Analysis: Newspapers, radio and television stations from across Ireland and further afield tell the story of the ill-fated 1951 All-Ireland homecoming journey but what do we really know about this curse?
On Saturday, Mayo will take to the field against Tyrone in search of their first All-Ireland Senior Football title since 1951. As has been the tendency in recent years, the last few weeks have spawned numerous articles and discussions about the now infamous Mayo curse.
Newspapers, radio and television stations from across Ireland and further afield tell the story of the ill-fated 1951 All-Ireland homecoming journey during which it was alleged that the team did not show due respect to a funeral resulting in a curse that Mayo would not win another All-Ireland until every member of the team had passed away.
Many of these articles question if this will finally be the year when Mayo break the curse and point to the now sole remaining member of the 1951 team.
Within Mayo, social media and general conversation suggests there is growing discomfort and discontent that this GAA legend and his now deceased teammates are regularly subjected to commentary about a mythical curse rather than being celebrated for their incredible playing achievements in winning back-to-back All-Ireland titles in 1950 and 1951.
It is also a point of general frustration that discussions of the curse overshadow the achievements and potential of the 2021 panel. So as these articles grow in number, what do we really know about this curse, what does local memory tell us and what light can the archival records shed on the events of September 1951?
There are several different versions of the curse story in circulation. Aside from the generally accepted details above there are varying accounts of the team arriving back to the county on their victorious homecoming journey by bus or on the back of a lorry, while the person who issued the curse ranges from the local parish priest, to the widow (who is sometimes identified as traveller woman), to a local witch.
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From the RTÉ GAA Podcast, Mikey Stafford and Rory O'Neill are joined by Dessie Dolan and Ciaran Whelan to look ahead to Saturday's showdown between Mayo and Tyrone, where a high energy, 80 minutes of chaos is expected.
As we approach this year's All-Ireland the majority of published accounts have centred on the story of the local priest with other potential protagonists increasingly sidelined.
It would seem like a relatively simple task to test the veracity of these accounts – surely an event of such significance to local GAA stalwarts, supporters and even the team themselves would have been well documented, the eyewitnesses to the curse being cast would have recalled the event time and again at local events, matches or even in the pub, incorporating the story into a collective community memory.
As part of the homecoming celebrations there was a large crowd present from which to choose these prospective storytellers and yet the most damning evidence against the myth of the curse is that not one single eyewitness to this fabled event has ever been identified – despite it being within the living memory of many. In fact, there is no local memory of references to a story about a curse until the 1990s.
When questioned in recent years about the events of the day, surviving members of the 1951 team dismissed it as total nonsense, Paddy Prendergast has frequently been interviewed and recalled not even being able to see out of the sides of the lorry in Foxford (so the bus version of the event can be set aside), let alone know sufficiently well what was happening outside it, to be purposefully disrespectful.
Fr Peter Quinn, a member of the 1951 team, who I interviewed as part of the GAA Oral History Project, was adamant that there was nothing to the story.
Not one of the more than 140 respondents to the GAA Oral History Project, which ran from 2008 to 2012 voluntarily raised the issue of the curse. There is no reference to it in the project’s questionnaire responses and it is only discussed in interviews where it was specifically asked about.
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From RTÉ Radio One's The Ray D'Arcy Show, Journalist Diarmaid Flemming explains all about Mayo and the famous curse.
I was aware of rumours of 'some kind of curse' when I embarked on the project interviews in 2009 but rather than colour people’s responses with a specific question, I allowed the conversations about Mayo’s All-Ireland drought to arise naturally and followed up references to this by asking interviewees what they thought the reasons for it were.
The responses varied: not having the calibre of players required – they were not tall, strong or tough enough; that the dedication and commitment to training in Mayo was not as strong as in other counties; that emigration had drained potential players; that politics was too centrally embedded in Mayo GAA and that the players lack self-belief.
When asked specifically about the existence of a curse it was dismissed as nothing important and something that they had only heard about since the 1990s or more often mid-2000s.
I suspect that if I was to revisit these interviewees today the curse would form a much more central part of our conversations, not because they would give it any more credence but because it has become so deeply entwined in the general conversation around Mayo’s All-Ireland final appearances.
When and how this happened is difficult to pinpoint but it seems that the first whispers began shortly after defeats in the finals in the late 1990s, growing in strength in the early 2000s and increasing to something akin to a roar through the repeated near misses of the last decade.
This was largely fuelled by increased representation in the media through documentaries, newspaper articles, social media and even a reference on the UK television show Countdown. Yet even this renewed focus and attention has not uncovered any extant local memories of the actual cursing occurring – so what of other local records, the media of the time, local archives, etc.?
A trawl through the newspaper archives for the homecoming events of September 1951 unearthed some key facts. The 1951 All-Ireland Final was played on Sunday 23rd September 1951. Mayo beat Meath by 2-8 to 0-9. The return trip to Mayo took place on Monday where they were met by large crowds, bonfires blazing from the hillsides and Mayo flags flying.
The Sligo Champion reported that it was already evening by the time the team arrived in Ballaghaderreen, where a torch light procession met the players and guided them into the town’s square. From here progress was slow as the team was celebrated in each town along the road from Ballaghaderreen to Castlebar.
The Connaught Telegraph reported that the players who had travelled in their own cars from Dublin boarded a lorry at the junction of the Ballina – Swinford roads and were processed into Castlebar by the Castlebar Brass Band arriving in Castlebar at 9.45pm for a reception by the Urban District Council with a crowd of over five thousand people.
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From RTÉ One News, The countdown is on to this weekend's All-Ireland Senior football final between Mayo and Tyrone, with excitement building in both camps.
A familiarity with Mayo’s geography will alert you to the first fatal flaw in the curse narrative – the homecoming cavalcade did not enter Foxford as part of its triumphant victorious arrival route. In fact, the team and the Sam Maguire did not visit Foxford until the following evening when they travelled through the town on their way to Ballina.
This is borne out by a Ballina Herald report outlining how a Foxford publican was fined for a breach of licencing laws on the night of Tuesday 25th September for serving alcohol after hours to four men who had attended the Foxford homecoming for the All-Ireland that evening.
The evening arrival in Foxford on Tuesday is further reinforced by accounts of the team’s triumphant arrival into Ballina on Tuesday night where they were once more greeted by bonfires and another torchlight procession.
Even if we are to make allowances for inaccuracies in the curse’s narrative around the homecoming activities, this timeline makes passing a funeral a relative impossibility given that funerals took place then as now during the day.
If we are still to continue to clutch at threads of the curse narrative, we might seek to examine the local parish records to see if a funeral had taken place in the area on that Tuesday and somehow was delayed until evening.
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From RTÉ Radio One's Sunday Miscellany, Warriors of the West, by Kate Kerrigan, on holding Mayo in the heart and soul
Unfortunately, the lack of parish records for this period is well documented and was confirmed by the parish priest of Foxford in 2016, Fr Padraig Costello, who was repeatedly asked to access them as the story grew in strength.
Local journalist Michael Gallagher, not content to leave any lingering doubt around the curse, searched death records for the area and was able to confirm through his research that while a local person had died over the weekend of the All-Ireland the funeral did not take place until the Wednesday.
The closest possibility to the curse then was that the remains may have been in the Church on the evening that the team passed through, but as the remains would already have been in the Church neither the team nor their supporters could have been accused of disrespecting the deceased.
And what of the priest – was it possible that the local parish priest would engage in a pagan activity like casting a curse and condemning Mayo to years without another All-Ireland win, perhaps, the records cannot give us this information.
However, they do tell us that although he was born in Sligo, the Rev Canon Thomas Curneen was first a student and later teacher and President of the renowned GAA nursery, St Nathy’s College, before taking up his role in Foxford making any anti-GAA activity highly unlikely.
The obituaries in the local papers on his death in 1955 make no reference to his role in any such cursing and speak instead of a much beloved pastor.
While by no means conclusive the extant documentary records do clarify the details of the 1951 Homecoming in a way that raises questions over almost every element of the curse narrative.
This combined with the lack of local eyewitness accounts to an event within living memory which would have had so much importance for a whole county, and the almost irrelevance of the curse in period before 2012, all suggest that whatever happens on Saturday the result will be decided on the field of play and not by memories or media coverage of a mythical curse.
Dr Arlene Crampsie is a Lecturer and Assistant Professor in the School of Geography at University College Dublin.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
