By Kevin Egan

The journeys are the same, but the luggage has changed. For the best part of five decades, Rathdowney man Pat Delaney has been heavily involved in Gaelic Games, club and county.

While he once would have set out for a match with his hurl and boots, then there was a long and successful spell when his notebook and whistle were essential pieces of equipment.

Now? Toilet Paper is just one of a myriad of things that he and his wife Mary make sure he has on board when heading to games.

30 years ago, Delaney travelled to Croke Park to referee the 1989 All-Ireland Hurling final between Tipperary and Antrim. He’s been back at headquarters countless times since then, but he’ll be there in an official capacity again on Sunday in his role as kitman to the Laois hurlers, and he explainshow there’s a lot more to consider than making sure that he has 26 jerseys for the matchday panel.

“I do have a list that I keep hanging up at home with different things that I’m supposed to have every Sunday,” he says.

“Between myself and Mary, I’d say ‘call it out there’ because I’d read it myself and it mightn’t have registered. So she’d ask ‘have you the bibs for the subs warming up?’ ‘I have’ I’d say.

‘Have you the Maor Foirne bibs?’

‘I have,’ I’d say.

‘Have you one for Eddie Brennan?’

“I have that one.’

‘Have you two sets of jerseys?’

‘Yep, I have all them.’

‘Have you the Lucozade Sports?’

‘Yep I have them. That’s grand.’

“Have you the bars?’

‘Yeah, I have them.’

Then, ‘Have you toilet paper and that stuff in the bag?’ Jesus, it’s unreal. The one thing I mightn’t have is the one thing someone will look for. It might be an all-time low looking for toilet paper but for some strange reason there might not be toilet paper in a place, it has happened before! Then when you know you have it, it’s grand.”

Understandably, Delaney has also found himself taking up the whistle for several internal training games, and as there is widespread respect for his local knowledge, experience and hurling insight, he says that he will occasionally be asked for his views on team selection matters, and he’ll oblige – even if he knows it’s not his main responsibility.

“I’m inclined to mind my own business. I do what I have to do and that keeps me more than busy,” he adds.

“There’s different managers down through the years that’ll ask your opinion on different things. Maybe before they pick a team they’ll say to me, ‘pick a team and come back to me tomorrow.’

“Now sometimes you get it right and some of them wrong but the fact that you’ve been around a while, they value your opinion. When they’re fresh in especially, but a lot of it is so they can stand close to you to learn the lads names! Some managers will be great on names and some would be very poor so they’d be mad to know”.

After being brought in while Damien Fox was in charge and continuing his role through a number of different management teams, Delaney was asked to continue his role under Eamon Kelly, but only after the Tipperary man jokingly referred to clearing up past history.

“When Eamon was appointed, Gerry Kavanagh (then the Laois GAA chairman) says ‘a friend of yours is going to be ringing you to know if you’ll continue on with him.’ He says, ‘we have Eamon Kelly appointed. I think he’d had a bit of an issue with you before.’

‘Why would that be?’ I said.

‘He said to me that you sent him off in a match.’

"I said ‘it must have been a school match or a college match where the name might not ring a bell with me.’ So anyway, a few days after he rang me. I said ‘Eamon, where was it?’

‘You know well where it was’, he replied.

“It was a Junior All Ireland final below in Limerick. I was playing with my own club on the Monday night and I remember I got a belt of the hurl and I got four or five stitches for it. There was a fierce row just before half time so next thing Steve Mahon from Galway was involved in it as well as Eamon Kelly.

“So I sent off Eamon Kelly, that was alright. Next thing, Steve Mahon wouldn’t get up off the ground so they linked him in, Tipp were going mad at me for not sending him off. I’d no doubt in my mind what I was doing with him though. Next thing, they came out and Steve Mahon came racing out to the field. I went straight over and I gave him a straight red. When he said it to me, I remembered it.”

After he recounted some memorable anecdotes from his refereeing career, this writer naively asked Pat when he had officially hung up his whistle. It wasn’t a question that had as straightforward an answer as one might imagine.

“My daughter is a teacher in a school in Mountrath. About a fortnight ago she rang me, asking ‘what are you doing?’ I was up a field at the time and she said ‘you may come over here to Mountrath, we’re in a Camogie quarter-final and the ref who was supposed to do it is after phoning in.’

So I turned off the tractor and came down the road and said to Mary ‘you may get me that refereeing gear, Eimear is after ringing me there,’ because I knew she’d go mad. So when did I stop reffing? I’m not sure I ever stopped.

“My biggest problem is I do find it very difficult to say no to somebody. You know so many people from the refereeing. There’s lads that were only starting out when I was giving it up and you’d still be very familiar with them. The craic and banter that would go along with it would be great.”

He concedes, however, that when it comes to refereeing, games like those in Croke Park on Sunday can sometimes be easier to handle than the type of matches where he might be asked to fill in now.

“The good thing about inter-county or a fairly high standard of club level is you can read the game fairly well. You see a corner back or a wing back and he has the ball you know he’s going getting that up to the half forward so you could be gone flying it.

“Or a lad taking a free, you could be up there where it’s going to come down. Then in a junior game, you see a wing back with it and he could throw it up and miss the thing, and you’re gone down to the far end of the field and next thing it’s gone back into the goals.”

No danger of that on Sunday, as an in-form Laois team takes on a Westmeath side that has shown plenty of potential to go one step further than 12 months ago, when they lost out to Carlow in this fixture.

“Last year we thought it was really a matter of form and it doesn’t work that way. There’s an

awful lot of teams thinking different. No one is standing back like a road block and waving you

on.”

“Hopefully now if lady luck stays in, we can achieve what we set out to achieve.

And either way, it’s fair to assume that Pat will be there again next year ready to go again.