From goalie to cameraman: Olly’s legacy to Westmeath GAA

Many young fans probably feel that Olly Gallagher’s sole contribution to Westmeath Gaelic games is as a very well-respected cameraman, whose videos and DVDs have provided countless pleasurable hours, ironically more than ever during the lockdowns of 2020/21.

However, those of us of a certain vintage will recall Gallagher as a top-class hurling goalkeeper with a then-powerful St Brigid’s side and a very strong Westmeath team throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Like many hurlers from his birthplace, Olly, now aged 71 but looking significantly younger, attributes his love of the small ball game to Waterford native and primary schoolteacher, the late Eamonn Moynihan, who introduced him to hurling in Gainstown NS.

"We wore purple jerseys with a gold collar, even if there were very few organised competitions those days. I kept my jersey for years as a souvenir,” Olly recalls, laughing as he adds: “I remember once during a school break driving a sliothar through the window and knocking a cup of tea off the table where it was being drank by one of the teachers!”

Mr Moynihan went on to be Westmeath County Board chairman from 1957 to 1961, and Olly is quick to acknowledge the hard – and unpaid – work undertaken to this day by such officials.

“On the day of a match, the game wouldn’t be till 2pm, but I go to Cusack Park to set stuff up around 10am and the officers would be there checking this, checking that. Unfortunately, most people take them for granted,” he remarks.

Olly continues: “I was always a goalkeeper and I don’t know why that was, but I suppose I was fairly tall even as a young lad. I only played outfield twice or three times during my career. Once was for St Brigid’s against Raharney in Cusack Park when the man I was landed on was Sean Greville and the first thing we did was poleaxe each other!”

As it transpired, Messrs Gallagher and Greville are both immediately mentioned whenever Lake County Gaels nominate their choice of the best-ever hurling cúlbáire to represent the county.

As a young boy, Olly’s goalkeeping heroes in Westmeath were Jimmy Dalton from Castletown-Geoghegan (“my idol”) and Rickardstown’s Mick Hayden. Further out the pitch, he looked up to Jack Power, ‘Jobber’ McGrath, ‘Dinger’ Bruer and Pat Jackson.

“St Brigid’s were very strong at the time,” says Olly. “Paddy Gavin and Frank McEntegart (also a future county board chairman) were two great men who drove it behind the scenes. Albert Colgan was like the Berlin Wall in front of me - a forward would never get in near me!”

“In those times, we trained in farmer John Noonan’s field. We togged out behind the bushes inside the gate and there were no showers. Unlike now, parents came to every game, like my late mother and father, Joseph and Angela.”

St Brigid's won the Westmeath Examiner Cup four times between 1968 and 1972. “I was honoured to be the captain for the last of these. It was a very proud moment for me when Eugene Doherty, a great man, presented the cup to me,” recalls Olly.

“We put in some very decent displays too in the Leinster club championship,” Olly reflects, before briefly recalling his later period with St Oliver Plunkett’s with whom he won a junior championship medal in 1978.

Olly, of course, had a long and distinguished career with Westmeath.

“The first big win I had with the county was when the U21 team won the ‘special’ All-Ireland title in 1968, and I made the senior team soon afterwards, but it was to be seven years before our big win under Bobby Begley in the senior ‘B’ with a great team in 1975 captained by an outstanding hurler in Mickey Fagan,” he says. “We got a big reception in Mullingar after it. That was a great evening.”

Hopes were then high for a big performance against newly-crowned National League champions Galway in the All-Ireland quarter-final in Athlone.

Alas, it was not to be, albeit for Olly his heroics in the face of adversity in a one-sided encounter clearly made an instant impression on the Tribesmen, both officials and players, including Galway legend John Connolly.

“I managed to hold the ball when Connolly went for a goal from a 21-yard free and he turned to me in disbelief when he looked round and saw the sliothar at the far end of the pitch! After we togged in, a few Galway officials approached me with the offer of a job in the county if I changed allegiances, but I was happy where I was,” says Gallagher.

“The following year (1976), we beat Offaly in the Leinster championship, but it fizzled away after that and we had some awful days,” Olly states. He shares the frustration of Westmeath supporters in attendance on that scorching hot day in Croke Park almost 45 years ago that Westmeath's southern neighbours “with virtually the same team” went on to be a major power in the game for two decades from 1980 onwards, while Westmeath totally failed to build on their promise. “I don’t know why, as it wasn’t like Dublin nowadays with money being a huge factor.”

Sadly, the game against Galway was one of the rare occasions when Olly got to display his excellent net-minding skills against one of the top hurling counties. He names Frank Shiels, the late Mick Healy, and Pat Bradley as the top backs in front of him in his Westmeath days. Eddie Donnelly (Antrim), PJ Qualter (Galway), Eamonn Cregan (Limerick), Tommy and Tony Carew (Kildare), Johnny Flaherty and Padraig Horan (Offaly), were the forwards he feared most.

Like so many on-field tactics in both codes, Olly concedes that the role of a hurling goalkeeper has changed radically since his own playing days, as he explains: “Unlike goalies now, I would never have hit a short puck-out. With the county, Johnny Keary was my target for a puck-out, and with St Brigid’s it was Olly Egan. They would put their hand up and if they were having a breather you’d see no hand up.

“High fielding is gone from football now also. It has become too much like soccer, just passing the ball around to each other, and I miss seeing high fielders such as the late Mick Carley.”

Indeed, he mentions the latter again in a list of his favourite footballers over the years to have played for Westmeath, in addition to Dom Murtagh, Mickey Scanlon, Fintan Costello, and more recently, Martin Flanagan, Dessie Dolan and John Heslin. In the managerial stakes, he compliments the late Páidí Ó Sé and Ray Smyth.

Olly is unable to clarify whether his beloved son Stephen (often seen now commentating as Olly focuses his camera) winning a hat-trick of Westmeath SFC titles with St Loman’s Mullingar, thereby emulating his father’s hurling feat with St Brigid’s, is unique. Both men won four Westmeath senior medals in total, but Stephen’s success in the Dublin SFC in 2006 with UCD edges the medal haul in his favour.

Understandably, Olly gets emotional when recalling Stephen throwing his goalkeeping gloves to his mother with the instruction to ‘mind them for me’ after the defeat of St Vincent’s in November 2006 in Parnell Park, especially as Antoinette died just six months later. Indeed, the gloves were on the grave in Marlinstown cemetery for many years thereafter.

Olly’s football roots are now firmly established with St Loman's in Lakepoint Park. “I appreciate people behind the scenes and I never forgot them for their roles in Stephen’s success. When he started, facilities at the club were very basic,” he states.

Many of Olly’s treasure trove of inter-county and club videos/DVDs adorn sideboards in Westmeath and further afield, in particular the great minor, U21 and senior successes of 1995, 1999 and 2004 respectively. In this regard, he praises the commentating and interviewing skills of Michael O’Sullivan and the late Johnny Garvin.

Indeed, Olly laughs as he recalls Westmeath’s classic Leinster minor trilogy against Laois in 1995: “Seamus McCormack from Meath was the ref and he rang me looking for videos of the two replayed matches in Tullamore. Johnny had commented more about the ref than some of the players and he suggested to me that ‘we better change some of the commentary’. I declined saying, ‘no, we’ll give it to him the way it is’. Seamus later told me how much he enjoyed the commentator!”

The GAA has come full circle from the ‘old normal’ when Olly and his contemporaries turned up for training and matches on bicycles, with just togs, boots and a hurley for company. As he states: “If a lad came with a kit bag, we’d joke that he must be going on holidays afterwards!”

“Last year, I missed the buzz of interviewing people before and after the games, but I commend those involved with Iarmhí TV for their super productions,” he concludes.

Please God, Covid-19 will soon depart and life will return to some semblance of a ‘new normal’. We all look forward to seeing Olly Gallagher and his equipment in their usual positions, perched next door to TEG Cusack Park score-keeper par excellence, his great friend Mick Moody.

- Gerry Buckley