‘Hurling players represent their place and people. You could rightly say that tribalism comes into it.’

I’m in my mother’s house in Youghal, on the neglected eastern fringe of both County Cork and the diocese of Cloyne, working (a bit) while the girls muck around with scissors and glue and, if I’m lucky, wander over to comb their father’s grey hair. The weather is patchy. “You should have been here in July,” we’re told, every year. The rain roars against the conservatory windows. “September is expected to be good,” my mother reassures me.

The village of Killeagh, a ten-minute drive away on the road to Cork, has been experiencing a summer of fame. “At the celebration of Confirmation,” parish priest Fr Tim Hazelwood told us, “I invited the forty or so children to sing ‘our song’ for the bishop. Without any hesitation they belted it out with gusto, word perfect and in tune. ‘Killeagh-la, la la la …/For the green and the white I adore;/For the parish to last ever more.’”

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