My friend Donie – king of audacious overseas GAA start-ups

• Published date: 15 April 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

A few days after the death of Donie McCarthy, our clubmate and friend, a tribute appeared in the Irish Star newspaper in the US. In the piece Donie was remembered as the man who brought hurling to Atlanta and the American South, a vast wilderness on hurling’s globe

The other dreamer in this scheme was Kieran Claffey. They watched the 2001 All-Ireland hurling final together in the Fadó Irish bar in Atlanta and resolved to start a team. You can imagine the scene and the pints and the humour that came over them. You have made promises in that mood too. How many have you kept?

Claffey had tried to foster hurling once before, a few years earlier, but the seed died in the soil and no other attempt was made until Donie agreed to coach the team. For their first training session, in October 2001, 40 enthusiasts turned up, a mixum-gatherum of lapsed hurlers, novices and daredevils.

Many of them, according to Claffey, had never held a hurley before; some of them, he says, had never seen a hurling match. Standing in the middle, Donie was both arsonist and fireman.

“That first 20-minute game had players recklessly swinging hurleys and holding hurls the wrong way,” said Claffey. “It was dangerous, but Donal took control. At the end of training Donal said to me, ‘We have our work cut out, boy – that was like something out of Braveheart.’”

When they eventually fashioned a team, the nearest opposition was 900 miles away. Their first game was against Milwaukee, a miraculous outfit made up entirely of American-born players. The Atlanta team was half expat, half native. What had they done? Started something that had a heart.

“Today there are 14 men’s hurling teams in the South,” says Claffey. “Hurling has truly spread and flourished in a part of the US where no hurling had been before. Donal McCarthy did that. He may not have started the other 13 teams but he lit such a fire under us in Atlanta and that helped light a spark that spread across the southern states.”

Put down roots

Donie, though, was already a veteran of audacious overseas start-ups. Seven years earlier, in Saudi Arabia, he co-founded the Naomh Alee club in Riyadh. At the time he was working for an Irish company “who would create the world’s largest dairy herd, without a blade of grass”. That was the spirit.

Gaelic games has put down roots in the Middle East over the last 20 years, with 14 clubs spread across six jurisdictions now, but imagine what it was like when Naomh Alee came into existence in the...