My biggest blessing is being from Kerry

ON days like these, the gravitational pull of home tugs hardest at Mick Galwey's great Currow heart.

- Roy CURTIS

A mythical figure in the story of Irish rugby, the unbending Cú Chulainn who led Munster and Ireland, a Lion in 1993, the oval ball gifted him a life of incomparable adventure and joy, the fading echo of his playing days touching him at the core still.

But Kerry and football is written in his 58-year-old blood, another level of identity and belonging.

Home is within you or it is nowhere at all.

Gaillimh is a giddy, upbeat figure, where others perceive setting suns he sees only towering skies.

Yet he becomes as profound as any Kingdom poet when he talks about the river of attachment that runs through him on this All-Ireland final weekend.

"It's who I am. It goes back to your earliest memories. What you are reared and brought up on," says Galwey.

"I was blessed with my rugby career, absolutely blessed. Playing for Munster, the friendships and memories, priceless. But the biggest blessing in my life, the thing that touches me most, is where I'm from. And I'm from Kerry."

I offer him a mean-spirited choice, the equivalent of asking a father to choose between two children.

Munster to win another European Cup or Kerry to lift Sam, which would mean more?

His laugh, brow and lash merging in uncontainable, eyes-closed gaiety, booms like a thunderclap over Carrauntoohil.

"That's a tough question. I'm tempted to say both equally, but I'd probably have to say the All-Ireland. It's the Kerryman coming out of me to be honest. It is what I am. I'd lose sleep over Kerry. That, unfortunately is the truth," he says.

"Like, I had an opportunity to go down to Australia with the Lions. I was invited down. And it would be very, very nice to wake up in Melbourne on Saturday morning, knowing there is a Test match on, a party atmosphere.

"But once there was the possibility of Kerry in an All-Ireland, I couldn't go. How could I live with myself if I did?"