Dr Eamonn O Sullivan

James O' Donoghue talks about Dr. Eamonn O'Sullivan


by Weeshie Fogarty

 "Every Kerryman is a tiller of the soil and football comes natural to them"

James o Donoghue was a psychiatric nurse in St Finan's Hospital all his life. Due to his great love for Gaelic Football he became very close to Eamon. In this interview Jameso outlines yet another perspective of what life was like under him in St Finan's and the massive contribution the doctor made to the life of the patients living there.


Dr Eamon was a great man for all sports; he was far ahead of his time, he was a sporting man, in fairness.  He had a handball court built specially for the patients, and this sport of course is part of the G.A.A.  Dr. Eamon was very interested in it and he encouraged the patients to play handball with the staff.  We also played football in the airing court. This was a big green area closed in on all sides, the patients would be walked out there morning and evening where the nursing staff would help them pick teams and play for long periods. That was the big recreation, playing football with the patients in the airing court. And we'd take them down to a game on the Sunday in Fitzgerald Stadium.  We had a special door to the stadium strictly for the patients.

The door was put there because it was the patients of St. Finan's that built Fitzgerald Stadium with the backing and organisation of the Dr. Croke club.  There is no doubt about it. They went out there with Eugene o Connor. They toiled with shovels and with hand-barrows and they removed a massive hill. They worked and worked.  And as recognition Dr. Eamon put in the green door as an entry to the stadium in the hospital grounds exclusively for patients with a special key that was kept in the hall porter's room of the hospital. The nurses could then take down the patients to any games on Sunday.  That patient's door was there until the seventies and eventually I'm sure you'll remember, it was closed up. It should not have been bricked up; if Eamon was around he would have insisted that it remain. He was a very thoughtful person and the patient's better welfare was always his priority. He was always looking for new means of occupational therapy which helped the patients recover more quickly. He was introducing all of this before anyone else in the country. 

There were lots of patients interested in sport because they had played with their own clubs and remember they came from all parts of Kerry. Eamon saw this connection with football as a tremendous opportunity to motivate the patients under his care. He often remarked to me that, "Kerrymen, football and the land are synonymous with each other". He was of course spot on and the same applies even to-day. Then there was the nursing staff from all the various football clubs. Kilcummin men who played with the Kilcummin seniors.  They were from Listry, Tom Lynch whose sons Brendan and Paudie became great Kerry footballers. Brendan is now the R.M.S. of St Finan's.  You had Mike Moynihan and Paddy Moynihan of Headford, you had all these. 

You had some lads from the town also, naturally, who played with Killarney Legion or Dr. Crokes. Johnny Culloty the legendary Kerry player did great work with the patients through his football career. John Kelly from Spa. John Cahill from Glenflesk They all played with their own clubs. Eamon encourager all the staff to play and in our hospital team we were allowed to play men like Kerry All Ireland medal winners Donie o Sullivan and Mick Gleeson. This despite the fact that they were not employed by the hospital.

Eamon's influence on football in the hospital was immense and with his urging and backing we formed our own club. It was founded at a meeting in the hospital on February 22nd 1956. The great Kerry footballer Bill Landers was our first president and Eamon was appointed as Vice President. We entered the East Kerry league and championship and competed very well. Then in 1959 we had our first ever All Ireland win when we won the Connelly Cup, competed for each year by the psychiatric hospitals of Ireland. And once again it was down to our trainer, Eamon. Despite being so busy all of that year as he guided Kerry to another title he devoted his spare time to his hospital side and we had a historic win in Croke Park as we defeated Castlebar in the final.

I had the great privilege of training under the great man and it was an unforgettable experience. He was quite spoken, never got excited and this rubbed off on the players with the result that you were always relaxed going into a match. He had this special way about him and he fully understood every player, their needs, their weaknesses, their strengths and their moods. I can now on reflection, look back and fully understand why he was so successful during all those years as Kerry trainer. Eamon was special. We will never see his likes again. A man before his time. He even allowed the players limited time off for training during his term as trainer of the hospital team. I suppose you could say that we were the first of the semi- professional players.

Eamon was great for the patients and directed his efforts into getting them to play football; he maintained that it was the ideal form of occupational therapy. He got us jerseys. He got us boots, stockings and togs. He got the whole works bought for us.  And when we went off to play other hospitals the secretary at the time, Mr. Bill Walsh would give me a blank cheque going off in the bus.  We used to have the "Knight of the road bus" and we'd carry patients, the best of them. We had great patients. We had fine footballers from the Dingle peninsula and everywhere and we went as far as the All-Ireland final. We played it in Clonmel. We would have a great time on the journey home and the patients looked forward to those outings so much. I'm fully convinced that a number of them were discharged later from the hospital due to the football outings organised by Eamon. It certainly got them out of those long stay wards and helped them mix with the outside world. It was the ideal therapy.  

On one of those outings we stopped at a little village pub in Tipperary and ordered twenty four pints of porter and so many minerals etc.  And the first thing the owner had to do, poor man, was go out to some other place and get a loan of glasses.  He didn't understand us at all.  Donal one of our patients called me aside and said "Come here Jameso I want you" and posted inside on the back door was a motto written, there were mottos everywhere and it said. "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps" and Donie said to me with a hearty laugh, "How well the so and so knew the lads from the mental hospital were coming". Eamon would follow us in his own car to whatever venue we were playing and after the match all the patients from the two teams would sit down to a big meal together and Eamon and the RMS of the local hospital would give a talk to the gathering and you could see how proud the patients were. He always had praise for their efforts and they responded to that in a very positive way. Once again Eamon was well ahead of every one else in psychiatry at that particular time. You won't see any initiatives like that anywhere to day. He was a great man in every sense of the word.  

He was a fanatic in so far as strictness was concerned. One time he gave me two footballs and said they were pumped wrong and the pressure in them was incorrect.  I pumped them again for him.  He took one of the footballs and he put it up on the boardroom table.  And it turned a bit sideways. It didn't stay as he put it.  "Deflate it again and pump it right" he said. You had to do all those things for him. He made the whole observation dormitory of the hospital available for the Cork team when they came down for the Munster Final and he did all these things. The Kerry team also togged out in the hospital. 

When training the Kerry team he was able to put weight on some players and with others he could get them to shed weight. He could judge each individual player to perfection.  I can't explain just how he did it but he was a great judge of players in that respect. He would have me weigh all the players on the hospital scales; I would record all their weights on a monthly basis and hand them over to Eamon.  I remember weighing all the lads in 1947 before the All Ireland against Roscommon.  He trained Killarney to win the senior football county championship in 1949. On the Thursday night before the final we finished training in The Stadium. We were all along a line sitting down.  And he walked along the line to us and said "I won't see ye now till Sunday lads and I want everybody in bed early and I want no drink" but he weighed back and he said "But Denny Lyne, it would be detrimental to you not to have a drink; you're used to a few pints."  And Dinny gave a big hurray, he stood up delighted.  He got permission to drink a few pints. We couldn't touch it. Eamon knew his man and a few pints would help Denny relax, he played a blinder in the final. Once again we saw the genius of Eamon in handling people. 

Because he was a fanatic people listened to him.  And they were said by him. And he knew the rule book inside out.  He caught me out several times. I would referee the matches that time, when he'd be training the Kerry team, the juniors versus the seniors and so forth. And he'd often correct me when I'd penalise fellas for something. He'd tell me that rule isn't in the book at all.  

Eamon was a fanatical Irishman and GAA man.  And then you see, Dr. Hayes was the opposite, he was a rugby man. He was second in command in St Finan's at one time and they had an argument in the boardroom one day and Dr. Hayes said to Dr. Eamon. "You go back playing golf" he said. "Isn't that a foreign game, GAA men should not be playing foreign games?"  "Ah not at all" says Eamon. "It was golf Cú Chulainn played!" He was a strict man. There was nothing humorous about him.  He never mixed with the staff or anything like that, just went along his own way and came to you when he needed you. He was a very private individual in many ways.

He was the daddy of them all.  He had the basics that nobody has today; it is only all running and fitness now-days

You ask me how he would perform in to-days football world. I believe he'd be out there. He'd be ahead of all of them.  In my opinion he'd be light miles ahead of them because he had the idea; he knew the whole thing inside out. He was unique in many ways. With his psychiatric background, dealing with people every day of his life and his great family tradition of sporting greatness. He was Weeshie the great communicator, dealing with people and knowing how to motivate others. Now you tell me one person in all of the GAA to-day who has a record in all facets of the game and life that Eamon had. There is no one there with Eamon's life record and I am delighted that you are documenting and publishing his life. What a tragedy it would be if he was completely forgotten. 

Weeshie it would be hard to pick them out.  I know that I'd pick out lots of them but my sporting memories would be, big games in the park, where we had to work some way in getting down if we were on duty. It was a trade in itself to get out either with patients or get out under some guise or another.  I remember Dr. Eamon sending me down one time with chairs.  Another time incidentally I was chairman of the East Kerry Board, and I was in charge of, for the Munster Final, I was in charge of the sideline.  And the sideline that time had a cycle track.  It was not a sideline as such and for a week before it, we started building it up for the people coming, Cork and Kerry. And I was driving Bird's lorry. Billy Bird gave me the lorry, to draw planks and concrete blocks and everything.  And we built up the whole place and Dr. Jim Brosnan was chairman of the county board at the time.  He said to me before the game started, a scorching day in the park, he said to me "In the name of God, James, tell him to lock the gate coming into the sideline. Because we'll be all killed. We'll be all murdered with the crowd coming in." They registered 10,000 people on the sideline on the day.  And all that money went to the Fitzgerald Stadium.  There was one year that we were beaten and he was very low in the estimation of the county board and the people, because he trained the Kerry team on tomatoes and it was a bit of a joke that all these tomatoes were THE thing.  He got an idea about them. They didn't work anyway, because we didn't win the all-Ireland.

He was behind it all a very soft person and easily hurt. On year I believe it was in the early sixties we were beaten in an All Ireland semi –final and he was very low in the estimation of the county board and the followers. Some things never change in Kerry. He had made a big thing of including tomatoes in the diet of the team, all the papers had it. It became a bit a joke but would you believe the sale of tomatoes in the county went sky high. The team was beaten and he was ridiculed in some quarters about all of this and I could se it hurt him greatly.

It was Dr. Eamon who was responsible solely for the football been played by staff and patients in St Finan's during my years there.  He had two obsessions. He sent every patient out in the garden working.  Because he said "Every Kerryman was a tiller of the soil".  And he said, "secondly the one sport that the patients will appreciate and will come natural to them, is football, because, it's natural to Kerry." So that was the way it worked. The football was there, there was no problem.  He would often come to me with a football after the Kerry team training, practically new, O'Neill's All-Ireland, for the patients.  "There's a football there James for the patients, see after them".

He was an amazing man Weeshie and without a shadow of doubt well before his time.

* James passed away in November 2008

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