Cork must take down towering pillars of Cian Lynch and Kyle Hayes in Munster final
Seven in a row, in any context, in any walk of life, in any competition it is an unbelievable achievement, demonstrating exceptional consistency and dominance, and in the Munster Hurling Championship these days it would seem near impossible.
But here we are talking about it potentially happening on Saturday evening in the TUS Gaelic Grounds. Tickets are harder to get than an All-Ireland hurling final, such is the attraction of this for all fans far and wide.
The question that I pose is not will Limerick win as I feel they will but what could Cork do to actually try and stop them making more of their own history?
Well, first off, try and tackle or hit them, which would be a vast improvement from the last clash three weeks ago. Mark their players, and bring some intensity to the battle - you hope they will have all this and more on Saturday. No doubt, emotionally and mentally, they will be way more in sync with what is required to beat Limerick. But I am thinking tactically here - what could they do to win this game on the field?
For me it's two fold and sounds very little when you look at what Limerick have dotted around the field. Cork must go after the pillars of this Limerick team - Kyle Hayes and Cian Lynch.
This is far easier said than done. I'd rather chance the applied maths paper in the Leaving Cert than try figure this out - but if I had to make a call it would be this. Teams just simply have to man-mark the genius that is Lynch. His influence on a game is incomparable to most if not all players on the field.
Ger Millerick might have been the guy to try and do this but he is ruled out with injury so, after that, the man-markers in the Cork camp are few and far between. Could they stay zonal and trust that whoever is in that zone when Lynch enters will try and shut him down?
Could Ethan Twomey be brought back into the fold and told go as hard as you can for as long as you can on the Patrickswell man? I've seen many try but few succeed when it comes to trying curb Lynch but it must be done if you want to win.
Secondly, the marking of Kyle Hayes - what to do here?
Physicality, speed, skill and game awareness: he ticks all the boxes. Who could Cork put on him to try and stop him thundering up the Gaelic Grounds sod?
The Rebels have an abundance of talent in their forward division but they don't have that out-and-out dog who will win the dirty ball and pop it out to the shooters - because they are all shooters. It's a dog they need for this assignment on Hayes.
Who that is I'm not sure but the Darragh Fitzgibbon experiment on him didn't work at all the last day. Maybe Pat Ryan will look at 'redemption' as their word this week and perhaps he will look at Fitzgibbon and say to him 'here's your chance to right those wrongs now'.
Cork cannot avoid Hayes like they did last year in Croke Park, so whoever is given the task of trying to shut down the influence of the Limerick No 6, they will have to most likely sacrifice their game for the greater good. Cork wins, everyone in red will win. Thinking of team rather than me!
If they can get these match-ups right, they stand a great chance to be the first team other than Limerick to lift the Mick Mackey Cup since it was renamed a few years ago.
But I still think Limerick will be keeping the Ahane man in the Treaty County on Saturday night. Why? Because in terms of the Limerick hurling team, the total effectiveness of the group is even greater than their effectiveness when acting in isolation. Limerick are always greater than the sum of their parts
Finally If I could for a moment wear my Tipp hat. As a Tipp man, if you wrote away to Santa to ask for a hurling title, it is hard to look past asking to win an All-Ireland against Kilkenny and in Nowlan Park - and we have been to heaven and back twice in the past year with our minors and now our U-20s achieving these fantasy-like victories.
Good for the soul for Premier followers to see these players wear the blue and gold with such pride, passion and honour. It gives hope to the future of Tipp hurling and, while the county might not quite be back, we are certainly going in the right direction.
My brother Cormac coached these guys to an All Ireland minor title three years ago against Offaly in the same venue and I know how much it meant to him to see all these guys progressing in their careers and know that you have played a part in this.
But I know as he stood on the grass in Nowlan Park last Saturday and the crowd parted in front of him after the final whistle, there was captain Sam O'Farrell making his way through the crowd to get to Cormac, who he had spotted in the madness of the aftermath just to say thanks and shake his hand.
That meant as much to him as any point he scored or ball he caught for them as a minor player. A touch of class, a small gesture but one that will live long in the memory.
Then when you hear how captain Sam speaks with the honesty and experience of a man 20 years his elder, how he remembers everyone at a time of such heightened passion and adrenaline in his speech. He remembered one of our fallen warriors Dillon Quirke. it reminds me of a great quote that was said to me before.
We were at a funeral of a legendary figure and someone said to me 'this fella will never die, you know'. 'What do you mean?' I responded. 'Well, I was told that you die twice,' came the reply. 'The first time being when you take your last breath and the second when someone speaks your name for the final time'. For that reason, Dillon Quirke will never die and it was just so touching for Sam to remember and mention him in his speech on Saturday.
I hope, as we all do, it brought some comfort to the Quirke family to hear their son and brother's name reverberate around the stands of Nowlan Park as Tipp win an All-Ireland title.
That's the GAA, that's what we are about!
Highlights of all the weekend's football and hurling championship action on The Sunday Game, 9.30pm RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player.
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Irish Times
37 minutes ago
- Irish Times
12 must-see artworks at the RHA Annual Exhibition 2025
It is the largest and longest-running open-submission exhibition in Ireland, and the 195th RHA Annual features 422 pieces by academicians and artists old and new. It will also be the final Annual for Patrick Murphy, who retires as director of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts at the end of 2025. He took up the role in 1998, since when the RHA has regained its relevance in the Irish art infrastructure, revamped its Ely Place headquarters, elected its first woman president, revised its charter and celebrated its 200th anniversary. [ From surviving dissent and debt to celebrating artists: The Royal Hibernian Academy at 200 Opens in new window ] The RHA Annual Exhibition itself is selected by a committee of artists. Their choices, this year from 4,565 submissions, are made anonymously, and are exhibited alongside pieces from RHA members, plus 11 invited artists. Despite not including performance or site-specific works, the RHA Annual is often said to offer a snapshot of the state of art-making today. So with all that going on, where do you start? We pick 12 works on which to feast your eyes. READ MORE Abigail O'Brien: Susanna and the Elders I & II 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Susanna and the Elders I, by Abigail O'Brien. Photograph courtesy of the artist 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Susanna and the Elders II, by Abigail O'Brien. Photograph courtesy of the artist Coming from the Bible's Book of Daniel, the story of Susanna and the Elders has been a pervy staple in art history, as two fully clothed men stare lustfully at the semi-naked Susanna. Rubens had a go, but it took Artemisia Gentileschi to give a sense of how Susanna herself might have felt, when she painted it, in multiple versions, in the 1600s. Abigail O'Brien's large-scale photographs show a female display mannequin perched on a chair in a junk or antique shop from a pair of angles. More or less naked ('she' is wearing a hat and necklace), the images show the ludicrous proportions that have been manufactured to characterise female 'beauty'. While the setting may hopefully imply how outdated these standards are, the images also underline the continuing objectification of women, in commerce as well as in art. O'Brien is the RHA's first woman president in its 200-plus-year history; her preface to the exhibition catalogue sets out the gender inequalities that women artists still face. Despite greater parity in representation in the Annual, their work is still consistently undervalued, including by the artists themselves. Institutional inequalities also persist in our public collections. That said, we may be doing better than they are in Britain. O'Brien notes that the UK Royal Academy of Arts, in London, has been going for more than 250 years, yet only held its first solo show by a woman artist in its main galleries in 2024. As she writes: 'most of all, we need to keep talking about it.' Caoimhe McGuckin: Wellspring 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Wellspring, by Caoimhe McGuckin. Photograph courtesy of the artist While The Fall, a large architectural pavilion by Ben Mullen, Peter Maybury and Tom de Paor, initially grabs the attention as it eats up a large chunk of the upper main gallery, there are some very powerful smaller sculptural gems to savour. Áine Ryan's 'Go Make the Tea' He Said is a delicate pâte-de-verre trio of sculptures on a silver tray. What at first appear to be little biscuits are instead a pair of breasts. Serving up subversion with every sip? Alongside this, Caoimhe McGuckin's Wellspring is a cast-wax model of the human heart. Instead of aorta there are stubs of bright red crayons. It may bring to mind an idea of human creativity beginning at childhood, but it's also worth realising that the sculpture very strongly resembles a grenade. Elaine Byrne: Losing All Sense of Time 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Losing All Sense of Time, by Elaine Byrne. Photograph courtesy of the artist Elaine Byrne's sybaritic image of a swimming pool is photographed in vivid colour, as tanned families and loving couples disport themselves on fake rocks. So far so very escapist. But the pool is built out over the sea, which threatens to engulf the bathers on one side. Suddenly the thin fencing seems ludicrously fragile – as ludicrous, perhaps, as building a swimming pool at the edge of the ocean. While frequently beautiful, Byrne's work tends to have a political edge, so look closer still and see that the sea is a totally different hue of blue, and the real rocks edging into the picture are different again from their created cousins next door. The idea of sunbathing at the end of the world calls to mind Sun & Sea, the opera performance that came to Cork Midsummer in 2023, after winning the Golden Lion for Lithuania at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Bernadette Kiely: No Promised Land 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: No Promised Land, by Bernadette Kiely. Courtesy of the artist A highly accomplished painter, Bernadette Kiely has been increasingly focusing her subtle eye on the climate crisis . Her arresting oil painting No Promised Land seems as if it is literally saturated, as a bright-red delivery truck is swamped in the midst of a flooded plain. Conjuring all the nuances of greens and greys, and with a brilliant eye for composition, Kiely shows how easily our landscapes, and our sense of safety, can be obliterated by the power of natural forces. We can just make out roads, hedges and the tops of trees, but if we don't do something soon, the future could become a highly inhospitable place – even in Ireland's gentle fields. Ally Nolan: The Men/Na Fir 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: The Men/Na Fir, by Ally Nolan. Courtesy of the artist You'll need to go to the passage behind the RHA's reception desk to find this large mixed-media panel. Based on Thomas H Mason's photograph Four Aran Men, Inis Meáin, from the National Museum of Ireland , the artist has layered digitally printed organza, linen, wool and appliqué, complete with hand-woven embroidery. Nolan is an award-winning fashion graduate with a master's in art history, a background that tells in this richly complex work that brings the original black-and-white print to life. It shows the vibrancy of the layers of knowledge embedded in the legacies of craft, while underlining the craft embodied in some of today's technologies. Ronnie Hughes: Chromatic II 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Chromatic II, by Ronnie Hughes. Courtesy of the artist There is a joyful exuberance at this year's Annual not seen since before the Covid pandemic. This is not to say that artists are ignoring the panoply of problems the world is facing, but there is nonetheless a burst of colour, in painting particularly. A cluster of canvases in one of the upper galleries includes Tom Climent's Contour Lines, John Fitzsimons's Generation and Ann Marie Webb's Back Light. Chromatic II, by Ronnie Hughes, shows how the simple-seeming geometries of colour and line can make the eyes and mind dance. With none of the frenetic, brain-melting energies of full-on op-art, this work gets behind and beyond language to celebrate the power of colour in all its abstract glories. Cathal Carolan: Censored 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Censored, by Cathal Carolan. Courtesy of the artist In the Annual hang, the RHA's atrium is reserved for highly wantable small works, and this year there are plenty to shine. Conor Horgan's photograph of pinked-up oyster mushrooms comes from his Disco Vegetables series, Stephanie Rowe's Auction II captures a moment of intensity in jewel-like form, while Tara O'Reilly's Night Worker is a standout of a small portrait. Within this group Cathal Carolan's Censored continues to draw the eye. A headscarved woman is seated on a bus or train, looking away from the camera, her eye line bisected by a window panel. While this anonymising gesture is powerful in itself, what makes the work unforgettable is that this woman, out of context and perhaps even out of her home country, has all the qualities of posture and light of a Vermeer. Value and worth are curious notions, dependent entirely on the arbitrary whims of place and time. Pauline Rowan: Awake, Between the Gates 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Awake, Between the Gates, by Pauline Rowan. Courtesy of the artist There's a vast novel of story in this photograph. A baby sleeps while what we presume is its mother lies awake. It could be a moment in any new parent's life, yet the pair are on a mattress on a floor, the rumpled sheet not quite tucked in. Quietly heartbreaking, the image catches at homelessness, dispossession, determination and love. The work was actually made when Rowan moved with her newborn daughter to live in a house on grounds open to the public. When the work was shown at Photo Museum Ireland at the beginning of this year, the artist recalled that tourists would stand and look through the windows. Adding biographical narrative to understanding a work of art can sometimes expand but often limits it. You don't need to know the backstory to find this an unforgettable image. Agata Stoinska: Reverberations 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Reverberations, by Agata Stoinska. Courtesy of the artist Many artists have their eyes on nature in this year's Annual. Martin Gale imagines a return of wolves in a pair of paintings, while Tony G Murray's duo of Silent Forest prints leads you to imagine where myths of tree creatures may have come from. In this vein, Agata Stoinska's large-scale forest photograph brings you right to the heart of the emergence of legend, with a clever doubling device that manages to avoid becoming glib. Instead the mirrored trees create a portal, and everything is calling you to want to walk through. Rae Perry: Resolutions 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Resolutions, by Rae Perry. Courtesy of the artist The US-born, Dublin-based artist Rae Perry is largely self-taught, but her time in Florence, where she studied drawing, shows in her use of light and in the soft and rich Florence-school-inspired hues of her canvas. Nicely enigmatic, Resolutions is also tender and intimate. 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It's about a route you take' Opens in new window ] Tower blocks reach for the leaden skies, while lower-rise civic buildings, and what might be edge-of-town sports or education complexes, come forward to meet the eye. As the city creeps beyond its limits, an area of vegetation is marked for destruction, reminding us of the Australian writer Tim Winton's comment that 'architecture is what we console ourselves with once we've obliterated our natural landscapes'. Vera Klute: Lustre II 195th RHA Annual Exhibition: Lustre II, by Vera Klute. Courtesy of the artist Extraordinarily versatile, Vera Klute is a renowned portrait artist. Her oil painting Slope, also in the exhibition, is a lush jungle of a canvas delving into the infinite varieties of our often overlooked riverbanks. Before you get to that, however, you'll have met her Lustre II, a marvellous sculpture in the RHA foyer that, depending on your perspective, imagination and predilections, could be a strange alien craft, a giant fuchsia or something slightly sexual. And that's the glories of art in a nutshell. The 195th RHA Annual Exhibition in association with McCann FitzGerald is at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts , in Dublin, until August 3rd
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Hare golf coursing: a mother and leverets up close in Carlow
I am a sports photographer and, while recently taking photos at Carlow Golf Club, I was told that a female hare was feeding two leverets about two metres away from the window. I went outside and slowly got as close as I could and took the shot. The hare did not move at all. Pat Ahern, Co Carlow This is a wonderful image of a working mother. Female hares can have two or three litters per year – this is her first this year. Hares do not use burrows, so the young leverets are born in a depression or form in longish grass. The mother spends little time with them, although she is always in cover close by. The leverets stay very still in the form, in which they were born, for the first few days and the mother returns around dusk to feed them – just one feed every 24 hours. After a few days the young disperse but they will return to the spot at feeding time for about three further weeks. Large red damselfly. Photograph supplied by Paul Dunne I saw this red damselfly on laurel in Connemara. Paul Dunne, Co Galway This is the large red damselfly, Pyrrhosoma nymphula. It is the first species of that group on the wing every year and marks the start of the season. It is our only red damselfly – the other red ones that appear later in the summer are all larger and stouter. It is common throughout Ireland, particularly in areas where the waterbodies are acid, such as bog pools and upland lakes. READ MORE Common wave moth. Photograph supplied by Darren Maguire I spotted this delicate and beautiful little chap on a whitethorn hedge in early May. I haven't seen one before; can you help identify it and hopefully provide some background? Darren Maguire, Co Meath This is a common wave moth. It overwinters as a pupa, and this one has now turned into an elegant adult. While it may be visiting the hawthorn for a feed of nectar to keep it going, it needs to find some willow or aspen because it is on the leaves of these trees that its caterpillars feed. These can be either green or brown with cryptic makings, and they really blend into their background to avoid being detected by pesky, sharp-eyed birds. May bug I found this beetle on its back and struggling on my patio. I turned it over and left it alone and a little while later it was gone. What is it? From Co Dublin by email Lots of queries and images of this insect have arrived during May – I assume from new readers from last June onwards. This is the May bug, which emerges and flies every year in May and always graces this column then. It is a large beetle, up to 30mm long and quite heavy for a beetle. The males have impressive antennae, which can open out like a fan – all the better to detect the presence of a female. As adults, they feed on the leaves of trees and shrubs and swarm around them at dusk in the hope of getting lucky. Barrel jellyfish. Photograph supplied by Judith Brassil What is this jellyfish seen on Curracloe beach on May Day? It was about 12 inches in diameter. Is it dangerous? Judith Brassil, Co Wexford This is an early sighting of the barrel jellyfish, which usually reaches our shores later in year when the water is warmer. Young fish and small crabs don't think it is dangerous as they often seek shelter in the protective tentacles. It can sting us however, although the sting is usually only mildly venomous. Please submit your nature query, observation, or photo, with a location, via or by email to weekend@
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Walking Ghosts by Mary O'Donnell: An ambitious, dystopian and horny collection
Walking Ghosts Author : Mary O'Donnell ISBN-13 : 9781917453226 Publisher : Mercier Press Guideline Price : €16.99 The opening story of Mary O'Donnell's new collection sets a pattern for what is to come by depicting the Covid-19 lockdowns as an instance of paralysis in the Joycean fashion. Its protagonist struggles to live meaningfully in a world turned upside-down by 'that microscopic ball with the little cartoon feet', and many of the characters who follow experience a similar longing to shatter the nagging stasis of their lives. On one level these are the walking ghosts of the title but, on another, they are ciphers for the old-guard tropes of Irish literary writing – the contested field, the London abortion, and so on – which O'Donnell here seeks to reanimate and, in one or two cases, cast aside entirely. No surprise, so, that many of her protagonists are survivors of Ireland's literary-industrial complex (one rather brilliant tale, The Stolen Man, concerns a writing student succumbing to the seductive creative freedoms of Galway). Yet, after several stories content to probe the margins of suburban realism, O'Donnell suddenly delivers a jolt of genre energy halfway through The Space Between Louis and Me. It is the kind of story that makes you go back and re-read it from the start (to say any more would be to ruin the surprise). READ MORE Soon after comes The Creators, the most striking story here, which offers a reflective extrapolation of our contemporary climate crisis. Set in a future of 'fear and extreme heat' where Scotland's Hebrides have been transformed into 'Garden Isles', this is a deftly sketched portrait of desperation and desire, one worthy of inclusion on the eclectic shelf of insular dystopian fiction by Irish women (think The Bray House by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne or Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff). Walking Ghosts is a work of quiet ambition rich in standout descriptions ('He looks like a horse in a cubist painting'). Moreover, this is a horny collection, one happy to linger on female desire through chances taken – or not – on lost loves or intoxicating holiday acquaintances. Yet the most intriguing flirtation here is that of O'Donnell with speculative fiction. This paradoxically both elevates and anchors the proceedings. Because, yes, the future may be dire, but its calamitous potential may yet be dampened by the choices we make now.
