There was a man, one time, who lived not too far from the village of Gowlnacalley, in the county of Tipperary, and he never held much with new fangled gimmicks like the motor car or the ‘lectric’ light, recalls An Fear Rua...

Thady Maher was his name. He lived a quiet, simple life as a bachelor, all alone since his poor mother died a few years earlier. Thady left the national school at the age of thirteen to become a farm labourer, working on the large holdings of the strong farmers scattered for miles around the village. His only recreation in life was the Sunday visit to the pitch to cheer on the local club, Gowlnacalley – John Redmonds, and in the evening time, to sip a few large bottles of bitter sweet stout in a quiet corner of Ma Molloy’s drinking emporium.

At the end of the night – hail, rain or snow – Thady would step outside, hop up on his little cart and the patient ass would guide him home safely, even if his master nodded off. The ass knew the way well; out the byroad at the top of the village, past the old graveyard of Kilnamona, with its little cillín field beside it where the remains of the unbaptised mites repose peacefully, then on past the cross roads where he had to turn left before meandering a few hundred metres up to the gate of his tidy little labourer's cottage.

In his day, Thady had been a handy enough hurler. He it was who scored the winning goal in the county junior final of 1918, the day the ‘Redmonds’ won their first ever title. He was a nippy little half forward, adept at flicking the sliothar over his marker’s head, and running on to the ball before lashing it into the back of the net before it even hit the ground. At times, after a few large bottles, he would sigh a little sigh, and ruefully remember the days when he was a gossoon and could have had his pick of the young women of the parish. But, their fathers would never let them marry a labouring man with no prospects, no matter how skilfully he wielded the camán.

One Halloween night, years ago, sometime in the early years of the Emergency, in fact, Thady Maher had drunk his usual few large bottles and was contentedly seated on the cart making his way home. It was a clear, bright, moonlit night and the dark hedges loomed on either side of the aluminium coloured road. As the cart neared the old graveyard, Thady thought he saw a shadowy figure or two sitting on the wall. He rubbed his eyes, drew the cart nearer, and looked again.

Sure enough, there he saw Simon Kelleher, who had been cut down in the prime of his youth in a dreadful accident involving a hay baler. There too was Paddy Stakelum, drowned in the Claddaghbeg River at the age of twenty one. Soon, other figures he recognised from long ago, young and not so young, appeared at the wall. As the little ass contentedly munched on a few blades of grass beside the wall, glad of the respite, Thady looked over the wall as the grey wraiths slipped down and began to flit through the glinting headstones.

It soon became apparent that they were engaged in the ancient game of hurling. Players dashed hither and thither, blocked, flicked and passed to beat the band. Soon, Thady could resist it no more. He hopped down off the cart and clambered over the wall. He grabbed a hurley from the ground and joined in. After a while, the game became tense as the scores flashed from end to end of the graveyard. Just then, Thady grabbed the sliothar, hopped it on the bas of his hurley a few times, evaded a couple of tackles, and fired a rasping shot that looked as if it was going wide until it struck a headstone and diverted between the two Celtic crosses that served as one of the goals. Game over.

Thady looked around to exult with his team mates but they had all disappeared, save one. The dark figure approached him and gave him a wintery smile, like the glint on the handles of a coffin. ‘You were great, Thady’, the voice said. ‘So good were you that we’re going to make a place for you permanently in our team from next Sunday’. Thady went to reply, but when he looked again, he saw that he stood alone in the moonlit graveyard...

The following Friday, struck down by a mysterious illness, he died alone in his bed. He was waked on the Saturday and buried in Kilnamona graveyard after twelve o’clock Mass on the Sunday, just on the right hand side of the pathway not far from the big green wrought iron gate. If you’re ever passing that way yourself some day, you can’t miss the headstone. It’s the granite one, with the crossed hurleys framing a sliothar at the top and the words ‘In proud memory of Thady Maher, hurler of this parish’.

The moral of the story is this. If you're passing by a graveyard late at night anytime around Halloween, stay in your car and don't get off your ass...


Thady Maher did his bit in the fight for Irish freedom...