County Mayo breaks fabled 75-year-old curse to win All-Ireland football championship

Legend has it the last time County Mayo won the Gaelic Football All-Ireland in 1951, an angry priest cursed the team to never win another championship so long as they lived.

But on Sunday — five years after the 1951 team’s last surviving member died — Mayo beat Kerry to claim ​the Sam Maguire Cup for the first time in 75 years.

John Gunnigan, host of the Mayo Football Talk podcast, watched the victory live at Dublin’s Croke Park stadium. He says it was a moment the people of Mayo will never forget.

“I have been to Croke Park for over 50 years at this stage, and I have never, ever experienced anything like that,” Gunnigan told As It Happens guest host Loren McGinnis. 

“I’ve never seen so many people crying, including myself.”

The story of the curse

Gaelic Football All-Ireland is the national championship for Gaelic football, an Irish soccer-like sport that pits two teams of 15 against each other.

Gunnigan says the event is massively popular in Ireland and among the Irish diaspora. Bigger, even, than the World Cup.

“It’s a huge occasion, and we’re one of the minnows of the game,” he said. “To get to a final is a big, big deal.”

Mayo has competed in 11 All-Ireland championships since their 1951 victory, and lost every one.

Eventually, Gunnigan said, people started to blame the losing streak on a curse, which the 1951 team reportedly acquired while celebrating their victory in the town of Foxford.

“The story goes that as they were coming through … they got in the way of a funeral that was taking place in the town and delayed the funeral, ” Gunnigan said.

“The priest was not best chuffed, and you didn’t cross a priest in those days. So the priest allegedly was so annoyed with the team that he said that for however long any member of that team lived, Mayo would never win the All-Ireland again.”

It probably didn’t happen

It makes for a good yarn, Gunnigan says, but it doesn’t seem to hold water. 

RTE, Ireland’s public broadcaster, investigated the curse earlier this year and could find no church records, newspaper articles or eyewitness accounts to confirm the story. There’s also no record of a funeral coinciding with the team’s visit to Foxford.

The 1951 team’s members also steadfastly refuted the claims over the years. Paddy Prendergast, the last survivor, brushed it off as hogwash any chance he could get, according to the Irish Times.

Prendergast died in 2021, two weeks after Mayo lost its last final. 

Gunnigan says the curse became a self-perpetuating myth. 

“The problem is, you know, we didn’t know anything about that curse when we were growing up, and I was born in 1962,” Gunnigan said. 

“It was only after we’d lost five finals, I believe, in the early ’90s, that talk of the curse gained any kind of currency at all.”

He remembers the 2021 championships, when Mayo managed to beat the highly-renowned renowned Dublin, only to lose to the decidedly less intimidating Tyrone.

“I think that was the day I said: ‘Jesus, we have to be cursed. Like, how on Earth did we lose that game?'” he said. 

“But there is actually a simpler explanation. We played rubbish that day. We didn’t deserve to win.”

Mark Carney, Joe Biden are celebrating

Still, when the team scored the winning goal on Sunday, the announcers instantly erupted: “The famine is over! The curse be damned!”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose paternal grandparents are from Mayo, also declared the curse broken in a post on X.

“Proud to have roots in County Mayo,” Carney wrote.

U.S. President Joe Biden, ​who has ancestral ties to Mayo, also shared congratulations online, as did Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, whose mother, Peggy, hails from Mayo.

Whether or not the curse is real, Gunnigan says this really does feel like a new era for Mayo.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that the lives of all Mayo supporters changed forever on Sunday,” he said. “I do think we will look at ourselves in different ways.”

Mayo team manager Andy Moran expressed a similar sentiment on Tuesday when he told a crowd of celebrating Mayo fans: “They sneered at us. They laughed at us, but they won’t laugh at us anymore.”

Gunnigan was still riding the high on Tuesday, his voice hoarse from cheering.

He says he climbed Croagh Patrick, a sacred Irish mountain, with his son Joe earlier in the day, only to find the view of County Mayo obscured by clouds. 

“When we got to the top, I said, ‘Joe, we don’t need to see anything anymore, because after Sunday, we have seen the promised land.'”