Team to return for euphoric homecoming after winning all-Ireland men’s final against Kerry, ending decades of defeats
The hex is broken, dispelled, banished, and a story that bewitched Ireland for decades has ended in fairytale: Mayo are all-Ireland champions.
Seventy-five years after a supposed curse condemned its Gaelic men’s football team to endless defeat, the county prevailed and uncorked a wave of emotion that engulfed even its rivals.
The team will return to the west of Ireland for a euphoric homecoming on Monday evening after winning the senior football championship, a victory that thrilled Ireland and Mayo’s diaspora, including Joe Biden, Mark Carney and Noel and Liam Gallagher.
“Mayo 1-20, Kerry 1-17. Chisel it on the gravestones, scribble it in the sky,” the Irish Times exulted. “Croke Park untethered, the whole place afloat for an hour on a lake of the sweetest tears that were ever cried.”
Most pundits had favoured Kerry to win the 138th all-Ireland final and write another chapter of Mayo woe at Sunday’s contest at the Dublin stadium. Instead the underdogs triumphed and even some Kerry fans wept at the catharsis.
Few seriously believed in the curse – it was said no member of the last winning team from 1951 would live to see another – but there was no doubting the drought that followed, with 11 defeats in 11 finals since 1989. A book about Mayo’s quest was titled House of Pain.
Whenever the county made it to a final, a frisson gripped television viewers and the 82,000-strong stadium crowd: was this the day they would witness the end of the hex? On Sunday it was.
“To every young boy and girl across Mayo and our diaspora across the world, never stop dreaming, stick your chest out and be proud to be from Mayo,” the team captain, Jack Coyne, declared as he held aloft the trophy named after Sam Maguire, a legendary player. “The wait is over. Sam is home.”
Authorities had provisionally estimated a crowd of 40,000 would greet the team at McHale Park in the county town of Castlebar on Monday but that looks conservative, Gerry Bourke, the homecoming committee chair, told RTÉ. “After what I saw in Croke Park yesterday, I think we’ll have to revisit the plan.”
Mayo, a landscape of bogs, rocks and Atlantic cliffs, is the third biggest of the island of Ireland’s 32 counties. It is sparsely populated, with just 130,000 people, but players and supporters have a reputation for fervency in the Gaelic Athletic Association, the sport’s governing body.
According to lore, the young victors of 1951 were on their way home to celebrate when they passed through the village of Foxford and failed to pay their respects to a funeral, prompting the enraged priest to utter the fateful words: “For as long as you all live, Mayo won’t win another all-Ireland.”
Seven decades later, the last surviving member of that team, Paddy Prendergast, told friends he would willingly “roll over and die” if there was any truth to the curse, but that it was a myth.
“There was supposed to have been a funeral in the local church; I don’t know whether there was or not. I saw people standing around the church but we didn’t get off the truck because we couldn’t get off the bloody truck,” he told an interviewer in 2017.
Researchers who probed church records, press cuttings and otherch gained currency in the 1990s. The legend, however, is intact: Prendergast died in 2021, aged 95, two weeks after Mayo lost the final
Biden – who concluded a 2023 presidential visit to Mayo with the rallying cry “Mayo for Sam!” – congratulated his ancestral home county. “Today, the dream becomes reality,” he posted. “You earned this victory. Enjoy every minute.”
Carney, the Canadian prime minister who made his own ancestral pilgrimage to Mayo last month, echoed the joy. “The curse is broken,” he posted. The Gallagher brothers of Oasis, who also have family ties to Mayo, expressed pride. “Finally!! Up Mayo!!” Noel posted.
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