By any measure, the weekend gone by was a remarkable one in Roscommon LGFA.
Between 2005 and 2014, St. Brigid's won eight out of the ten senior titles that were on offer, adding an All-Ireland intermediate club title for good measure. Then they fell away, were relegated, bounced back up, and should have won last year’s final against Clann na nGael, having taken a 2-5 to 1-1 half-time lead.
They lost the second half of that game by 4-10 to 0-2, and this year, their half-time lead was an eerily similar 2-5 to 0-4.
The similarities ended there. In 2024, Kate Nolan missed the final with an ACL injury. On Saturday, she scored 1-9 in St. Brigid’s 4-12 to 1-9 win, securing the brand new Marie McAleer Cup, named after the founder member and first vice-President of the Ladies Gaelic Football Association.
Also over the weekend, St. Barry’s delivered on their potential by winning the intermediate crown and Northern Harps – formed in just 2020 – won the Junior A title for the first time in their history.
Yet amidst all this, it was the Junior B final that remarkably captured the imagination of the public in Roscommon and beyond.
Over 1,000 supporters filed into Kilbride last Friday night to see the home club take on St. Michael’s/St. Ronan’s, another new club from the very northern tip of the county that hadn’t won two adult games in the one calendar year until 2023.
In normal circumstances, a club like that, drawn from villages like Arigna, Cootehall, Ballyfarnon and Knockvicar that have been hammered by rural depopulation as much as any part of Ireland, would be the neutral’s choice as the team to support.
Last Friday, it wasn’t even close. Their opponents were the second team of Kilbride, a team known as 'Rocky’s Rebels’ in honour of Rochelle ‘Rocky’ Mullaney, a much-loved and admired stalwart and captain of the Kilbride club who won five county SFC medals in succession from 2016 to 2020, but who sadly passed away in July of last year.
Máire Lohan, whose husband Mark Dowd was recently appointed the new Roscommon senior men’s manager, is one many players who soldiered alongside Mullaney in the last decade and who came out of retirement purely because of the idea behind this junior team.
"Our friend Rochelle passed away last year from cervical cancer and her partner Mick had this dream of setting up a second team this year to play junior football in her memory," Lohan said.
"He bandied the idea about around Christmas, he got a few people saying yes and no, and more saying ‘ah you’re not serious!’.
"It got the go-ahead from the county board and then in April and May he made a few calls and he opened it up to anyone who wanted to come and play with us. There’s a great mixture of girls – there’s girls who would have played on the five-in-a-row teams, there’s women who are older than that, there’s women younger than that, there’s U-16s. We have girls who haven’t played in ten or 12 years and they just came in because it was in memory of Rochelle.
"Everybody had hung up their boots, football was a done thing for them," she explained.
"It was purely because Mick got us all together. Rochelle was such a big part of the team on the pitch and also such a big part of the group socially, that everybody wanted to come together and do this".
It didn’t take long for muscle memory to kick in. Sandra Shanagher, who refereed the 2024 county senior final and whose daughter Aisling captains Kilbride’s first team, lined out in goal and her connections with another veteran, midfielder Bernie Donnelly, gave Kilbride a solid foothold in terms of possession.
Roughly 20 years after they all emerged onto the adult scene in Kilbride together, Corina Gormley anchored the team at centre back. Siobhán Martin (née Tully) put in a player-of-the-match performance at centre forward while showing energy that would suggest that she could still pull on a county jersey if she wanted, and Sinéad Clabby led the line with authority, scoring a goal that put ‘Rocky’s Rebels’ six points up with less than ten minutes to play.
"At the start of the year the idea was that this would be a bit of fun, we might have a few nights out and all that. Instead we’ve had one night out and everyone wants to be out training and putting in the work, that’s how these women are wired. Then it all came flooding back pretty quickly and the rhythm of the game came very naturally to everybody," said Lohan.
All good, except St. Michael’s/St. Ronan’s had their own fairytale they wanted to write. Clodagh Daly scrambled in a goal, Rachel Flynn nailed a free with the last kick, and the match went to extra-time.
This Kilbride group, believed to have 30 children between them, suddenly had to dig deep for 80 minutes instead of 60. And they did.
Fast forward to the end of extra-time and still the teams couldn’t be separated, so the hordes of young supporters from those rural villages up north, all of which faced into a drive of over an hour back home, gathered behind the goal at around 10.40pm for 20-metre free kicks.
Clabby scored hers, as did Leah McCawley, the St. Michael’s St. Ronan’s teenager who made her debut for the Roscommon intermediates in goal this year.
Seven other kicks fell short or wide as reserves of energy and adrenaline ran dry, leaving substitute Una McGuinness to kick the winner for ‘The Saints’ and give them their first adult silverware in their short history.
"We didn’t expect to be in a Junior B final, we thought at the start of the year that if we were in Junior C it would have been amazing, but it’s brilliant to be here," said Lohan, though you could sense that even now, a decade later, losing hurt them as much as it did when they were the dominant force in Roscommon club football.
It was almost as if Rocky’s influence was still as strong as ever.
