Poc Fada champion who thrived on the Cooley Mountains

Talking Sport with Stephen Glennon

IT may have gone unnoticed but this week the regional finals of the Galway Poc Fada took place in various venues around the county. While it’s a competition Galway has only had moderate success in at national level in the past, the county did produce one of the game’s best exponents.

Only Ger Cunningham of Cork with seven Poc Fada national titles has more than Turloughmore native Mike Shaughnessy, who between 1994 and 1996, claimed the three-in-a-row of the Setanta Cup for his heroics around the Cooley Mountain. Interestingly, Shaughnessy’s victory in ’94 stopped Offaly’s Albert Kelly from achieving a similar feat.

It would be an understatement to say that the Poc Fada has not played a huge part in Shaughnessy’s life. For 15 years, Shaughnessy competed in the nationals, finishing second on two other occasions and winning the Cooley Cup – pairs competition – on no less than eight occasions.

Consequently, his exploits at the County Louth venue saw the former goalkeeper inducted into the Hall of Fame two years ago by the organising committee and, yet, he acknowledges that his achievements have gone largely unnoticed outside his own family, friends and his native Turloughmore club.

Still, it’s not something Shaughnessy loses any sleep over. He’s just delighted to be able to relive some of those sporting moments from the Cooley Mountain once again. “The first year I qualified for the Poc Fada was when I was 19 – in 1981,” begins the father of three.

“I qualified along with Jim Wall from Castlegar and Joe Cooney from St. Thomas’, father of the Cooneys. In that first year, I didn’t get on great. I was a bit green to what was involved; the fact that it was around a mountain. It was all totally new.”

In 1984, though, he enjoyed his first success when winning the pairs competition with Cork legend Justin McCarthy. “They would pair a winner from one province with a runner-up from another. It was still the same competition; they would just add your total pucks together.

“So, I won that [pairs] a total of eight times, starting with Justin McCarthy in ’84. You would meet the finest of lads and I would be friendly with some of them. The Lord have Mercy on Tommy Quaid (Limerick), I couldn’t believe it when he died. Tommy was a gentleman,” remarks Shaughnessy, who also became very friendly with Limerick’s Pat Hartigan who he often met up with at the Galway Races.

In addition to that first pairs victory in ’84, he also won the Cooley Cup with Kildare’s Vincent Moore (’88), Kerry’s John Conway (’89), the late Quaid (’91), Offaly’s Albert Kelly (’92), Clare’s Davy Fitzgerald (’93), Meath’s Johnny Masterson (’94) and Tipperary Liam Shinners (’95).

The only other Galway hurlers to do this were Richie Burke, alongside Clare’s Christy O’Connor, in 2000 and Galway goalkeeper James Skehill, with the previous year’s overall winner Gerry Fallon of Roscommon, in 2010.

Shaughnessy notes that before he finally won the overall event in the mid ‘90s, he had come second twice – one year in which he was very unlucky to lose out to Cunningham during the Corkman’s seven-in-a-row rampage. Indeed, on that occasion, both men finished on the same amount of pucks.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.