Drom & Inch GAA Club

Sunday Times Article from 2008

Below is an article from last year written for the Sunday Times about the club.

By Christy O’Connor

Paudie Butler’s front room at his home in The Ragg in Tipperary is furnished with the usual

and unusual trappings of a home-office; books, shelves, a computer and a goldfish tank in

the corner. This is effectively the national hurling development control centre but there

are no master blueprints lying around or large technical sheets decorating the walls.

Hurling’s development has always depended more on blue collar ethic than high-tech strategy

and a framed photograph beside the door neatly showcases the potential of those values.
The picture includes the Drom-Inch and Sixmilebridge U-14 teams which shared the 1995 Feile

na Gael Division One title after a period of extra-time had failed to separate them. In the

competition’s 37 year history, Drom-Inch’s achievement is still a standout monument because

Division One has always been dominated by the urban club powerhouses. Ballyhale Shamrocks,

Tullaroan and Oulart-the-Ballagh are the only other three clubs from a non-urban base to win

the competition but they were all nourished from a rich heritage. Drom-Inch had neither

prestige nor population but their achievement flew in the face of tradition and it

represented a glorious beginning.
The flag they stuck on top of the mountain 13 years ago is fluttering just as strongly in

the breeze now. Strong rural clubs have always relied on a particular generation of players

to sustain ambition and accelerate development but Drom-Inch have moved the club from the

periphery of Tipperary hurling to the very centre in a very short time. Four of their

players – Eamonn Buckley, Seamus Butler, Seamus Callinan, and James Woodlock - start today’s

Munster final.
That achievement is further illuminated when compared with club representation trends in

Tipperary’s over the last 40 years. Toomevara won ten county titles in a 15 year period

between 1992 and 2006 but they never once had four starters on a Tipperary championship team

in that time. Roscrea and Kilruane-McDonagh’s dominated club hurling in the 1970s and for a

period in the early 1980s but Roscrea had four players on a Tipperary championship team just

once – against Cork in 1979. Kilruane never had more than three starters and they had also

won an All-Ireland club title like Roscrea.
Mullinahone did provide five players to the starting Tipp teams against Laois and Galway in

the 2003 qualifiers but one of those players – Denis Byrne – was an import from Kilkenny and

it was a year after Mullinahone had won their first county title. Drom-Inch’s achievement

now is even more elevated given that they’re still waiting for their first county senior

title.
“For years, having one player on the squad would have been a huge, huge bonus but having

four on the team is just a dream,” says Damien Young, a former Tipp sub goalkeeper under

Brendan Cummins. “Jesus, it’s unheard off. You’d expect that from the likes of Toome

(Toomevara) or Mullinahone but not from a club like us. It’s the talk of everyone around the

place here. They’re so proud of the lads. They’re all heroes now to the young lads here.”
Tipperary never expected Drom-Inch to produce hurlers for the county and the club were never

persecuted with guilt in the past when they didn’t. Mick Kennedy, Phil Farrell and Tom Barry

were all locals but they won their All-Irelands with Limerick and Dublin. Seamus Bannon from

The Ragg won three All-Ireland with Tipp between 1949-’51 but he played his club hurling

with St Mary’s Nenagh and Young Irelands Dublin during those three years.
In 1975, Tommy Butler became their first championship player in over two decades. Butler won

an All-Star in 1978 but his career was played out during a huge Tipp recession and he never

won a championship game in his six-year career. It took a generation for the club to produce

another championship player when Tommy’s son, Seamus, made his debut in 2004.
Located just four miles from Thurles, Drom-Inch were always hemmed in by clubs bursting with

tradition and with the deeds and feats of old hurlers deposited like minerals in the soil.

The parish borders Toomevara, Borris-ileigh, Holycross-Ballycahill and

Loughmore-Castleliney, all clubs which had won county titles. “If our forefathers played

Thurles Sarsfields or Holycross or Boherlahan, they would be talking about it as a lifetime

ambition of having just actually played against them,” says Paudie Butler. “That would have

been sufficient for them.”
The furthest Drom-Inch had ever travelled was winning mid-Tipperary divisional titles in

1974 and 1984. Those teams were sustained by a handful of families but the decimating

effects of emigration in those decades ravaged the club’s chances of going any further. Yet

the interest was always huge and hurling in Drom-Inch was never about medals. The game was

never segregated from the mainstream of life or scheduled into a slot. It was always with

them like the weather. Only warmer.
“I’ve never been in a community that will support a club as much, both financially and

emotionally,” says Matty Ryan, a former club chairman and juvenile secretary.
They always had a tradition; they just didn’t have the underage structures to develop it. In

a place as small as Drom-Inch, with only around 750 houses, it’s always been a numbers game.

Under those conditions, they sought to maximise their output through intensive underage and

schools training and they had Butler on hand to lead the charge.
He is National Hurling Co-ordinator now but his initial grounding for the job began in Drom

School in the 1980s. He based his school coaching model on the skill template that Neil

Williams had so successfully established in Toomevara. Then in 1988, the club developed a

new club pitch in The Ragg, which is just across the road from the school. A big expansive

field, it neatly complimented the club’s athletic and skilful coaching model. The seeds were

down. The conveyor belt was up and running.
“I remember standing in the school yard before school started one morning and thinking to

myself, ‘If we have our wits about us here, everything is possible’,” says Butler.

“Everything was on the cards because they were uniquely talented, both boys and girls. I was

young and fresh and teaching in my own parish school. We knew then that it certainly would

be the adults fault if we didn’t succeed because there was no question about our talent

anymore.”
In 1992 the club won the U-12 county title, their first ever A title. That group went on to

win county titles in every A grade from U-12 to U-21, picking up Community Games and Feile

na Gael titles along the way. Inevitably, Drom-Inch players began to make an impact on

Tipperary underage teams; Young captained the Tipperary minors to the 1999 All-Ireland

final, while Butler captained the U-21s two years later.
It naturally took them a while to find their feet at senior level. They were fighting

relegation in 2002 and 2003 but they made it as far as a county quarter-final in 2004 and

looked ready to take flight. They reached their first county final in 2005, which they lost

to Thurles Sarsfields. They reached another county final last year but were heavily beaten

by Loughmore-Castleliney.
“It was the most disappointing day of my life because I knew we weren’t that bad,” says

Matty Ryan. “These fellas just want to win but they froze on the day and it was horrible.”
Two county final defeats in three years have increased the pressure and expectation on them

to deliver but the average age of the side last year was 22 and they will arrive in time.

“Up until 2005, the talk outside the parish would always have been, ‘Drom-Inch are good

underage but they’ll never win senior’,” says Damien Young. “Now they’re saying, ‘They still

can’t win it’. But this team is still very young and if we don’t win it this year, it isn’t

all gone. We still have time.”
When they met Loughmore in the championship two weeks ago, the sides drew in the best club

game played in Tipp this year. Loughmore went on to win the Munster club title last year and

Drom-Inch know that they’re not too far away now.
“Last year’s county final will be a defining threshold for these players,” says former Tipp

player, Raymie Ryan, who coached the team last year. “They’ll learn from that and move

forward because they’re great listeners and a fantastic bunch of hurlers. They’ve got great

coaching from Paudie Butler and that’s standing to them now. There were nights when we had

46 guys training and they’re obsessed with their hurling and obsessed with trying to win

their first county title.”
When Butler first began his odyssey as a coaching evangelist and tutor around the country in

the 1990s, he was able to measure the standards elsewhere against the ability in Drom-Inch.

He soon realised that “we could take on anybody”. They proved that as underage players and

are close now to completing their ambition as a senior club. Having four players starting

for Tipp in a Munster final legitimises that ambition even more.
The parish is clearly bursting with pride now but they’re not getting carried away with

themselves either because they want this trend to become the norm. The club have shown that

they can offer their young players a pathway to play for Tipperary now, something they could

never have offered in the past. The gateway to a new world is wide open.
“It’s wonderful and it’s a lovely time for us,” says Butler. “But we want this thing to be

normal, not something to be made wonder at. To say that it’s a complete surprise would be a

lack of confidence. The whole parish has worked so hard for this and we just wish now that

the lads keep on developing as they are and keep growing into a new Tipperary team and

become part of a new era.
“Our ambition is to win a county title for the parish and to produce as many good hurlers as

we can for Tipperary, at every level. We don’t want to be on the periphery any longer and we

want to be central to the whole business of hurling in Tipperary. We want to be a driving

force and to bring an energy and a vitality to Tipperary hurling.”
Days like today though, are eternal. The good times are here. And better days are coming.

Added By Micheál 04 Sep 2009