Both rural and urban GAA clubs face increasing challenges as demographics in Ireland change. This is one of a series of articles exploring the issues clubs face and what they are doing to adapt.
Cooley Kickhams (Louth)
Founded: 1887. Members: 780. Teams: 24.
Rural clubs come in all shapes and sizes. The Cooley Peninsula, jutting out into Carlingford Lough, is a gorgeous lump of mountain, forest and lake with the tourist hotspot of Carlingford down in the middle of it. But though the population of Carlingford itself has grown significantly over the past decade and a half – more than doubling to 1,445, according to the 2016 census – the Kickhams still draw most of their players from the byroads and townlands beyond the village.
“Carlingford is something we’re always working on,” says club secretary Brian Rafferty. “We’re in the school there, we have a GPO in there. But in all honesty, we’d have very few footballers from Carlingford for whatever reason. We won the intermediate championship last year and I think we had three Carlingford players on it. The vast majority of our players come from the outskirts and other places on the peninsula.”
And yet, despite not really drawing deeply from the main population centre in their catchment area, the last thing Cooley are struggling for is numbers. “The exact opposite in fact!” says Rafferty. “It looks like we might have to have a third adult men’s team this year. I’m sitting down these nights and going, ‘How am I going to get these fellas football?’
“Especially after the change to the minor grade, you have all these lads coming out after under-17 and there’s no football for them because they’re not men at that age yet and it’s not fair to throw them all into adult football in one go. So that’s the big problem we have. We have plenty of challenges but a shortage of players isn’t one of them.”
Like what?
“Finance is obviously a big issue,” Rafferty says. “Like every club, the costs have gone through the roof. Electricity, lights, pitch upkeep, everything has gone way up. We have two full-size pitches, a three-quarter length and an astro. Our ladies’ teams won more or less everything last year.
“We have a good lotto that covers the day-to-day expenses and we hold a big festival in August that brings in good money and gives us a good start on the following year. But you’re always needing more.
“We’re lucky enough with emigration around Cooley. It would have been a problem at one stage all right but we’re close enough to Dundalk so there’s good enough employment. Fellas are self-employed, a few of them are lorry drivers and that kind of thing and we have a younger group who are at college and come back on weekends. They might head off when they’ve graduated possibly but we’re always looking to build the numbers coming up behind them.”
