Offaly GAA great who will be forever associated with ladies football passes away

THE death has taken place of a man who was a larger than life figure in the worlds of sport, music, business and community affairs and who never forgot his native Offaly and Tullamore.

In particular the late Brendan Martin's name will be forever associated with ladies football at national, provincial, county and club levels .

Brendan – who was in his mid eighties - passed away at 3.35am on Wednesday morning after battling for two weeks with bilateral pneumonia.

Tribute has been paid to the deceased by the Chairman of the Offaly Person of the Year sub-committee of the Offaly Association (Dublin), Liam Fleury who described him as a legend.

Brendan was the recipient of the 2019 Offaly Person of the Year award.

The Tullamore native played a seminal role in the development of ladies football which now attracts over 50,000 spectators to the All-Ireland Championships final each year in Croke Park.

The ladies football pioneer was thrilled at the progress of the game over the past four and a half decades from small beginnings in the mid 1970s.

Brendan was to the forefront of the game's development from the very early days of the All-Ireland championships in 1974.

The 2019 Offaly Person of the Year was among the visionaries present at the meeting, fittingly held in Hayes Hotel in Thurles, which established the championships structure.

“At the time people thought we were mad asking ladies to play this rough game,” he recalled in an interview with the Evening Herald in 2019.

The founding committee operated on a shoestring budget and he took it on himself to purchase a Cup for the All-Ireland.

Brendan bought the Cup in John Cooke's jewellers in Dublin and it was named in his honour. To this day the trophy is called after him, forever proclaiming his role in the development of ladies football.

The affable and outgoing Dillon St native, retained a zest for life to the last which would put a younger man to shame.

The 2019 Offaly Person of the Year was also a talented musician and raconteur who reportedly always carried around a tin whistle in his sock in case an impromptu music session developed.

Music, as well as sport, played an important part in Brendan's life since he joined Tullamore's St Colmcille's Pipe Band at the tender age of 14.

He was a stalwart member of the band for many years and continued to play the pipes up to recently.

But sport, and gaelic football in particular, dominated his early years though his career on the field of play came to an abrupt end when he joined the Pipers Band.

Growing up in Tullamore Brendan played football in national school and in the local league, a competition pitching street against street which was characterised by intense local rivalry.

He attended Offaly matches with his late father but always returned home disappointed at the result.

But that changed in 1964 when Offaly minor footballers dramatically captured the All-Ireland title.

He had a family connection with the winning team in that its captain, Sean Grogan was his first cousin.

“I'll never forget '64 as I had been in Peamount hospital with TB and the All-Ireland final took place on my first day out,” he recalled in an interview with the Tullamore Tribune prior to the Covid pandemic.

He and two other patients borrowed a nurse's car to attend the game on the understanding that they would be back in the hospital by 8pm.

He savoured Offaly's successes on the football field throughout the decades after that breakthrough and he keenly followed the fortunes of household names such as Martin Furlong, the late Paddy Fenning, Paddy McCormack, Willie Bryan and many more.

Having left school in 1952, aged just 13 years as was common at the time, Brendan worked initially with his father who was a plasterer, as his forebears had been.

But he was ambitious and qualified as a quantity surveyor, initially completing a correspondence course, and then studying in London and at Bolton St College in Dublin.

Brendan was to spend his working life in the construction sector in Dublin where he and his firm completed many notable buildings, including 16 schools and colleges.

Among the landmark projects his firm constructed was Cheeverstown House in Dublin in 1983, a £6.5 million development.

However, the Offaly man and his firm were victims of the collapse of the so-called Celtic Tiger economy but in characteristic fashion he rebuilt  the firm.

In his early years in Dublin, he became involved with the Offaly Association, a group of people from the Faithful County who founded the body to provide assistance to their fellow Offalians in sourcing work as well as looking after those who had fallen on hard times.

There was also a strong social element to the group and he played football in the Phoenix Park with his fellow county men.

It wasn't long before women and girls from the county began to play in these games and the Offaly ladies travelled down to Stradbally in Co. Waterford to play an established ladies outfit there.

Brendan soon developed a keen interest in the fledgling sport and was one of those who organised the inaugural meeting of what was to become the Ladies Football Association in Thurles.

From that meeting a ladies football All-Ireland championships was organised with the first final being held in 1974.

Offaly took on old rivals Tipperary in the final, played in Co. Laois, but were defeated by a single point.

He was a mentor to the Offaly team and remained closely involved with the outfit over the coming years.

Brendan witnessed the phenomenal growth of the sport, both in this country and around the globe, over the past four and a half decades.

Football also played an important role in his courtship of his wife, Kerry native, Mairead Cronin whom he met in August 1982.

The first football game he took Mairead to was the famous All-Ireland final later that year when his native Offaly ended Kerry's dream of securing an elusive fine-in-a-row titles, he even took Mairead to the Offaly victory banquet later that night.

The happy couple had two sons, Peter and Cormac, who have inherited their father's love of music and football.

He was also a keen golfer, a former chairman and president of the Offaly Golfing Society and organised a special outing to Achill Island, the spot where he met his future wife, every year.

Deepest sympathy is extended to Brendan's wife, Mairead, sons, Peter and Cormac, family, relatives and a large circle of friends.

Funeral arrangements later.