The Castle Bookshop in Castlebar is the venue this Thursday, 8th December, for the west of Ireland launch of the book ‘Grassroots, Volume 2: Stories from the Heart of the GAA’. Complied by author and journalist PJ Cunningham, the book features amusing, entertaining and dramatic tales from members and followers of the GAA at home and abroad. The launch takes […]
Back in 2020, with the Covid pandemic then in what would subsequently prove to be just its early stages, Charlestown native Tom Brett and Mayo News columnist Seán Rice published a book entitled We are Mayo. It’s a book about Mayo, about its geographic location in the world, its rivers, lakes and mountains, its history and its infrastructure, its people, its sporting […]
With a long and distinguished playing career at inter-county level – capped by two All-Stars and the Footballer of the Year award in 2017 – Andy Moran was one of Mayo’s top performers in an era when the county challenged seriously for national honours year after year. Since retiring as a player, Andy has turned his attention to coaching and, […]
The last decade has been a time like no other for Mayo supporters. Prior to 2011 we had no experience in the modern era of dining at the top table on a regular basis but for ten years now we’ve been competing seriously for ultimate glory almost every year. The story of these times – sadly, an era that was, […]
Regardless of how the 2011 League campaign had gone, Mayo’s first year under new manager James Horan was ultimately going to be judged by what kind of championship we had. A Connacht title followed by defeat with honour in Croke Park, preferably not at the quarter-final stage, was probably the height of our ambitions going into that championship season. That […]
Although Mayo’s calamitous defeat in the qualifiers to Longford at the end of June 2010 didn’t – as had happened to me in the blog’s first year back in 2007 – leave me bereft of topics to talk about, it did leave me in a daze over the weeks that followed. After Longford, the Mayo GAA story didn’t remain static. […]
In the opening weeks of the blog’s existence in early 2007, it was just me talking to myself. I’d read articles about blogs, I knew that the majority of them never became established and died rapidly, that many never attracted any readers at all. That was of no concern to me at the outset. To be honest, I’d probably have […]
Several different strands came together the morning in February 2007 that I brought into being the phenomenon that became known as the Mayo GAA Blog. At one level, what I did that day was just a flight of fancy, a mere whim, an idea that simply may not have been followed through on at all. It wouldn’t have been the […]
One way of thinking about how individuals live their lives – it’s certainly a method I often use to frame my own existence – is to parcel the single contiguous existence into discrete chunks. Childhood and adulthood are obvious divisions, the individual decades are, of course, a handy means for carving up bits of what might be a long life […]
This football-less Covid era is getting to all of us. A further yawning period of more than two months now stretches before us ahead of the most optimistic date at which the ball might be thrown in to start the 2021 inter-county season. We’ll all be driven bats before then. Up until last year, all of our lives had a […]