they played Cork in the All-Ireland semi-final, he arrived at the team’s training camp to lend a hand.

Cavan unexpectedly beat the Rebels and went into collective training again for the final, a week before which he and Peter Donohoe were surprise recalls to the playing panel. They went through their paces with the squad and Big Peter took his place on the match-day panel, but John Joe didn’t.

A month later, he was gone.

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John Joe needed an operation and as an army officer, undertook it in the Curragh Hospital. Something went wrong. By the time he was moved to the Meath Hospital in Dublin, the Gallant John Joe could stand no more. He breathed his last on the way.

The news prompted absolute devastation among the people of Cavan and beyond.

“It was the end of a week’s long watching and waiting for news from the Curragh hospital, shared with the anxious parents, brothers and sisters living here, on the progress he was making after a serious abdominal operation,” reported the Anglo-Celt.

“Men and women going to their work in the mornings, farmers going to the creamery, business people and customers alike asked each other each morning, ‘How is John Joe?’

“The homes of his parents at the Derries and of his sister, Mrs E O’Dowd, Main St, were besieged daily for the latest news. Then when hopes had risen for his recovery, the announcement came...”

Word came through to the family in Killeshandra quickly. An army officer and John Joe’s wife, Olive, and family arrived and stayed the night, before taking his parents and brother Vincent to the Curragh to see him. His younger sister Annie stayed at home to mind the farm and deal with the business of looking after the floods of callers. She was sick with worry and unable to eat.

At the funeral, teammates, some of whom shouldered the coffin on its final journey, visibly wept. The story led the national newspapers.

His old pal John Wilson put pen to paper days after his burial.

“The leonine head, the honesty and goodness that suffused his countenance, the upright elastic step, the step of a dignified officer when leading his soldiers down O’Connell Street in an Easter Week parade, the step of a true athlete when leading his team to victory in Dublin, London or New York, all these we had seen and had come to think of him as an essential part of our small world,” wrote Wilson.

“Death has robbed his loyal and devoted wife and tender family of his companionship and solicitude. The country sympathises with and prays for them. Death has robbed thousands of a football idol, and many of an intimate friend. But the memory of lion-hearted displays on many fields, of lively discussions in various training camps, of titanic laughter at his own hearth, of the joy that emanated from his great and limber frame – the memory of those remains, the Joy of Life.

“Death has taken him away. These memories it cannot take, and we are grateful for the memories.

“The shadows lengthened and the evening came. His busy world is hushed. For him, the fever of life is over and his work is done.

“May God grant his soul eternal rest, and peace at the last.”

The tributes flowed for weeks in print. Tony Myles, writing in the Irish Press, spoke of the pain of being present at the funeral.

“This was Cavan sorrowfully bringing back one of its finest sons. But it was Ireland, too, for John Joe O’Reilly belonged, not to Cavan only, but to all of us no matter what county we come from, who appreciate a gentleman, a soldier and a Gael. He had played the game of life to its finish and he played it as he played the game of football he loved – a sportsman and a gentleman.”

The Anglo-Celt echoed those sentiments.

“It is not given to many mortals to attain heroic stature or legendary reputation, even in a long lifetime, yet, John Joe O’Reilly, soldier and athlete, was both a hero and a legend before he was 30 years old... Above all, a sportsman without peer.”

And the Gaelic Sportsman, on December 6, 1952, followed up:

“All Ireland knew him as John Joe. All Ireland knew him too as a great footballer, a born leader of men, a genial, warm-hearted, quiet-spoken Gael, as generous in victory as he was glorious in defeat.”

John Joe has never been replaced. He is, as Fr Dan Gallogly referred to him in Cavan’s Football Story, "Breffni’s lost leader".

Had he never played football, his would have been a life less ordinary. That he did, that he led his men to the greatest victory in the history of the sport, ensured his memory will never fade.

“He was a representative of the new nation, which was only a couple of years old,” GAA historian Eoghan Corry has said.

“He was a member of the army during the Emergency and captained the winning team in New York in 1947 and again in 1948. Four years later, he was dead. All the aspects of the legend came together.”

Needless to say, his death was a gigantic blow to his family. The 13 siblings had only been together once, the previous summer, as the older ones had left before the younger ones were born. That, in itself, maybe provided some comfort.

He lives on, more than anything, through stories and song. Ian Corrigan, a star of the showband era and nephew of Aidan, who travelled with John Joe for that match with Kerry in ’52, made the Gallant John Joe, written by Swanlinbar man Albert McGovern, famous.

“I remember having my breakfast and getting ready to go to school,” recalled Corrigan, a self-confessed football fanatic.

“The news came on and the first thing was that this morning, Commandant John Joe O’Reilly died. Nobody could believe it.”

Corrigan’s pedigree is strong – he attended John Joe’s final game.

“I went with my father and a couple of local people. John Joe went off about 10 or 15 minutes into the second half. I remember there was a man beside me, who was TP O’Reilly’s father, we had got a lift with him to the game.

“And I remember him saying, ‘that’s the end of John Joe’. Little did anybody know...”

Twenty years later, the connection grew.

“I was playing in London in 1966 or ’67, in the Gresham in the Holloway Road and a fella from Corlough came up and said: ‘Did you ever learn that song The Gallant John Joe?’ And I said no, but I will when I go home, because I had been asked a couple of times.

“I went down to Albert McGovern in Swanlinbar and got the song and recorded it. I released it on a Monday and I launched it out in Donnybrook, that was around April 1971.”

The song entered the top 10 at number nine and the following week, Corrigan and his band were gigging in Donegal. On the way, they tuned into Gay Byrne reading out the top 10 and when their song wasn’t in the first couple listed, they presumed it had dropped out. But when Byrne reached number two, and they realised The Beatles’ Penny Lane had been knocked off top spot, the butterflies began to flutter. They had made it.

“You wouldn’t believe how popular the song is,” says Corrigan.

“I could go to any county in Ireland and it’s requested, it’s one of the best selling Irish songs there has been.”

Tom MacIntyre, the late former Cavan goalkeeper and playwright, wrote a one-man play called The Gallant John Joe, which starred Tom Hickey and told the story of a bewildered widower whose only solace is telling stories about John Joe.

“Commandant John Joe O’Reilly,” recounted the mesmeric Hickey, “was an army man through and through and playing football for the army, took a belt in the kidneys that went wrong.

“He was removed to the army hospital, from there to the coffin.... The coffin only goes one place.”

• GAA historian and author George Cartwright is currently working on a biography of John Joe O’Reilly, which is to be published this autumn and is sure to be of huge interest to to Cavan GAA followers.