There are few towns, not to mention cities or metropolitan suburbs, that can boast that they have contributed three of the current Ireland Women’s Rugby World Cup squad. That proud distinction rests with Ballinasloe, Co Galway, which has always punched way above its weight when it comes to the exploits of the oval ball.
The trio, Béibhinn Parsons, Aoibheann Reilly and Méabh Deely, are schoolfriends who learned the game at one of the oldest rugby clubs in the country. Ballinasloe RFC was founded in 1875 and has been a shining light of the game west of the Shannon.
In lining out for their country in the Rugby World Cup they are following in the footsteps of many other international players, albeit men, who were either from the town or have strong links to the locality.
Among the internationals who learned their rugby in Ballinasloe were former Lions stalwart Ray McLoughlin, who toured Australia in 1966 and New Zealand in 1971, and Ciaran Fitzgerald, who captained the Lions on their tour of New Zealand in 1983.
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Like McLoughlin and Fitzgerald, a number of other internationals went to school in Garbally College, Ballinasloe, among them Dickie Roche, PJ Dwyer, Feidlim McLoughlin, Mick Molloy, Noel Mannion and Johnny O’Connor. Noel Mannion’s gut-busting 70 yards try in Cardiff Arms Park in 1989 was so memorable it was included in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony video.
Rugby’s links to Ballinasloe were fostered on the lawns of the local landlord’s house, Garbally Court. Built in 1819 and the seat of the Earls of Clancarty, the de Poer Trench family, the first game was played on the West Lawn in 1875.
When the Trench family withdrew from Ireland during the War of Independence, Garbally Court and its surrounding farmlands, woodlands and historic walkways were purchased by the Diocese of Clonfert for £6,750. St Joseph’s College, the Diocesan school for Clonfert, which was established in 1892, relocated to the house from a building in Ballinasloe in 1923. The main building housed the fledgling boarding school with the nearby stables converted into classrooms.
It was in the shadow of the great house that Garbally students over the years learned their craft and it became the standout rugby school in Connacht, amassing almost 50 senior schools titles in the intervening years, which included a significant spell when they withdrew from competition because of the infamous GAA ban on foreign games.
Women’s rugby has a much briefer history than its male counterpart but continues to grow in popularity across the country. The game’s strength in Ballinasloe is down to the work of the local rugby club which over the years has been buttressed by its links with Garbally.
The three women internationals are all past pupils of the local Convent of Mercy, Ard Scoil Mhuire; that school commenced a new life this September after its amalgamation with Garbally to form a new entity, Clonfert College, on the Garbally campus.
That amalgamation has come at a price – and a controversial one at that. The new school authorities, in understandably trying to forge a new identity, opted to ditch any reference to Garbally in its new name. That has led to a campaign by former pupils to at least retain reference to the school’s geographic location. Among those campaigning on the issue are Ciaran Fitzgerald and former Galway All-Ireland hurling captain Conor Hayes.
As for the future of the historic house and its surrounding pasturelands, the playing fields will likely be retained and incorporated into the new school. But Garbally Court’s future is less certain. The diocese had offered the house and a parcel of land adjacent to it to Galway Co Council for €1 but the local authority baulked at the prospect after learning that it would require more than €4 million remedial and upgrade work.
Likewise, the Office of Public Works or other State agencies have expressed no interest in acquiring the splendid building, the only one in Ireland designed by the English architect, Thomas Cundy, who drew up drawings for much of London’s Belgravia.
Ambitious plans for it to be transformed into a museum and a public space for Ballinasloe and its hinterlands have fallen on deaf ears. The fact that Ballinasloe remains a political outlier on the edge of the constituency of Roscommon Galway has hardly helped matters.
Garbally’s uncertain future is mirrored by that facing the ninth Earl of Clancarty, Nicholas Trench. A cross-bench life peer in the House of Lords, he is the last of the lineage. The wife of the 73-year-old, journalist Victoria Lambert, has been campaigning for years to allow women to inherit titles, which would allow their only daughter to become the first Countess of Clancarty.
If she achieved that unlikely goal she might have the opportunity of revisiting Garbally and witnessing at first hand the next generation of women rugby players plying their trade on the West Lawn.
