Lovely hurling as Miko meets Ruth

Lifestyle – Ninety-four-year-old Miko McInerney from Ardrahan played hurling for club and county and worked as a schoolteacher for many years. Highlights of his rich life have been captured by musician and broadcaster Ruth Smith in a video she made as part of a series initiated by Galway Town Hall Theatre, involving older people and local artists. She tells JUDY MURPHY how it came about.

“We’re all made of stories,” says singer and broadcaster Ruth Smith. That something she realised at a young age, thanks largely to her upbringing in her family-run pub, The Maples in Portumna. It was a place of storytelling, music and hurling conversations and she imbibed this rich heritage from childhood.

Ruth who presents Simply Folk on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday nights continues to cherish that tradition, so, when Fergal McGrath of Galway’s Town Hall Theatre contacted her in early Autumn, asking her to get involved in Bringing it All Back Home, she was delighted. Bringing it All Back Home is an initiative between Backstage Theatre in Longford, The Town Hall in Galway and the Pavilion in Dún Laoghaire that involves theatre-makers, musicians and writers engaging with older people – mostly residents of nursing and care homes, to present digital stories, based on their lives.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the Backstage Theatre had asked Ruth to create a ‘visual poem’ on Longford musician Liam Rogers, whose parents had been lock-keepers. The process touched her deeply and the resulting video was so powerful that after seeing it, Fergal McGrath asked her do something similar here in Galway. Given her Portumna hurling heritage – her brothers, Leo, Peter and Andy are all noted players – Fergal suggested that she pair up with an older-generation hurler.

Ruth’s resulting video with 94-year-old Miko McInerney, who hurled with Ardrahan and Galway, is special as this born storyteller shares his memories of club and county hurling – including playing against the great Christy Ring and travelling to New York and Boston with the Galway hurlers in 1951. The retired schoolteacher sparkles with life and humour as he tells stories of attending Mass after an all-night poker session – having made the effort after a priest had complained that the hurlers were having so much fun, they were forgetting their spiritual duties. It’s fascinating too, as he describes how in the 1950s, when inter-county hurlers marked each other, they did so without speaking. Miko shares this information without comment – it was just how things were.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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