‘I look to the future now and I know
I can do whatever
I want.. I’ve never been into drugs but now I go, ‘Maybe in my later years’”
Three Dooleys,
four stories
THE three Dooleys are sharing a couch in Johnny’s Tullamore home, where once they shared the spoils of victory. They are the nearest thing to King’s County hurling royalty – the brothers who propelled Seir Kieran and Offaly to heights that club and county could only dream of now.
It’s not every day that three siblings strut across the same All-Ireland stage: Joe, Billy and Johnny Dooley were so good they did it twice. Joe went one step further: the only Offaly hurler to win three Celtic Crosses on the field of play.
Different times. Glorious times. Unlike the hard times of today.
Twenty-four years ago, all three started when Offaly completed the most remarkable, surreal All-Ireland odyssey of modern times. Two seasons later, with Billy just retired, Joe and Johnny were battling against the Black-and-Amber tide and the rise of a new Cody empire.
Offaly’s last appearance in a senior All-Ireland was a chastening experience. In the same year, 2000, the county won a Leinster minor and U-21 double but there was no senior jackpot to match the rich dividend that flowed from their underage successes in the late ‘80s.
Offaly hurling, once famous for punching above its weight, has been pummelled over the past two decades. They were still relatively competitive during Joe’s four-year stint as manager, ending in 2011, but he doesn’t shy away from how tough a job it was. By the time Johnny spent a year as selector and coach in 2017, the pace of decline had accelerated and Offaly ended up in the third tier Christy Ring Cup in 2020, albeit they rebounded back up into the 2022 Joe McDonagh Cup.
This year’s run to an All-Ireland minor final restored some long-absent giddiness, even if it all ended in heartbreak at the death.
“If we could get near winning something,” offers Joe, “the chances are we’d win it. That’s the way we have been.”
The brothers are here to talk about their new book, Dooley: A Family Memoir (written with Kevin O’Brien and published by Hero Books). Hurling, inevitably, is the dominant theme but the title offers a clue that this is also a story of the ties that bind a family, not just a dressing-room. It’s a study of rural Ireland, farming life, and sporting excellence.
Into the mix you can throw in several escapades that mightn’t sit comfortably with the spartan caricature of today’s inter-county elite.
Johnny and Billy made their senior championship debuts on the same day in 1991, joining Joe on the team in a notable first. They were freshly-minted league champions – a most un-Offaly thing to do – and dreaming big.
But the weekend beforehand the two younger brothers and their future wives enjoyed a stay-over in Athlone that culminated in Bozo’s nightclub followed by a house party. Then, on the day before facing Dublin, they ventured to the capital early because they had tickets to Rod Stewart in the RDS.
“I was making it up afterwards,” says Billy, “we were eight hours [on our feet] between walking to get there, at the concert and by the time we got back, around half-ten or 11 on the Saturday night. Got up Sunday morning, the auld legs were a little bit flat alright! We headed back over to the Spa Hotel to meet up with the rest of the Offaly team. We weren’t drinking or anything like that on the day, but it was totally, totally the wrong preparations for going to Croke Park.”
And even though Johnny top-scored with 1-7, Offaly lost. Summer over. For the first time in 12 seasons, they had failed to reach a Leinster final.
Yet, within three years, Offaly were back at the summit, the first of four All-Ireland finals they would reach (winning two) between ’94 and 2000. For all the mythology about that team’s propensity to party, they could scarcely have achieved so much if they were perennially on the lash. “When we had to train, we knew when to train,” says Johnny.
The book is dedicated to their parents, who reared nine children. Betty is still going strong at 80, liable to whip up a fry or an apple tart if one of her children pops into Clareen. But sadly Sean passed away in 2000 after a year-long battle with cancer.
It’s only fitting, then, that the Dooleys are donating all of their proceeds to Dóchas Offaly Cancer Support Centre, which provides an invaluable service to anyone affected by the disease.
It’s just frightening that someone could lead a double life to that extent
The fans
invaded the pitch
and got
their way in
the end
Sections
Subscribe
Sections
THE surreal story of Offaly’s All-Ireland escape-to-victory over a shellshocked Limerick in 1994 has invariably been distilled into one pithy sentence. Five down, five to go … the rest is history.
But perhaps a more appropriate starting point is early 1993. A training session in Birr, Éamonn Cregan settling into his first season as Offaly manager. One of those wet, miserable nights designed for drenched dogs and hardcore county men only.
Twelve players togged.
Cregan stormed off, hopped into his car and drove back to Limerick. Players wondered if he’d ever return.
Even if panel numbers were smaller back then, it wasn’t a good look. Johnny Dooley was an injured bystander following a knee procedure. “Tony Murphy, who’d be our team secretary, had a great way of putting things. He said, ‘Lads, this is shocking, shocking!’ Tony kept saying ‘shocking’ but I suppose it was shocking in a way that our manager would walk away from a training session. Like, we felt he was a big name to be coming into Offaly.”
Shocking that he’d left, or that only 12 turned up?
“I think it was a bit of both, to be fair! Tony was as disappointed as anyone. He’d like to impress a new manager, and to only have that number at training wasn’t good.”
Johnny’s summation is that Cregan had inherited “a legacy of poor attitude, maybe coming from previous years, and it took Éamonn a while to change that. He did change it, in fairness to him. I’d say we tested his patience a few times.”
BILLY: “It was probably an eye-opener for Cregan and what was ahead of him. But I suppose from that day on, the thing changed. They probably worked that out, that we’re after getting this manager and here we are with 12 at training in Birr – it just wasn’t good enough. And I think from then on, the auld corner was turned.”
JOE: “Cregan told me himself that he was shocked by the level of unfitness in the team. The first night he arrived, when Derry O’Donovan did his runs, he said lads were just so unfit he couldn’t believe it. I suppose he set himself then to get us fit, and that was Derry’s job and Derry was brilliant at it. But it was tough going for a few months until you kind of got used to it. He used to do these 20-minute runs – multi-sprint stamina running. You sprinted, jogged, sprinted, for 20 minutes non-stop. We weren’t used to that kind of stuff.”
JOHNNY: “And he introduced these long warm-ups. A warm-up for us, once upon a time, was flapping your arms and running on the spot! But he had a 15-minute warm-up where you’d spend ten minutes stretching, and the warm-down was probably 10-15 minutes. And that was like something he brought from a professional set-up; he (O’Donovan) was involved with Arsenal, he had learned a lot of things out there. And we could see straight away, this lad knows what he’s about … and we bought into it then.”
All three siblings confirm the image of Cregan as a manager who was not there to be your friend, who retained a certain distance, who was a stickler for self-discipline. “If you were a minute late, you did ten press-ups. If you were ten minutes late, you did 100 press-ups,” Joe recounts.
But, crucially, his thinking on how the game should be played was in perfect symmetry with the Offaly way.
JOHNNY: “I suppose it was a Munster thing as well, it was all about moving the ball fast, he didn’t like lads dilly-dallying on it or twisting and turning … or carrying the ball. He wasn’t into guys soloing. He had a very simple philosophy on how it should be played.
“And if you didn’t carry off what he wanted, you could see him on the line – he would be gone bananas.
“You knew what your role in the team was. There was nothing too strategic about how you were to play or what positions you were to take up; you were given carte blanche. But once you worked your socks off and kept the ball moving …”
JOE: “Your job was to get the better of the man you were on, and that was it.”
And yet, for all the gifted stickmen at his disposal, Cregan’s team might well have been remembered as All-Ireland nearly men … but for those five minutes of celestially timed magic against the manager’s native county.
With the clock ticking, Offaly peered into the abyss. Cue Johnny’s delivery from the right wing; Billy drawing the foul. Standing over that fateful 20m free, Johnny initially sought out “a bit of guidance from the line, to see what I should or shouldn’t do. I couldn’t see Eamonn obviously, but Derry O’Donovan did put the finger – I took it as putting over the bar. But I suppose at that stage, I don’t know whether we would or we wouldn’t have come back … but I made the decision at that stage, look, go for it.”
If his shot had been blocked and Limerick launched a scoring counter-attack, Joe surmises, it would have been lights out.
Except it wasn’t blocked and, before Limerick had time even for a standing count, they were poleaxed by the double-whammy of Pat O’Connor’s follow-up goal. All that remained was Offaly’s party piece of five more unanswered points – including one from Johnny and a hat-trick from Billy “without moving a ten-yard radius,” the man himself smiles in fond recollection.
For Joe, who had won his first Celtic Cross nine years earlier, it was especially sweet to claim his second alongside two of his brothers on a day when all three played well. And don’t even dare hop the ball by suggesting Offaly might have stolen it: with a shade more luck, he reminds, they could won further All-Irelands in ’95 and ’99.
BILLY: “The whole thing just turned for Offaly in that short time. If it was now, I don’t think it would be talked about as much because there are such high-scoring games. But 3-16, and you score 2-5 in the last five minutes of an All-Ireland, was exceptional at that time.”
JOHNNY: “It’s something that’ll stick with you forever. And it’s something that happens [once] in a very, very blue moon – when you get those scores at that time in an All-Ireland final. It was just an incredible feeling when it was all over, to go from feeling like the game had slipped to having it won with a minute to go.”
1985
1994
1998
2000
EVERYTHING comes to he who waits. In December 1998, Joe Dooley was honoured with his first and only All Star award. He had just turned 35.
“I had one in ’84 before the All-Ireland,” he clarifies. “When the ball was being thrown in I had one nearly in my pocket, and when it was over Seánie O’Leary had it at the other end - he got two goals for Cork!”
The summer of ’84 was meant to be Dooley’s coming-of-age season. Or at least that’s how it was shaping up for the 20-year-old. A good run in the Centenary Cup had kickstarted his senior Offaly career. Injury delayed his championship debut until the Leinster final victory over Wexford, but he was then propelled into the national spotlight after shooting 2-3 from play in the All-Ireland semi-final against Galway.
Fast-forward to September 2 in Thurles, once-off home to the All-Ireland hurling final. In the battle of Faithful iconoclasts and Rebel aristocrats, old money ruled: Cork won in a canter.
“After going scoreless, I was replaced by Paddy Kirwan near the end,” the rookie finalist explains in Dooley: A Family Memoir. “As I trudged off the field, a wave of disappointment washed over me. I’ve let the team, myself … my family down.
“The centenary All-Ireland, played at the newly refurbished Semple Stadium … it was built up to be such a great occasion and then things went so badly for us on the day, and for me personally.”
By Joe’s own admission, it took him a couple of years to get over it, his confidence “still a bit shattered” after the ’84 All-Ireland. He was contributing but felt he could have done more. In the ’85 final against Galway he was held scoreless, much to his chagrin as he’d a “perfectly legitimate” goal disallowed for a square ball call.
But Offaly prevailed and their young forward from Seir Kieran had played his part. He was only 21; he had his first ever pint of Smitwicks on the night of the final.
However, even as Offaly celebrated only their second ever All-Ireland SHC title, the occasion was laced with poignancy. The semi-final against Antrim, played in the Armagh Athletic Grounds, would prove to be Pat Carroll’s final game. Illness took him far too early; he died the following March, aged just 30.
The Dooleys’ mother, Betty, is originally a Carroll from Coolderry; she and Pat’s father were first cousins.
“Pat had been kind of struggling for form that year,” Joe recalls. “But nobody knew there was anything [amiss], that he was sick or anything. Then we played Antrim in Armagh, we beat them and it was a real wet day.
“Pat didn’t have a great game; I think he might have been substituted before it was over and he wouldn’t have liked that. I was sitting down the back of the bus, and Pat came right down to the back and sat beside me.
“He was sitting in the middle seat and he just put his face into his hands and said, ‘I’m going to have to get myself sorted.’
“He was getting headaches, I think at the time, and he hadn’t really told anyone about it. He obviously went to a doctor and got referred and got scans, and he was in hospital by the end of the week and never played after it. The scans showed a brain tumour.”
The following March, Billy Dooley was playing for Birr Community School in Rathdowney, facing St Kieran’s Kilkenny in the Leinster Colleges final.
“Padraig Horan was training us at the time. He was called out at half-time in the match; I can remember it as well as can be,” says Billy. “He came back in and his eyes were sort of filled up. He said a few words and he just said, ‘We have to win this today, lads.’ He said no more, and I’d say maybe at the time we knew Pat Carroll wasn’t in great shape. But we beat St Kieran’s, and we came back in after the match and he informed us that he had passed away.”
Joe Dooley was at that game and can remember the sad news being announced.
“He was a completely one-sided hurler, but he had it perfected,” his cousin and Offaly comrade reflects. “He could always make space, particularly going out to the sideline. And a great man to score points from distance.
“In training, he mightn’t be going well at all, and he’d be kind of cross as well if things weren’t going his way! But he had the ability then to turn bad form in training into good form in a game. When he’d go out in a game, he was always able to psyche himself up … he was the heart and soul of the team.”
The brothers before the 1994 final
The Offaly crowd on Hill 16
The Offaly team photo before the final
“IT HIT ME like a double whammy in the days that followed. It sort of dawned on me the year I was after having. You lose your father, you lose the All-Ireland as captain … it’s a lot to deal with.
“Sinéad would say it too, I was down for so long after that. After my father died I put all my eggs into the one basket … winning the All-Ireland in his honour. I was completely deflated in the days that followed. There’s photos of us going home after the game and we looked so gutted. It felt worse than 1995 because we knew it was our last chance.”
Johnny Dooley from ‘Dooley: A Family Memoir’
This was the year that signalled the end of a glorious era for Offaly hurling, one that had traversed two decades of eye-popping achievement. For the majority of those years there had been at least one Dooley, and quite often three, on the team.
Billy was first to retire, aged 31, in the spring of 2000. Their father Sean passed away that April, having been diagnosed with throat cancer the year before. He was just 64.
As Billy relates in their memoir, when his father got sick, he had to run the farm as home as well as doing his day job with Offaly County Council. His eldest son arrived in November ’99. While it would have been “lovely to play on when Johnny was captain”, it was no longer really viable. And so he became an Offaly spectator, watching Joe and Johnny carry the baton.
Pat Fleury, part of Offaly’s trailblazing ‘80s team, was now the manager. He and Joe Dooley had been Offaly teammates, at opposite ends of the pitch, when the county won its second All-Ireland in ’85.
It proved a strange year for the Faithful, one that resonated with end-of-days undertones. In his second season, Brian Cody was starting to mould Kilkenny into a cold-blooded killing machine: they played Offaly off the park twice that summer, winning the Leinster and All-Ireland finals by margins of 11 and 13.
In between, the faltering Faithful had briefly diced with quarter-final Armageddon against Derry. And yet that was followed by an achievement that ranks up there with their finest hours: they toppled All-Ireland champions Cork in the semi-final, sweet revenge for ’99 and the first time an Offaly side had ever vanquished the Rebels in championship combat.
Joe Dooley sums it up neatly in their memoir: it was the team’s “dying kick”, a four-point victory that ranked among the sweetest of his career.
But reality wasn’t long intruding. Two early goals laid the groundwork for Kilkenny’s 5-15 to 1-14 coronation. The beaten All-Ireland finalists would finish the year with just one All Star – a third gong for Johnny Dooley after a standout campaign.
A 37-year-old Joe finally called time on Offaly the following March. Johnny played on for another two summers before finally admitting defeat in his long-running battle of wounded knee.
But before all that, there was still time for one final team holiday, reward for reaching the 2000 All-Ireland. If they had beaten Kilkenny, their destination would have been Australia. If only …
JOHNNY: “We were in Thailand and were going on a day out for the lads and some of the girls as well. We took a boat out, went across to an island, had a great activities day; and as the day developed we came back to the main island again and moved on. Got a bit to eat, into a local bar. And one thing led to another.
“We were playing pool and the place was quite busy, and a camera phone went missing. Belonging to Joe, a very expensive camera phone! There was an argument over where it was and who might have taken it. One thing developed and led to another; and of course we did have a few drinks on board, and things got a little bit out of control. As it developed then, the police showed up and we got handcuffed and brought off to the local cell.”
JOE: “I think it was the civil police, and they arrived out of nowhere. Somebody obviously rang them when a bit of discussion was going on about the missing camera. So, there was a bit of a debate … they were looking for a few bob to let us go, and of course we thought they were asking for too much. But by the time the next morning came, we were glad to pay what they were asking for! It’s the only time that anything ever happened in our lives, and we travelled a lot of places. It was a fair fright to get.
“There was all sorts of people in it. We got talking to one or two; there was an English guy, he had been there for over two months. He had some problem with his passport so we said, ‘Jesus, we could be here for two months!’”
JOHNNY: “When you look back on it now, it’s something we can laugh about with our kids … but at the time it was far from funny, let me tell you!”
Billy is keen to stress that he was nowhere near that team holiday. He had retired just in time!
CASTING his mind back almost a quarter of a century, Johnny Dooley describes it as “game two, Croke Park”. Except, of course, in this moment, there was no such thing as game two – it was merely an All-Ireland hurling semi-final replay and it was all over and Clare had won by three points. Offaly’s 1998 campaign – betimes disjointed and dysfunctional, colourful and chaotic, with fleeting cameos of excellence – was over.
Or so we thought …
The mercurial Faithful hadn’t hurled remotely as well as the first day, even trailing by ten points early in the second half. The Dooley brothers were pivotal to the subsequent fightback but it still wasn’t enough.
“I didn’t pass much remarks,” says Johnny, “headed straight for the dressing-room and changed. As you do when you lose – you want to get out of there as quick as you can, and up to the players’ bar.
“And it’s only then, when I went up to the bar, I got myself a drink and moved over towards the glass façade … I could see all the crowd, there must have been eight to ten thousand people out on the pitch at that stage. And it’s only then that it really dawned on me that this thing is big.
“You knew there was something happening - this was the first time this ever happened in Croke Park that supporters invaded the pitch. We sort of felt, yeah, they’re going to get it hard to push this under the carpet …”
Offaly’s roller-coaster year had just taken another turn for the bizarre.
It was, by some distance, the zaniest of summers. There was nothing like it before ’98; and nothing like it subsequently. How did so much GAA controversy unspool in such a short period, and almost all of it entwined in a hurling championship that resolutely refused to follow any pre-ordained or faintly logical script?
Central to it all were the hurlers of Offaly – a team on life support in early July, its pulse barely detectable, transformed into All-Ireland champions just two months later.
And with a new manager in situ, a Galway man of mystery who answered to the name Bond, Michael Bond.
Think of all that happened in those few short months. Offaly losing badly to an underwhelming Kilkenny in the Leinster final. Babs Keating cutting loose against his own players in the post-match media scrum, his critique encapsulated by that memorably withering put-down: “Like sheep running around in a heap".
Liam Horan, then Gaelic Games correspondent of the Irish Independent, phoning Johnny Pilkington the next day. Pilkington’s undiplomatic reaction: “It is wrong for Babs to be talking like that. He's making it look like the Offaly players are idiots and indisciplined … we go down together and we win together. What he said will only cause trouble.”
By the Tuesday evening, relations fractured, Keating had resigned.
The ultimate imponderable: what if Pilkington didn’t answer that journalist’s call?
“Nothing would have happened,” Joe Dooley surmises. “Babs would have stayed on, no question. Now, I’d say the selectors – to be fair to them – weren’t happy with the way the training was going. Like, I was playing corner-forward that time and sure the ball would never come into you, because everybody was taking pot shots from out the field and there was no direct hurling at all. But the minute that Bond came in, the ball was coming every two seconds.”
In the midst of all this midland turmoil, an inferno was raging in the south, the touchpaper ignited by those early minutes of mayhem that marred the provincial final replay between Clare and Waterford.
This set the ball in motion for a divisive Munster Council investigation; the remarkable Clare FM interview/sermon given by Ger Loughnane, firing off scattergun broadsides in every direction; Colin Lynch’s hugely controversial three-month ban … all this before Jimmy Cooney, refereeing the first Offaly/Clare replay, blew for full-time with over two minutes of normal time still on the clock.
He had played a 30-minute half instead of 35: an innocent error with season-altering ramifications.
Under rule, the GAA had little option but to order a refixture, which took place in Thurles the following Saturday. By this stage, the momentum and not just the narrative of Clare/Offaly had changed irrevocably.
Before the first outing, with their new manager still bedding in, Offaly’s prospects against the reigning All-Ireland champions had been viewed with overwhelming scepticism. The Dooleys remember one pundit suggesting they should “ring in with the Blue Flu”, a topical reference to Gardaí collectively ringing in sick as they agitated for better pay. “That kind of drove us on for the first day – we wouldn’t have really feared Clare anyway,” says Joe.
Emerging from the confusion and chaos of day two, and duly reprieved by the Games Administration Committee, Offaly now travelled to Thurles on a high. Fate had been their friend; now they had divine intervention on their side too.
As Joe explains, his wife Marie’s mother was “very friendly with the Poor Clare nuns down in Cork, and one of the nuns sent me up a bag of Miraculous Medals. So, I handed them around to all the players in the dressing-room before the game, and everybody pinned them inside their togs. When your back is the wall for a big game like that, you’ll take every advantage you can get.”
BILLY: “Clare conceded to a replay very quickly. We probably felt a little bit that they sort of fancied themselves in Thurles … and that gave us a good bit of motivation, to go down there and beat the Munster champions in Thurles was probably one of our best achievements over the years.”
JOHNNY: “I never had played a big game down there before. And you hear all the stories about Munster hurling, but it is a special feeling. I distinctly remember going in, and the crowds coming behind us … it’s a different sort of a buzz about the place. Like, it was the only game I probably played outside of an All-Ireland where it was of a similar significance from the point of view of the pressure and the intensity and the atmosphere … it was one of those days that will stick with you forever.”
The game itself crackled with electricity, Joe Dooley rolling back the years with five points from play as Offaly prevailed by 0-16 to 0-13. Now they had Kilkenny in their All-Ireland sights – a repeat of a Leinster final that might as well have taken place in a different decade, so much had happened in the interim.
In terms of competitive preparation, Offaly had “all the advantages”, Billy Dooley reckons. Johnny remembers how comfortable and confident they felt.
The rest is history, festooned in green, white and gold: Offaly surged to victory by 2-16 to 1-13. In hindsight, you can perhaps see how their name was written on the Liam MacCarthy Cup: Brian Whelahan, their talisman, was beset by ‘flu and labouring in defence before being switched to attack, where he finished the final with 1-6.
Twenty-four years on, the Dooleys look back fondly on an era when Offaly challenged almost every summer – a period that will, almost certainly, never be repeated. With the passage of time comes perspective: it wasn’t a black-and-white case of everything Babs did was wrong and anything Bond did was right.
JOE: “Babs is a nice man. He just lost the run of himself that day [of the Leinster final]; I don’t know what got into his head, to be honest with you. Maybe he thought we weren’t going anywhere and that it was time for him to kind of cover his tracks and maybe make sure that the blame didn’t fall on his feet. But, like, I’ve often met Babs since.”
JOHNNY: “I was on a golf trip with him and he was very pleasant and a great character, a great man to entertain. When he came into Offaly first, we were delighted to have him on board. And he had great ideas and he was going to bring us on a three-week world cruise and he was thinking big, which was great for us. His fitness guy (Johnny Murray) was perfect. But I suppose as the year developed, he had a different vision for how he wanted us to play, other than our system under Éamonn Cregan. He was a believer in getting the ball into hand and taking on lads and running with the ball … that was maybe part of the reason.”
BILLY: “We were exceptionally fit that year, and a lot of that has to be handed to him. We went on the Nutron Diet. We went on a lot of stuff that we hadn’t done before. Now, Michael Bond came in at the end of the year - but all the hard work was done. It’s just that we weren’t performing on the day, and the type of hurling he wanted us to play wasn’t suiting the team we were.”
Over a decade later, Johnny was heading to Spain on a golf trip when, on a whim, he purchased Davy Fitzgerald’s first biography, Passion and Pride, at Dublin Airport. In their own just-released memoir, he quotes a passage from the former Clare goalkeeper’s book: “Offaly won the All-Ireland, but as far as I was concerned, those players have OUR medals and it was OUR All-Ireland.”
“It just irked me a little bit,” Johnny now admits. “You win them and you lose them, and sometimes you have a bit of luck. We felt that overall, that particular year, we proved ourselves in the third game; we proved ourselves in the final.”
JOE: “If you look at ’98, we had two managers. No other team had two managers in the one year and won an All-Ireland. We played eight championship games. We beat Leinster champions and Munster champions to win the All-Ireland.”
Safe to say, the Dooleys won’t be handing back their medals any day soon.
Words by
Frank Roche
Video and photos by
Steve Humphreys
The mother and father of all the Dooleys
A 37-year-old Joe finally called time on Offaly in
March 2001
1994
1985
1998
2000