A junior club with senior names
Currow GAA
Currow were among the eight original clubs at the inaugural meeting of the East Kerry Board in 1925, and they have been at it ever since. The football grade is junior — they play in the East Kerry Junior Premier today — but the names that have come out of the club run higher than the grade suggests. Séamus Scanlon played for Kerry. Mick Galwey took an All-Ireland Senior Football medal with Kerry in 1986 at nineteen, before swapping codes for rugby. Moss Keane played underage for Kerry before moving to Cork for college and on to Lansdowne. For a parish this size, that's an extraordinary roll-call. The pitch sits on the edge of the village. The names are on the wall.
Moss Keane and Mick Galwey
Two locks for Ireland
Two of Ireland's most-capped second-rows came out of this village within eighteen years of each other. Moss Keane (1948–2010) was the first Catholic Kerry-born GAA man to play rugby for Ireland — fifty-one caps from 1974 to 1984, the Triple Crown of 1982, the day Munster beat the All Blacks in 1978, the 1977 Lions tour. He died in 2010, aged sixty-two. Mick Galwey, born in Currow in 1966, came up through the same parish, won his Kerry medal in 1986, then went to Shannon RFC in Limerick, won forty-one Ireland caps, captained the country four times, and toured with the Lions in 1993. They knew each other. The village knew both. Two front-row villages have produced one international pair. Currow has produced two.
The river under the bridge
The Brown Flesk
The river running under the bridge in Currow is the Brown Flesk — Flesc Donn — a tributary that flows west and joins the River Maine a few kilometres downstream, on its way to Castlemaine harbour and Dingle Bay. It's a small river, not a famous one. It runs brown after rain because of the bog above it, which is where the name comes from. There's no walk along it of any consequence and no fishing legend attached. It's just the reason the village sits where it sits — a fording point on the old road from Castleisland to Killarney, before the bridge replaced the ford and the road took its modern line.
A small monument to a working past
The village pump
There is still a pump in the square. It is not a tourist attraction. It is the kind of cast-iron pump that stood in every Irish village before mains water arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, kept now because no one quite saw the point of taking it away. It works as a marker — a reminder that within living memory the women of the parish carried buckets from this pump every day, and that the Currow that produced the GAA men and the rugby internationals was a Currow without running water. Look at it for a minute. Most people drive past it without noticing.