John Lawler
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
John Lawler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A century ago, Kildare played Kerry in the final of the All-Ireland Football Championship, a record attendance of 38,000 packed Croke Park, poised to witness what would be regarded for many decades as the greatest All-Ireland final ever played.
From the touchline, Cork journalist Paddy Meaghan voiced a live radio commentary for 2RN, the first of its kind for a football final.
British Pathé were there too with their hand-cranked 35mm wooden motion picture camera.
The precious few minutes, which make up the resulting newsreel, show the men from Kildare emerge first out onto the pitch.
Players filed out between the stands on Jones's Road through a mixum-gatherum scrum of randomers.
Plucky bystanders shook the hands of their heroes.
Some of the players dragged on cigarettes, others chewed gum.
If they were phased by the enormity of the occasion, they clearly weren't showing it.
I remember when I first saw that grainy footage of the 26th final.
It was in Nace Library in 2019.
I was there with my 83-year-old father and my brother for a history presentation.
But it wasn't to be just any presentation.
We were there to relive the golden era of Kildare football, the halcyon days of the late 1910s into the roaring 20s, which, as a long-suffering supporter, remains regrettably unsurpassed in terms of the county's success to date.
The period saw Kildare secure a sixth in a row of Leinster Championship titles, with three All-Ireland successes, one of which was rewarded with the inaugural presentation of the Sam Maguire Trophy in 1928.
Those assembled in the library that afternoon were as equally steeped in the GAA as my father, and odds-on to be blood relatives to those long-extinct footballing dinosaurs who roamed a very different world to her own.
Our personal link to that era was my father's father, our grandad.
He had been sub-goalkeeper on the All-Ireland winning squad of 1919.
The Pathé newsreel continued to play in the projector.
Amongst the players in their peaky blinder-style caps, white jerseys, white togs and club socks, one figure stood out.
A sharply dressed man in a suit, tie and fedora hat.
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