The news that Limerick man Gerard McDonnell produced a hurley and sliothar and pucked a shot from the top of Mount Everest, after he climbed it recently, does not come as any surprise to assiduous students of Irish history, such as An Fear Rua …

After all, more than two thousand years ago, atop of the Hill of Tara in the Royal county of Meath, didn't Setanta himself drive a sliothar into the mouth of Culann's guard dog, with all the force of a Paul Flynn '21-yarder', thus killing the poor animal and immortalising himself as Cú Chulainn? However, even Martin Curran and the lads in the nearby Kilmessan hurling club would have to admit that climbing Everest to puck a sliothar is a somewhat tougher proposition than the six hundred feet or so of the Hill of Tara.

Hopefully, Mick gave the sliothar a right good puck and drove it somewhere out into the snowy fastnesses of Nepal. T'would be unfortunate if some poor sherpa slowly making his way to the top was to be knocked off the slopes by a belt of a sliothar. Though, from what AFR hears from his climbing friends, if you die on Everest they just let your body lie there for posterity and the next lot just climb over you to get to the top, without stopping for so much as a decade of the Rosary. A bit like they way you get to the top in Fianna Fáil politics.

Anyway, sport and the great events in Irish history have long been intertwined. It is a little known fact that as Theobald Wolfe Tone approached Bantry Bay in 1796 on board the French vessel 'La Surveillante' that he and the matelots were not engaged in playing deck quoits, but were actually tricking around the deck with a sliothar and a few hurleys in a game of rounders. And no better men than the Inner Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to engage in a few games of handball before setting off for yet another secret meeting to plot a Fenian rising. No wonder a few of the IRB lads were in the 'shnug' in Hayes' Hotel in Thurles waiting for the word from the room above, the night in 1884 that Cusack, Davin, Nally and the rest of them founded the GAA.

Have you ever tried soloing a football up and down the gangway of a submarine while speeding along a hundred feet under the stormy waves of the Atlantic? Well, that was what Sir Roger Casement did aboard the German U-17 in April 1916 to while away the time as he headed for the coast of Kerry. Unfortunately, Sir Roger always contrived to lose his ball in a close tackle with one of the tall, blonde German seamen of the Kriegsmarine. But he never seemed too put out about that!

Later that same month, the GPO garrison in Dublin whiled away most of Easter Week with a seven-a-side gaelic football tournament played in the back yard, in between taking pot shots at the British 'Tommies' of the Lancashire Regiment and the Sherwood Foresters. In the final, finished shortly before the blazing edifice was evacuated, fine displays by Harry Boland and Mick Collins led C Company, 1st Dublin Battalion of the Volunteers to a 2-7 to 1-4 victory over a ragbag team of undernourished inner city dwellers drawn from the Citizen Army. Up to now, it has always been assumed that the Labour leader, James Connolly, had to be stretchered from the GPO because of wounds sustained in the fighting. However, a confidential eye witness report, filed with the Bureau of Military History in Cathal Brugha Barracks in Dublin, reveals that in fact he was injured by an off-the-ball tackle by Collins. The burly Corkman bumped into the misfortunate pint-sized Connolly with a loud cry of: 'Take that! Ya little Communist hoor ya!'.

It is believed in certain historical circles that Countess Markievicz and the women of Cumann na mBan passed their incarceration in Kilmainham Jail by playing camogie in the stone breakers' yard. Unfortunately, after a while, the jail authorities had to introduce random strip searching after the Countess was nabbed by a guard trying to smuggle a tommy gun under her dress, while protesting all the while that it was just her hurley! As the guard laconically remarked: 'Is that a hurley under your dress … or are you just glad to see me?'. Later, under the influence of Mrs Tom Clarke and some of the older women, the Countess invented Ladies Gaelic Football, but the long skirts worn by the Cumann members hindered the development of the game.

However, some of the lads in the Wee County of Louth have now challenged Mick to an even greater feat of mountain hurling. The Louth lads say pucking a ball off the top of Everest is nothing compared with winning the testing 'Poc Fada' in the Cooley Mountains. So maybe a Limerick man will go down in history as the first person to win a 'Poc Fada' on both the Cooleys and Everest ….