A great volume of Boyne water has flowed under the magnificent Victorian railway viaduct in Drogheda, to meet the Irish Sea at Mornington, since the last time Louth won the Leinster and All Ireland senior football championships. Fifty two years worth of water, in fact. For the year was 1957.

We were just reminiscing about it the other evening below at our local pitch while idly watching a promising bunch of under 16 footballers go through their training paces. One of our mentors, his father-in-law was on that ’57 campaign in the red-and-white of Louth and the memories bubbled up in conversation.

The English novelist and poet LP Hartley famously wrote: ‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ He might well have had the Ireland and the wider world of 1957 in mind when he made that acute observation. When Louth’s captain, Dermot O’Brien, ascended the steps of the old Hogan Stand to receive the Sam Maguire trophy from the President of the GAA, the Antrim man Seamus McFerran, it was indeed like being in a foreign country, so different to the one we know today.

It was a country devastated by emigration and with what seemed to be little hope for the future. 1957 was a General Election year. For the last time in such an election, Eamon de Valera was returned as Taoiseach with an overall majority of the 147 seats in the Dáil.

The big film that year was David Lean’s epic wartime drama ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’. It won the Oscar for Best Film as well as Oscars for Alec Guinness as Best Actor and for Lean himself as Best Director. 1957 was a good year, too, in the United States for a young Tennessean named Elvis Aaron Presley. His recording of ‘All Shook Up’ was the biggest selling single record of the year. His third - and considered to be his best ever - film ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and its title song became smash hits. But it was not just in America the King was popular. The ‘New York Times’ reported a craze for his music in Communist Russia where bootleg recordings of his songs were being passed around.

Within a few weeks of Louth’s All Ireland victory – though the two events were probably not connected – Communist Russia shocked the rest of the world by successfully launching the first ever man-made object to orbit the earth in space. It was called ‘Sputnik I’ a combination of words meaning ‘Fellow Traveller of the Earth’. The second Sputnik satellite carried a little dog called ‘Laika’. No, not a wee terrier in a red jersey from somewhere around Annagassan, but a heroic little mongrel picked up on the streets of Moscow.

All the Russian comings and goings overhead gave rise to one of those apocryphal stories that links Cumann Lúthchleas Gael with space travel. When the first man to orbit earth, Yuri Gagarin, was being debriefed back at his Russian base he was reportedly asked which seemed to be the friendliest country he had flown over. Much to the surprise of his KGB interrogators, the Colonel unhesitatingly replied ‘Ireland’. He explained that as he flew high over Dublin he could distinctly hear an ascending crescendo of voices shouting ‘Come on Down! Come on Down!’. What the poor Russians didn’t realise, of course, was that their years of pioneering space exploration coincided with the successful visits in 1960 and 1961 by the Down footballers to Croke Park on All Ireland Sunday.

But, then, it wasn’t just Elvis who was a rising musical star in 1957. The Louth captain, Dermot O’Brien, went on to be a leading showband singer. For a few years previously, O’Brien had been at the music part time. After a bad injury in 1953 he didn’t play again for the county until the All Ireland winning year of ’57. That year, he decided to give the football another ‘go’ but he always took the precaution of taping the index and middle fingers of his right hand so that another injury would not damage his accordion playing prospects.

O’Brien was late arriving for the final and might never have won a medal at all that day until a Croke Park steward finally believed his story that he was the Louth captain and allowed him in, just in time to join his team mates as the pre-match parade ended. He played a key role in a game that saw Louth defeat Cork by 1-9 to 1-7 helped by a goal from Kevin Behan with only five minutes remaining on the referee’s watch.

At least O’Brien got a medal for his efforts that day but others were not so lucky, among them our mentor’s father-in-law. County panels in those far off days were limited to twenty one members and so six players who had soldiered for the Wee county throughout the Leinster championship never received a medal. Ruefully, the six sometimes wondered to themselves was it because they were the only non-drinkers on the panel! Fifty years later, that omission was rectified and they received due recognition from Comhairle Laighean for their great achievement in a special presentation of medals.

Louth still travel expectantly on a road they hope will someday bridge that long gap and bring them Leinster and All Ireland glory. Sadly, whenever that happens, their gallant captain of 1957, Dermot O'Brien, will be viewing it from a seat on high, for, exactly fifty years after he led them to glory, he passed away after a long illness.


Elvis... all shook up in 1957...