They’d go rarin’ and tearin’ and fightin’ for love
For the land they call Killeagh and the Lord up above
Killeagh la, la la la la la la la la la
For the green and the white I adore
RM Block
For the parish to last evermore.
It was the Offaly hurlers who made Seán Crowley realise there was something going on with Killeagh. Something inexplicable. Something beyond.
Crowley is the teams co-ordinator at the Fota Island resort in Cork. When a Celtic FC or a Bath Rugby or whoever else land down for a few days, he’s in charge of making sure everything is bespoke and organised and just so. But he’s a Killeagh hurling man too. Which, in the company of the Offaly hurlers back in April, gave him instant standing, far over and above whatever fancy title Fota had for him.
Johnny Kelly’s side were staying at the resort before the Division 1B league final against Waterford in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Crowley was showing them round, passing the time, making small talk. When one of them asked idly where he was from and he told them, small talk became big talk in a hurry.
“I’d say about four or five of them, their heads popped up,” Crowley says now. “They all kind of jumped on it. ‘You’re from Killeagh! Like the song!’ That was the first time I copped that this was gone huge. We were out looking over the golf course chatting away and they were all excited. There’s a Killeigh in Offaly as well, they told me.
“But it’s gas. You see teams all over the country now playing it in dressingrooms and after matches. It’s put the club on the map anyway.”
Killeagh, then. The song is a tidal wave, a force unlike anything seen on the Irish music scene for decades. It has spent seven weeks this year at number one in the charts, the most in that spot by an Irish artist since Maniac 2000 by Mark McCabe, a full 25 years ago. It has more than 22 million plays on Spotify alone, a spectacular number for any song, never mind one that was only released as a B-side just over eight months ago.
On Sunday night at Electric Picnic, Kingfishr will play the Main Stage in the prime sun-going-down (they hope) slot, seven o’clock till eight. If their festival set lists from across the summer are any guide, they’ll leave Killeagh until late on in the set. But when they do strike it up, it will be like someone has pulled a bath plug, sucking the rest of Stradbally towards them. Let the Killeagh boys roar.
‘95 came promotion, high up on the wing
And ’01 up to senior, what a beautiful thing.
But what of Killeagh, the club? There isn’t a more famous hurling team name in the country and yet the small club in east Cork is, understandably, completely unknown to 99.9 per cent of the people singing their song. They were a camogie power in the 1980s, winning five Cork senior titles, five Munsters and one All-Ireland. But they’ve never won a men’s senior championship and were a junior club for most of their history.
Mention Killeagh to the casual GAA fan before this year and some – only some, mind – would have been able to conjure up the name of the great Joe Deane, the brilliant corner forward with the yellow helmet who won three All-Irelands and three All Stars between 1996 and 2009. Mark Landers, the Cork captain in 1999, was a Killeagh man too.
They’ve had other stalwarts come and go over the years but, for the most part, Killeagh have been like everyone else. Quietly digging away and tending to the crops, yielding hurlers all the while, readying themselves for the years when a few good ones come through together.
The best of times in Killeagh came at the turn of the century when they jumped the steps of stairs from junior to senior in just six years, a status they’ve hung on to ever since. They’ve survived various restructurings of the Cork championship in the past quarter of a century – saved by them on occasion, in fact. These days, they play in the Senior A championship, a rung below Premier but still solidly senior.
“This year is the 30th anniversary of winning the junior championship,” Crowley says. “That was huge. My father was full-back on that team. He sent me a picture only this week – the press came up to the club the week of the final and they took pictures. I have three brothers and he had this picture with the four of us in it.
“Those were the golden days. The junior championship in Cork was so hard to get out of that time. You had all these rural village clubs trying to win it – it took us three attempts to get there but we did and we got up to intermediate. We had a very good spell with that team – they lost an intermediate final in ’98, my father was in charge of that team and we were devastated. But we got up to senior by winning in 2001. Those were six or seven of the best years we ever had.”
For Killeagh to be playing in the senior championship was dreamtime stuff back then. Crowley tells the story of Tomás Fitzgibbon, a former player who was pushing 40 at the time and had moved to Galway a few years before. The lure of Killeagh playing senior hurling was the bungee rope that hauled him back.
“There was a kind of a buzz about it. People were going, ‘Jesus, isn’t he some man to be coming all the way from Galway to play for Killeagh.’ But sure Tomás would have dreamed all his life to play senior championship. He came back and played corner-forward.
“We were down playing UCC that first year and it was an absolute cracker of a game. We actually won it in the end. Tomás went in and was playing on this little small cornerback. He was a tiny little fella and he’d no helmet on him.
“But he was flying into everything and he was all anybody was talking about after the game. ‘Who’s your man, the cornerback?’ It turned out it was Tommy Walsh. It was the first time any of us had seen him or heard of him.”
Tomás Fitzgibbon came from a family steeped in hurling and in Killeagh. Go back the generations and there’s a lineage all the way to Dr Edwin Fitzgibbon, after whom the Fitzgibbon Cup is named. Bring it more modern and Tomás is the brother of Ger Fitzgibbon, who played on and managed more Killeagh teams than you could count down the years.
Ger has two boys, Cathal and Eoin. Cathal Fitzgibbon plays midfield for the Killeagh seniors. Eoin “Fitz” Fitzgibbon is in a band.
When my time’s at an ending,
When my days are no more,
Bury me with my hurley
By the river Dissour.
It started with a fella called Yank. Last summer, Phillip O’Neill (nicknamed Yank “because he tried to go to America once”) goaded his friend Fitz, the guitarist in Kingfishr, into writing a song about Killeagh. All the other clubs around the place have songs they sing after matches. Why not us?
“They were looking like they were going to get to an east Cork Junior A final,” Fitzgibbon told The Two Johnnies earlier this year. “I was down in Killeagh, drunk, and I made a deal. If ye get to the final, I’ll write a song. Lo and behold, they got to the final and I got the text off Yank to write the song.”
The whole thing took 20 minutes. Kingfishr were in studio last October recording their album Halcyon. At one point, at a loose end while banjo player Eoghan “McGoo” McGrath was off recording, Fitzgibbon sat down with singer Eddie Keogh to see could they bang something out for this hurling song he had promised Yank.
“We just ran off for 15, 20 minutes,” Fitzgibbon told the Guardian last month, “and I started rattling it out. Thinking nothing of it because it was all a bit of a joke. Then we showed it to McGoo, who said: ‘What if instead of la la la, it’s Killeagh, la la?’ And sure, the three of us were screaming and shouting: this is the greatest thing ever!”
Killeagh duly won that east Cork Junior A final and the song got its first public outing afterwards. But that was all it was supposed to be. Nobody had any notion of making it a Kingfishr song, least of all Fitzgibbon himself. To him, it was a song about his little hurling club and the river that runs through his village in east Cork. The other pair are from Wexford and Tipperary, like.
And yet, look what happened. They stuck it on the B-side of their single Bet on Beauty last December. And there it sat, not making any particular impression on anybody until, by one of those random bits of kismet, it seemed to catch fire on TikTok around St Patrick’s Day. By May, it was number one. By June, the Cork hurlers were singing it in the Gaelic Grounds after winning the Munster title.
Kingfishr were in the Netherlands that Saturday night, playing a show in Nijmegen, close by the German border. Fitzgibbon thought he’d get to see it all before going on stage but then it went to extra-time and penalties so he had to play the gig without knowing what was happening. By the time he got back to the dressingroom, his phone was full of videos of the Cork team belting out their song.
“For 20 years of my life, I dreamed about being in that Cork dressingroom,” he told Eoghan Cormican in the Examiner. “So that was a real shock to the system for me. Hearing the team sing Killeagh was a beautiful, beautiful moment.”
For the club and the people of the village, it’s all a bit surreal. Having one of their own out in the world, conquering the charts, ripping it up at Electric Picnic and beyond, is something special. But hurling is hurling too – they have a good young team coming and have one win from two games in the Senior A Championship, with their last group match next Saturday.
“We beat Na Piarsaigh but we were probably a bit complacent against Fermoy,” says Crowley. “Somebody said to me afterwards that they can’t remember the last time Killeagh won two championship matches in a row. That’s the way of it. We’ll keep going.”
For the green and the white they adore.
