GAA hero Leonard McGrath had many strings to his bow

A new book on 1920s Galway GAA dual star Leonard McGrath – who won All-Ireland medals with the county hurlers and footballers in 1923 and 1925 respectively – seeks to honour one of the greats of Irish sport from the past century.

Penned by retired deputy principal of Portumna Community College, James Coughlan, ‘A Forgotten Gael’ also includes research from Marian Lyons, a distant cousin of Leonard McGrath. Lyons previously wrote a feature article on Galway’s double All-Ireland winner in the 1993 Galway GAA Annual.

While Lyons contributed a great deal of research and wrote the preface to this book, the collation of the material into a manuscript was undertaken by her first cousin Coughlan. Through his endeavours, Coughlan fills in a lot of the blanks, having trawled through the British and Irish archives and various ships’ manifests to glean as much additional information as he could.

“I was collecting information on him for a while,” begins Coughlan. “I knew that Marian had done something on Leonard McGrath in the ‘90s. She also gave me the history of the Porters (McGrath’s mother’s family) – I wouldn’t have known a lot about them – and I did a good bit of research myself. Then, last year, I spent about five months writing it.”

No doubt, Leonard McGrath was a fascinating subject to research. Born to Woodford native Julia Porter and Down man James McGrath in Charters Towers, Queensland, Australia in 1898, McGrath moved with his mother, brother James and sister Bridget (also referred to as Mary Mae or Cissie) to Cloonoon, Woodford, after his parents separated in 1903.

“Now, the story from the family was that he was reared in Cloonoon, but I found out that he moved into Portumna – 7 Fairgreen, behind the church – and that is where they lived until his mother emigrated again (to New York with Cissie in 1916),” says Coughlan.

Throughout McGrath’s early days, he showed great promise as an athlete, excelling at a sports day in Portumna. “That little piece about the sports in Portumna was great to find. He entered the (teenage) boys race – he was only 10 or 11 – and he won it. The prize was a wristwatch, which was a significant prize back then.

“So, he was even a talent at that age and he had the arrogance to go into the boys race. What really surprised me about him though was that he had so many diverse achievements in different spheres of life,” says the author.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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