When Billy O’Sullivan was a boy, before Ballygunner built an empire, there were just four classrooms in the local primary school. To be equipped for the day required schoolbooks, a tin whistle and a hurley. Hurling, though, headlined the day-to-day schedule: before school, in the middle of school, after school. “Every time we walked out the door,” says O’Sullivan, “we were swinging.”The principal, James McGinn, was a Dundalk man who landed in Ballygunner in the early 1950s. The little he knew about hurling when he arrived was neither here nor there: he galvanized his new neighbours to form a club where none had existed.

Source: The Times August 29, 2020 23:13 UTC