How the Club got it's Goat - By Dropout

In the course of the last thirty-five years, 32 duly appointed Presidents have shaped and steered the destinies of Skerries Rugby Club. But there is one egregious figure who, over the same period of time, has given almost unbroken service in a position of eminence at Holmpatrick. He has been an impasssive witness to afternoons of great euphoria. He has cast an equally equanimous eye upon days of soul-wrenching disappointment. A disciple of Kipling, maybe. Yet he has leered lopsidedly - or so it seemed to those present - at the bar-room excesses on nights of sweaty sociability. And he has habitually endured, without demur, the bleakness of a deserted clubhouse. Only twice has he abandoned his vigil. Some years ago, at odds, for once, with his cloistered existence (and in circumstances which baffled the keenest local sleuths and remain a mystery to this day) he spent a Christmas holiday touring in the Balcunnin area. Then, quite recently, accepting the need for an upgraded public image, he underwent some cosmetic procedures in a private city clinic. The references are, of course, to The Goat. There may have been 32 Presidents since the mid-70s but there has only been one Resident.

How did the hairy old Patriarch attain his lofty position? And how many at Rockalyoke to-day can retail to you the events leading up to his enthronement? The story is a banal one, an everyday story of rugbyfolk you might say, but it should nevertheless be required knowledge for anyone with aspirations to being a card-carrying fundamentalist of Skerries Rugby.

The goat has long been a staple of local mythology in North Fingal and, almost as soon as sartorial elegance became an occasional consideration at Rockalyoke, a proud caprine cranium found its way onto the club tie. Then, during the anni mirabiles of the early seventies, the great cavalcade of Skerries support arriving at distant provincial venues was invariably led by a goat that was very much alive, and sometimes kicking. If you were looking for an illustration of how our lives have been gradually and insidiously invaded by legislation you wouldn't have to look any further than the experience of a quarter of a century later. A laudable attempt at reviving the tradition of the live goat for the Leinster Cup Final in 1998 was met with a barrage of official obtuseness. Both the goat and his curator were escorted from the ground with the relevant sub-section of the Health and Safety statutes ringing in their ears. It was not until the mid-seventies and the completion of the clubhouse extension at Holmpatrick that the idea of having a resident goat was mooted.

An advisory group was set up which included such distinguished figures as Pearse Thornton and Jim Sherlock. It also incorporated that rarely dispensable auxiliary, Paddy O'Shea. Eddie Kenny is well remembered as a compassionate curate at the altar in Joe Mays and it was his uncle - he worked as a butcher on Strand Street - who passed on a valuable piece of information to the interested parties. The word was that twin goats, born a few years previously up in Balrickard, had matured into horny and handsome specimens of their race. (For those whose geography is as deficient as their history, Balrickard is a picturesque little pinnacle overlooking Ring Commons.) When David Ryan, who was wearing the Secretary's bib at the time, said that he knew a man in Drumcondra who would do a good job with the stuffing, all the prerequisites were in place. A decapitation was arranged and the trophy was borne downhill to an appointed meeting place. Alas, the taxidermist failed to show up and in the consequent disarray the goats head was placed in a bag and thrown in the boot of O'Shea's blue Cortina.

Skerries flag-bearing team had no match that week-end but the following week-end Lord Holmpatrick's riding colours were in Limerick for what was oxymoronically described as a friendly match against Young Munster. The afternoon was one of sustained turbulence and the after-match drinking was no less so. It was late when O'Shea left Rosbrien and at that stage he was passably sedated. Just outside Birdhill his reveries were disturbed by an almighty bang on the front of the car. Stopping to investigate, he found his number-plate in smithereens across the road. Some distance away a large Alsatian lay as dead as a doornail. He drove on. With only an occasional drowsy interjection from his passengers the journey continued placidly until, out of the blue, on the main street in Borris-in-Ossory, a member of the local constabulary materialised in front of his windscreen. "You have no number-plate" he intoned. Quick-wittedness characterises all of O'Shea's dealings with authority and, aware that an accident with a dog should have been reported, he said "I'm sorry, officer, but I hit a fox back in Birdhill". As the officer bent over to scrutinise the tax-disc a baleful, forgotten memory transfixed O'Shea : "The goat's head ....... what if he decides to look in the boot and makes the macabre discovery?" The official decision to wave on rather than pull in was received with studied gratitude by the driver.

The following morning when O'Shea had put together the fractured pieces of his existence he went to the boot of his car, opened the bag, and was met by a battalion of bluebottles. He conceded that the initial attempt to install a resident goat at Holmpatrick had ended in abject failure. The head was given as a gratuity to a couple of average greyhounds in the locality and is said to have contributed to a series of stunning performances in Harold's Cross. All told, the fate of his brother was bad news for the surviving twin up in Balrickard. In turn, he too was solicited by the rugbymen. On this occasion, however, the synchronisation was flawless ..... the provident Ryan had commissioned and received a pair of moose eyes from Canada, the taxidermist fulfilled his appointment, and it is this,second goat which greets visitors to Holmpatrick to-day.

It should be acknowledged before going any further that the lengthy treatise on The Goat was designed to prompt a question - what is the point of fishing out random recollections from the peasoup of past time? Faced with a rickety present and a conjectural future there is every inducement to lurch into retrospection. God spare us those dewlapped reminiscers who migrate lock stock and barrel into the past tense, ceaselessly citing a putative belle epoque where things were done better. As a perceptive Wexfordman (can anyone put a name on him?) once noted : "we imagine that we remember things as they were while, in fact, all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past". An equally perceptive, but possibly less lyrical Christy Jenkinson might have put it this way : "the past is a right bugger ...... if it doesn't dominate you it'll try to cod you".

Even allowing for these reservations it is sometimes prudent to send a reconnaissance mission into the foreign country that is the past. There is, in fact, something close to a duty to do so when it is a question of a rescue from oblivion. Many of those upon whom the stage-lights of Skerries Rugby once gleamed are deserving of recall and it is in this knowledge that Dropout, on an occasional basis between now and the end of the season, will look at the decade after 1975 and hasard a purely personal perspective on what happened on the day before yesterday at Rockalyoke.