The craic was only mighty in New York

For people from the West of Ireland, there’s something special about packing up the tent and heading for New York.

The history of emigration is ingrained in our psyche. When you depart the western seaboard, the next piece of land across the Atlantic Ocean is more than 5,000 kilometres away.

Supporters from the five Connacht counties mould their own special memories when it’s their turn to travel Stateside. The diaspora from the USA, Canada and further afield become entangled in the mother and father of all parties. Pubs with Galway, Roscommon, Mayo, Leitrim and Sligo roots in Manhattan, and just outside New York, have a field day.

For the Rossies, 2006 was unique. Being the maiden voyage, the famous Rosie O’Grady’s pub near Times Square was renamed “Rossie O’Grady’s”.

Personally, watching “True Blue” Willie Hegarty suffer after Liverpool won the “Stephen Gerrard FA Cup final” was the highlight. That he paid ten dollars to go in and watch the match at 10 o’clock in the morning was — as Willie would say himself — the cherry on top of the cake!

In 2011, hours after Roscommon comfortably saw off New York, Barack Obama announced to the world that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Never shy of joining a party, the Rossies gatecrashed the “USA USA” celebrations on Times Square.

Five years later, it was what happened on the pitch that grabbed the headlines — the colour draining away from everyone’s face (and it wasn’t from the partying in the days beforehand) as New York came within a whisker of causing one of the greatest upsets in the history of the championship.

Of course, the Covid years robbed us of the scheduled 2021 trip and therein lies the reason why anticipation was fever-pitch ahead of this year’s mass relocation of Rossies to the east coast of the US for a week.

Even last year in London, there was a sense that people were putting their hard-earned cash aside to make sure that 2026 in the “City That Never Sleeps” would be memorable. And it didn’t disappoint.

The sheer number of Rossies that travelled across the Atlantic Ocean confirmed the appetite for the trip.

Why? Deep down, they probably know that it could be the last one.

The fuel protests, which blocked the country’s motorways, threatened to throw a spanner in the works before the plane had left the tarmac. An overnight hotel stay in Shannon — the most “last-minute” hotel reservation in my life — got me the right side of the M18.

Twenty years ago, my innocence nearly ruined the trip before it began. Going out to report on a Connacht SFC match is classified as “work” in the eyes of US pre-clearance officials. Back then, a discretionary parole visa got me off the hook.

Ever since, I’ve been a “supporter going out to watch the match and explore your beautiful country”.

The Thursday afternoon Aer Lingus flight to JFK was packed with Rossies, including Conor McLoughlin, and Joe and Michael Simon from Corrigeenroe — where I was born and reared. 

Mike “Junior” Smith and his wife Mary, from Boyle, were on the flight too. Junior is classified as Derrycashel (a townland in Corrigeenroe where his late father hailed from) royalty, so it was no surprise to see him hanging out with the natives.

When we landed in JFK, my brother Seán, who has been in New York for the last number of years, was waiting. The Corrigeenroe brigade got a great kick out of being welcomed by one of their own — the first face they recognised on US soil.

As the Roscommon traffic figured out how to get into the city, my man on the ground — the brother — had it all planned out. Taking myself, Willie Hegarty and his wife Dympna under his wing, Seán brought us on the Air Train to Jamaica Station where another train took us to Penn Station in the heart of Manhattan.

In other words, within an hour of landing in JFK, we were sitting in Jake’s Saloon on the corner of 23rd Street and 7th Avenue being welcomed by Dunmore native, Jimmy Glynn, who rolled out the red carpet in his usual amiable style.

The Chelsea Savoy Hotel next door was our base for the next five days where we were joined by Seamus Duke (Roscommon People), Pat Compton (former Club Rossie Chairperson) and his wife Linda, and Shay (Roscommon Minor Board Chairperson) and Anna Galvin among others.

My other brother Tomás — Seán’s older twin by ten minutes according to the record books — who works about two hours away, joined us on the Thursday evening.

It was wonderful to have the Cooney brothers reunited, and they put their older brother very firmly in his box when they did a wonderful interview with Willie Hegarty during Shannonside FM’s special broadcast from Jake’s Saloon on Saturday morning. Mum and Dad, hanging on every word in Corrigeenroe, were very proud of them.

No sooner had we arrived than there were the sounds of sirens outside. Someone had jumped from the top of a building barely 100 metres away. It was only when we saw the flowers on the pavement a few days later that you realised it’s the sort of thing that, unfortunately, happens all the time in a city like New York.

The drama didn’t end there. On the Sunday morning of the match, we were woken by more sirens. It was more than the average noise associated with the streets of the city. By the time I was dressed to find out what all the commotion was about, a discernible smell of smoke was wafting through the corridor of the hotel’s sixth floor.

When I arrived outside, the sight of fire brigades and hundreds of firemen explained everything. Just 100 metres down from the hotel on 7th Avenue, a disused building had gone up in smoke. Just another normal morning in Manhattan.

Over the course of the trip, myself and the “twins” had a blast — going up to the top of Freedom Tower to get the most unbelievable vista of the city, visiting The Dead Rabbit — one of the most famous pubs in New York where I went against my better adjustment and sampled a pint of Guinness, which was promptly followed by their Irish Coffee speciality — and meeting some friends from St. Michael’s, including Daithí Noone, in The Long Hall Bar where I saw Liverpool beat Fulham 2-0.

Most evenings, we would return to Jake’s Saloon where Jimmy Glynn was waiting with his magic wand that included food, drink and plenty of craic.

The most underwhelming part of the weekend was the game itself. Roscommon took care of business against a New York side that would struggle to win the Roscommon Intermediate Football Championship. The only sour note was Daire Cregg’s harsh red card that looks likely to rule him out of Sunday’s clash against Mayo.

Gaelic Park is a strange place. It’s the home of the GAA in New York but it has issues, not least its capability to host a fixture where up to 5,000 people are in attendance, some of them camped under a few trees on a slope at the back of the goal.

There are red flags everywhere, including issues relating to health and safety.

As you can probably gather, this article has turned towards the reality of this fixture’s future. New York is the trip of a lifetime for supporters. As Roscommon manager Mark Dowd highlighted afterwards, coming out to see the Rossies in action equated to some families’ holidays for this year.

But the costs associated with bringing teams out to New York alongside the home side's lack of meaningful preparation look like it’s going to trump the enjoyment supporters experience for a few days as they get away from the demands of everyday life in Ireland.

Maybe, next year, it will be a team from the Tailteann Cup that will be handed the baton. Who’s to say that a couple of thousand people from Carlow and Wicklow wouldn’t experience the memories that Roscommon, Galway, Mayo, Sligo and Leitrim people have enjoyed for more than over two decades?

But there’s a sense of entitlement alongside an emotional attachment among supporters from the Connacht counties that New York is “their trip”. That’s completely understandable given the memories that have been created, spawning from the province’s history that saw thousands depart these shores in search of a better life.

But you can’t ignore the reality — getting hammered by the Galway, Mayo and Roscommons of this world won’t entice too many players to throw their lot in with New York. It’s a balancing act the GAA must find a solution to.

If this is the end, to New York — one of the greatest cities in the world — I say, "thanks for the memories".