Tuesday evening, the lads were enjoying the kickaround* but Garda Seamus O’Meara broke away to sidle up to me.

“Noel,” he said, lazy right eye blinking the way it does when he’s nervous, “I’ve told the old set, and now I’m telling you: I’ve decided to go odd in myself. I’m leaving the Force, for a greater force than any of us.”

Nancy grimaced. “A hard oul’ do,” were her very words, “and your crowd a decent, simple, country, Golf-fearing family who never brought trouble to anyone’s door.”

For once, though, I was stuck for words, and found myself jawing on for 20 minutes to fill the silence.

“But Garda Seamus,” I said, “A man of your age? You’re, what, 34 now? You were a famous birth for this club, January 3rd, 1975, your proud mother resolutely holding off since her due date on December 8th. She got a pain on Henry Street up shopping, but she wouldn’t give an inch. Are you sure, Garda Seamus?”

His left eye lit up as he replied: “Never been surer of anything in my life, Noel. I have always hankered after the bohemian lifestyle, but first I made the minors, and then the plumbing apprenticeship before my mother got me into the guards, and, well, Noel, if I don’t do it now I never will.

“I’ve found a nice place up a hill. Four and a half acres, reasonable land. There was an article in Organic Matters about how to husband a small holding.

“I’ve a Belted Galloway bought. Dungarees ordered online. I threw away the Mach 3 today, and the shower I’ll have after training tonight will be my last for months.”

On and on he went with his plans. Rise with the dawn and read by the light of the candle each night. Anam Cara by John O’Donoghue and anything by Eckhart Tolle.

Nature’s own alarm clock and the best mesh for a chicken coop, as if I didn’t know. For a full 45 minutes, he unspooled his thoughts. I afforded him the respect of a listening ear.

“You’re passionate about this, Garda Seamus,” I said, “and everyone knows where I stand on the vexed question of the human being accessing their field of pure potentiality,” I continued, “but you’re gone from the wire entirely.”

One of his eyes welled up. I think it was the left one but can’t be sure. My words were having an impact: “What about your wife and three kids? Are you going to have them laughed at in school just because you want to commune with earth?”
He was rattled: “Noel,” he answered, “we’re educating them at home.”

There was nothing I could do. So I continued trying. “Garda Seamus,” I softened, “you have always been a well-adjusted, rounded chap. You hung around with the lads in your single days, took your dealing trick the seldom time it came your way. This is a huge change of life you’re making.

“I have seen great men try to go odd, and it rarely works for them. You have to be raised that way.
“The galvanise blows off the house. The missus bonds with a mountain goat and the husband feels rejected. The children get fed up playing with the knotted rag for a football. All manner of things can go wrong.”
Nothing could dissuade him. He said he would still come down for training, and pledged his allegiance to Ballybore and to me, as if there’s a difference.

I said I was glad to hear it, but Tuesday night, as Garda Seamus O’Meara drove away in his 1982 Mark V Cortina, which he had bought earlier in the day, and himself, the wife and her mother sitting across the one-piece three-seater with the column-change, I knew it would be a long time before we would see him in the colours of Ballybore again.

“A pity that,” lamented Nancy, as we listened for close on five minutes to the dying sound of the migrating vehicle, “he was just settling into his career. He might even have made his championship debut this season. But we can only dance with the girls in the hall, as you always say yourself Noel. We’ll plough our own four and a half acres here.”

* The most regular question I get in correspondence is: “Noel, what one thing can I do to get my team playing better?” My answer: championship intensity in the kickaround.
I love nothing more than re-arranging my selection after a player or two picks up a kickaround injury. That kind of uncertainty forces players to live on the edge. It makes the other team nervous too.
To this day, I decline to comment on where I was when Seanie Leary got the nose broken in’77. “It is the GAA’s Grassy Noel moment,” Jim Sullivan wrote. Nancy felt he was making a laugh out of me and didn’t talk to him for three years, tricky for Jimmo because those were the years she managed the Camogie three-in-a-row.
After the third final, when my entreaties finally worked and she went in to stick the winning goal in her Sunday-going-to-Mass clothes, she accepted Jim’s insistence that he had meant no insult, and we sat down for an in-depth, two-hour interview, reluctantly concluded only when Jim ran out of cassettes.

It’s not that Noel doesn’t trust people, but he always prefers to grow his own. Email him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ; visit www.knowledgeablenoel.com; or give him a dig on Facebook (Knowledgeable Noel.)

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