Photo: The Mayo Newsįorde would join him in the Mayo full-back line along with captain Seán Flanagan. The Mayo senior football team (with Prendergast third from the right in the front row) that won the 1951 All-Ireland senior football title are pictured before the game against Meath at Croke Park. Both he and John Forde, a soldier based in Finner, were Mayo men playing in Donegal. "Paddy played for Donegal with my father in the 1940s. "I met him regularly," says Martin Carney, who shared his distinction of having played for both Donegal and Mayo. It was in some ways a lonely position to be the last man standing of the starting team of 1951 - former GAA president Mick Loftus is the sole survivor of the panel - but he was the antithesis of lonely. It was grossly insulting and very unpleasant.” As he said himself, if there were any truth in it, ‘I’d roll over and die’ but he said there wasn’t an iota of substance to it. It was basically hurting him that this was going on. A group of players more likely to respect a funeral you couldn’t imagine. So the idea of this curse is a load of rubbish.
“They were a very religious group of players, who got Mass every morning when in collective training. Tony O'Connor, chair of Prendergast's home club, Ballintubber, and father of current Mayo players Cillian and Diarmuid, is also a GAA historian - chairing the club history committee, which produced 'Face the Ball, Ballintubber,' a McNamee award winner on its publication 20 years ago.Ī friend of Prendergast, who interviewed him on many occasions, he debunks the ‘curse’ simply and effectively. This fabrication arose in recent times and suggested that as long as any member of the 1951 All-Ireland winning team were alive, Mayo would not win an All-Ireland - all because their homecoming had disturbed a funeral in Foxford. It was an unpleasant irony that the late Paddy Prendergast, who died at the weekend at the age of 95, found himself as much a victim of social media and innuendo as the current players thanks to the historical defamation that lies at the heart of the alleged Mayo 'curse'.
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