Below is the report of a hurling match between Ballyduff Lower and Meaghers (Ballytruckle) played at Foley’s Field, Killoteran in May 1906, made the pages of the Rochester Catholic Journal in New York.

Mayo man Michael Davitt, one of the three founders of the GAA and a chief organiser of the Land League, died a couple of weeks later, aged 60. A Famine child and a victim of eviction by the time he was four, having been forced to emigrate to England with his family, he began working in a Lancashire cotton mill as a nine-year-old.

At eleven, Michael had to have an arm amputated after getting it caught in a cogwheel and the accident changed his life’s trajectory from labourer to student to leader. No doubt he’d loved to have been able to (as the old refrain goes) put “two hands on the hurley” like the lads in Butlerstown, but his legacy endures all over Ireland.