It’s been a steady decline more-so than a dramatic fall-off for Kiltormer over the last three decades.
Sunday was a disappointing day for the club as they dropped to junior hurling, some 32 years after winning an All-ireland senior club title, but if they’re being honest it wasn’t entirely surprising.
Emmigration and injuries hit them hard this year, weakening their spine, leaving them vulnerable, and though they fought hard against it as players, administrators and as people, ultimately, they were powerless to prevent the inevitable.
Giants of club hurling once upon a time, they’ve diced with danger over the last few years, surviving close shaves to retain their intermediate status, but there would be no great escape this time around.
Kilbeacanty beat them by six points in Sunday’s intermediate hurling relegation decider, sending the one-time kings of Ireland to Junior A.
29 March 1992; The Kiltormer team. AIB All-Ireland Senior Hurling Club Championship Final, Kiltormer, Galway, v Birr, Offaly, Semple Stadium, Thurles, Tipperary. Picture credit; Ray McManus / SPORTSFILE
Sean McKeigue takes some cajoling to discuss the subject because, less than a week on, the wounds are still raw.
He grew up ‘hero-worshipping’ the likes of Andy Fenton, Tony Furey and co. as they blazed a trail for Kiltormer, winning their maiden county senior titles in 1976 and 1977.
He was the sub-goalie by the time their third championship came around in 1982, before graduating to number one for 1990 and 1991, when they won their fourth and fifth county titles, following through on the last with All-Ireland glory.
Kiltormer were titans of club hurling in those times, having played out legendary games with the likes of Cashel and Birr.
The vast majority of their players were no strangers to Galway panels, as the likes of Conor Hayes and Ollie Kilkenny won All-Stars and All-Irelands for the Tribe.
For a club to fall so far, you might expect drama and strife and maybe even mis-management, but McKeigue says that isn’t the case in Kiltormer, where a number of factors have converged.
“It’s a bitter pill to swallow to a degree,” says the former goalkeeper.
“But when we saw what happened with injuries and Emmigration at the start of the year. We knew we’d be up against it,” he says.
29 March 1992; Kiltormer man of the match Justin Campbell, left, and captain Aidan Staunton with the Tommy Moore Cup after the AIB All-Ireland Senior Hurling Club Championship Final match between Kiltormer and Birr at Semple Stadium in Thurles, Tipperary. Photo by Ray McManus/Sportsfile
“In fairness to the lads, they went down fighting last Sunday, they were a point down with ten minutes to go and things just didn’t go for them from there.
“But they gave it a good shot against a very tough back-drop.”
“It was just a natural regression over time,” he says, “It didn’t happen overnight.”
“But it certainly wasn’t through lack of hard work or effort or graft on the part of the people of the club,” he says.
“You still have people working fierce hard whether it’s going well or badly.”
Dwindling numbers are unsurprisingly at the heart of their decline.
But if McKeigue is ever asked for a moment where things first started to go south, he can never look past the Galway senior hurling quarter final in 1994, when they led Gort by almost fifteen points at half-time.
“If you asked anyone in the club, the second half of that game seemed to be the turning point.
“We often chatted about it since you know, lads that were involved, it was a very hard game to get your head around.
“They started chipping away at us and ended up drawing with us, beating us in the replay.”
“We were brilliant in the first half of that game but we just ground to a halt in the second half.
“The replay was low-scoring, Gort beat us six or seven points, we scored very little. And I think two years after was the year we were relegated.”
Kiltormer were an ageing team at that point but they hung in and clawed their way back.
They lost three intermediate finals in four years between 1997 and 2000, before rejoining the senior ranks in 2001.
The respite was only brief however as they went down again in 2004, before coming back up again in 2006. There was a stint in senior B before they went down once more in 2016, and there was no coming back this time.
Kiltormer have dropped down to Junior A hurling , hard to believe they were All Ireland Club winners in 1992 and at the top of Galway hurling for years , so many rural parishes are struggling now to field teams and this is the result . Sad to see
— Finnster 🇶🇦 (@finnster1977) October 6, 2024
“Geographically we’d be a big area.
“But we wouldn’t have had an influx of population that we’ll say the satellite towns out of Galway would have had, like Oranmore, Clarinbridge, Athenry.
“In rural east Galway, we wouldn’t have that. Back in the day, there would have been a lot of thriving businesses in Ballinasloe, employing a lot of our lads.
“The local economy was strong. AT Cross, Square D - big businesses in Ballinasloe - they eventually all shut down.
“The other thing is that now every young fella after finishing school, they’re straight to college - Carlow or Dublin or Limerick or Galway - so you had less around locally.
“Back in the 80s and 90s, you hurled and hurling was what you did.
"I think of the Dervans back then - they were working in Derry at the time. They used to leave the building site in Derry at 3.00 to be down for training in Kiltormer at 7. It was kind of taken for granted at the time. The buy-in was unbelievable.”
“The three schools in the area dipped a lot in numbers at various stages in the last few years, now they’ve come up again in the last two or three years, but obviously you won’t reap the benefit of that for a while.”
“The size of families is another thing. We had a lot of sets of brothers on that team. Now, you wouldn’t have those kind of numbers.”
“Eventually it all transpired that we just couldn’t compete with the big clubs in Galway, who could have two or three underage teams.
“We amalgamated with Mullagh at underage due to the challenge to field teams at some age groups.”
It’s a long way back for Kiltormer, but they can only do what they can. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and McKeigue definitely sees the desire.
Kiltormer's Keith Kilkenny was on Galway's All-Ireland under-21 winning team of 2007. Sportsfile.
“It arrests at the point where you get a re-injection. This year we blooded four or five young guys and hopefully they’ll show the benefit of that next year and the years ahead.
“We’d be hopeful that the cycle with the higher numbers in the school works out in favour."
“There’s unbelievable work being done in the club, there’s a young, vibrant committee, doing everything they can for underage hurling and camogie, and there are significant facility development plans in place to include an astroturf training pitch.”
“But look, we've been struggling at an intermediate level for the last five or six years.
“We just seem to have got stuck at the same level. And we are where we are right now.”
The sad thing is that for many rural clubs, the story of Kiltormer's fall will be like looking in the mirror.
