Remembering 1994: Iconic Family Photo …
The two remarkable pictures featuring on Mullingar Shamrocks Facebook deserve a solo posting. If a picture tells a thousand words, then one could easily write a book on the stories of the people in these pictures.
The photographs were taken outside the dressing rooms in Castletown Geoghegan on the day Ned Moore captained Mullingar Shamrocks to their third successive county senior title and Ned won the fifth of his seven senior football championship medals.
It would start with Eamonn and Patricia (Patty) Moore who were natives of Dunmore, County Galway and moved to Tudenham outside Mullingar in 1964 when they availed of a Land Commission resettlement scheme.
Ned and Patricia’s children Eddie, Keith, Gary and Jolene are there in their green and white Shamrocks uniforms. All three represented Shamrocks at senior level with Eddie emulating his father by captaining Shamrocks to the senior title in 2018 with Ned as manager in what was a very special day for the family. Eddie was winning his second senior medal on the unique 2018 occasion.
Gary also represented Mullingar Shamrocks in senior football and played his final game for the club on Sunday 5 October 2003 when Milltown defeated Mullingar Shamrocks 1-8 to 1-6 in the Westmeath Junior Football County Final. Keith, the youngest of the three Moore boys, played in the 2007 Westmeath senior final when Shamrocks (managed by Ned) were beaten by Tyrrellspass. Keith was the captain of the Mullingar Shamrocks team that won the junior title in 2013 but missed the final because of injury. In fact, of the three brothers, Keith has the best collection of Westmeath medals missing only a senior medal.
Jolene is also in the picture and Jolene has displayed her singing talent on stage for Mullingar Shamrocks and has performed in practically all of the club’s fundraising occasions that involved song and dance.
Take another look at the photograph. The three lads in the front row are Darren, Conor and Dean, three more lads who represented Mullingar Shamrocks at senior level. Darren played in the 2007 final. We won’t mention the goal he scored against Castledaly in the 1995 semi-final or his status as one of New York’s leading attorneys; we won’t mention Conor’s Sketches either or the fact that Conor is currently on a nationwide tour that has been a sell out; these boys never kicked over five points in a county senior final as Dean did in 2018, five crucial kicks that guided the Flanagan Cup to Springfield and not down the road to Lakepoint Park, in the year that Ned delivered a masterclass in team management.
Remarkably, 28 years after the photograph was taken Eddie, Gary, Dean and Darren are still active on the GAA fields with Gary at corner-back and Darren at corner-forward playing leading roles for Westmeath Football Club (New York) when the club won the New York Intermediate Football Championship in 2021. Westmeath lined out in their black jerseys adorned with the sponsor’s logo reading ‘DTM: the law offices of Darren T. Moore.’
Back to the photos and another one in the group is the supreme stylist, one of the greats of Westmeath football, Denis Corroon. Another who has won two senior county medals with Mullingar Shamrocks and has represented Westmeath for over a decade. Denis’s 2022 season was one of his finest.
And the young girl in yellow in the photograph is Niamh Dunne whose father Paddy is another great Mullingar Shamrocks stalwart.
W. B. Yeats once remarked ‘Did that play of mine send out certain men, the English shot?’
We can wonder did that occasion in Castletown Geoghegan in September 1994 inspire these young people to give such extraordinary service to Mullingar Shamrocks and to the GAA in general.
