Can you really put a curse on someone, or on a family or a parish, a team or a whole county?

Good question that, especially now in the after-glow of Mayo’s brilliant win in the All Ireland Football Final against Kerry last month.

For 75 long, lonesome years - seven and a half decades - the boys from the County Mayo toiled and strove might and main but to no good.

I’m sure Andy Moran won’t take offence if I say Mayo had teams of better footballers than the present crop over the last quarter of a century yet they never captured Gaelic Football’s ‘Holy Grail’.

Over the years, the story of ‘the curse’ seemed to haunt them. It was claimed, but never actually proven, that the 1951 victorious Mayo team on their journey home passed through Foxford and did not give due respect to a passing funeral cortege.

That was supposed to have happened in 1951, and yet ’twas nearly 40 years later before the ‘curse theory’ came into everyday conversation.

A few years back, a certain journalist/historian did a forensic investigation into the happenings in Mayo - and in Foxford in particular - on Monday, September 24, and Tuesday, September 25 - the two days after the 1951 decider when Mayo beat Meath.

No ‘suitable’ death, wake or funeral could be found that would correspond to the story of the curse.

The kernel of the curse was that as long as any member of that 1951 team remained alive, Mayo would not win the Sam Maguire Cup. The burden rested easily on Paddy Prendergast’s broad shoulders. He died in 2021 -truly ‘the last man standing’.

In the intervening five years since Paddy’s death, did Mayo look any more likely to win the title than at any time in the previous 70 years!

Now, if ye really want a........

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