Currans
Na Curraíne

A farming village on the N23 that became the home of Kerry football.

Currans is a quarter-mile of houses, a chapel and a GAA pitch on the N23 between Farranfore and Castleisland. About 250 people live in the village proper. Most travellers meet it as a thirty-second blur on the way to or from Kerry Airport — the runway is over the next field, more or less, and the road north out of the village runs straight at the terminal.

It is, at heart, a working farming village. Flat land, hedgerows, the River Maine cutting along the north-west, Stack's Mountains low and grey on the horizon to the north. The civil parish has been here for centuries; the Catholic chapel sits in the parish of Killeentierna and was rebuilt and reorganised in the 1860s after the western section was carved off into its own parish. The old Ardcrone burial ground, just outside the village, holds graves older than the chapel that replaced it.

What changed Currans — quietly, but completely — was the GAA. In December 2021 the county opened the Kerry GAA Centre of Excellence on a flat plain on the edge of the village. Four floodlit pitches, a state-of-the-art gym, eight dressing rooms, a dining hall. It had been twenty years in the planning. Every senior, minor and development squad in the county now passes through here, week in week out. The village still looks like a village. But the field on the way out of it is, in a real sense, where Kerry football is made.