It has already been a season to remember for the Mayo footballers, but there’s another dream dangling in front of James Carr and his club Ardagh over the coming weeks.
The north Mayo outfit – potentially the smallest club in the county – will embark on a first-ever foray into the Connacht Junior Club Championship this weekend when they take on St Aidan’s of Roscommon at MacHale Park in Castlebar.
This has been a year of firsts for Ardagh; they qualified for a county final for the first time and, then, managed to get their hands on the Pete McDonnell Cup thanks to a final defeat of Eastern Gaels.
“It’s magic, we’ve never been in a county final before so it was unknown territory for us but thank God we were able to get over the line,” Carr told this week’s episode of the RTÉ GAA Podcast.
Ardagh’s story has been one of survival, with the current incarnation of the club having been officially formed in the late 1970s. They are based in a small pocket of north Mayo, with Crossmolina, Knockmore and Ballina Stephenites among their high-profile neighbours.
For Carr – who opted not to travel to the US with the Mayo team in order to prepare for his club’s county final – there’s a real family connection to the club.
“We’re obviously in between three of the biggest clubs in Mayo, they tried to form it [Ardagh] a good few times and various things stopped the club being formed.
“My grandfather was actually one of the founding members of the club in 1978 and it was a club to try and get lads between Ballina, Crossmolina and Knockmore a bit of football and it’s ended up now that his grandsons have won a junior title.
“It’s so small, we’re just a road more or less.”
Carr turned in a man of the match display in their county final victory having also been part of the Mayo squad that finally claimed Sam Maguire earlier this year.
Having become the first Ardagh player to feature for the Mayo senior team, Carr has experienced the wide array of emotions of an inter-county player; in 2019, he scored a memorable solo-goal against Galway in Limerick, but also had to endure injury troubles, so much so that he wasn’t even part of the squad in 2025.
Carr lifts the Sam Maguire back in July
Carr returned to the fold this year, however, and says he was immediately enthused by the impact of his former team-mate, Andy Moran.
“We started training sometime in early December in the astro turf up in Castlebar Mitchels and I walked out and said ‘Oh my God, I’m the oldest player here, I’m in huge trouble’ and I looked round and Ryan O’Donoghue said ‘Oh my God, I’m the second oldest player here, we’re in big trouble’,”
“But I left that training, came home and I was beaming.
“I said to my wife ‘this is what I expected it to be’; it was full of energy – really tough in fairness – but Andy just has this way of bringing this energy to a session and kicking the living crap out of the ball.
“It indoctrinates you into that way of thinking – everything if heads up, forward football. It’s exactly what you’d imagine you’d love to play. From session one, it was really good. It was so enjoyable to be part of from day one.
“I went back to win an All-Ireland, that was it. I wouldn’t have gone back if I didn’t think there was something. And obviously Andy has a way of convincing you that there is a way.
“Andy has this infectious energy, he makes you just to want to fight for the cause. What he’s done for me, thanks doesn’t really do it justice.”
Indeed, Carr says Moran had a major impact on his career from his early days, having first joined the panel in 2017, the year in which Moran was crowned Footballer of the Year.
“I met Andy a few times, he obviously saw something in me that I didn’t see myself,” Carr explained.
“I used to meet him in Ballaghderrean, just the two of us, he’d be going through inside forward movement, areas of space to exploit, all that sort of stuff. It was really invaluable, he didn’t have to at all, there was no pressure from anyone for him to do that for me.
“But that was only part of it, when you walked into Andy Moran’s dressing room when he was a player or not, whether you were the oldest or the youngest you were treated exactly the same. That’s probably the biggest lesson I learned, I’d like to think I was a good teammate to anyone that came into a Mayo dressing room alongside me and the same with Ardagh.
“But that just sums up Andy Moran.”
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