Old Parish: Notes on Hurling

Shortlisted for The Last Word Listeners’ Choice Award, Irish Book Awards 2025

’No matter if you’re a die-hard hurling fanatic or you’ve never seen a match, Old Parish is well worth a read.’ Hot Press

’Entertaining and thoughtful’ Irish Independent

’There aren’t enough of these books ... The whole thing is a delight’ Malachy Clerkin, Irish Times

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Hurling is Ireland’s national game - a source of fascination and pride, even to people who have never played it. Ciarán Murphy, a lifelong club footballer, used to be one of those people. Then he spent a summer trying to play hurling with a tiny club in the West Waterford Gaeltacht. Along the way he embarked on a quest to understand the history, geography and mystique of this extraordinary sport.

Old Parish is the club of Ciarán’s father, a club where relatives of his are still deeply involved, and possibly the only place brave (or stupid) enough to take on a forty-one-year-old newcomer to the game. Predictably (and at times hilariously), Ciarán finds out just how difficult a sport hurling is to pick up when you’re in your sporting dotage, up against men who’ve played it since childhood.

Ciarán also explores why hurling is played in only half the country; he investigates the origins of hurling clubs’ antipathy to football and the difficulties of establishing hurling in new areas; he looks into the mysteries of hurley-making; and he seeks to understand why, when a hurling legend refers to the sport as ’the greatest game ever played by any man’, he has to be taken seriously.

Anyone who has ever watched hurling knows that it is something unique and extraordinary. Old Parish explains why.

Ciará n Murphy is an acclaimed podcaster (with Second Captains), a trusted columnist (with the Irish Times), and an ageing Gaelic footballer (originally with Milltown in Co. Galway, latterly with Templeogue Synge Street in Dublin). This is the Life is his first book.