Binding: Hardback
Date Published: 15 Dec 2025
The Dr. Harty Cup is the most coveted piece of silverware in Munster colleges' hurling. It is synonymous with top-class hurling played by well-prepared teams, is the pinnacle of inter-schools competition and an envied sporting status symbol for Munster schools and colleges. To possess a Harty medal, has become the 'Holy Grail' for the young Munster hurler.
This book tells of the glory and the heartbreak of every Harty season since its inception in 1918. A most unique collection of photographs is included along with a detailed statistical segment and a selection of player reminiscences.
Since its inauguration in 1918, the Dr Harty Cup, the prized trophy for Munster colleges senior hurling success, has been the most prestigious gong in post-primary schools hurling, even outweighing the Hogan Cup awarded to the All-Ireland colleges champions.
There is magic with the Harty Cup. And for Ó Donnchú himself, the magic of the Harty Cup is something he grew up with, and what made the project all the more appealing. “You’d remember the days in the school, I went to Thurles CBS, and we weren’t as successful as a lot of the schools, but we took the Harty Cup very seriously,” Ó Donnchú begins. “I played in the Harty Cup myself in the 60s, and we came up against a much better Limerick CBS team, that were in the middle of winning their famous four-in-a-row with players like Eamonn Cregan, Eamonn Grimes and Sean Foley.
“They were a super team at the time. And Limerick benefitted so much from those players, they won the 1973 All-Ireland afterwards and possibly should have won more,” he says. “It’s great for a school management to have the involvement in games, it makes running a school much easier when there’s a unity of spirit in the place getting behind the team.”
St Flannan’s College, Ennis, who top the honours list with twenty two wins, have always had a big north Tipperary influence with players from the division back boning many of their teams and the impact of Fr Seamus Gardiner and the late Bishop Willie Walsh, also an integral part of the St Flannan’s success story.
The story of the Dr Harty Cup is one that had to be told and last year the Munster College Council commissioned nationally acclaimed GAA historian and McNamee Award winner Liam Ó Donnchú, The Voice of Semple Stadium, to pen the history of the competition.
Himself a former Harty hurler with Thurles CBS in the late sixties, and currently Vice President of Thurles Sarsfields and a man with an impeccable track record in chronicling GAA histories, the project was in safe hands.
Running to over six hundred pages, with a magnificent collection of photographs to embellish the stories being told, it also has a series of testimonials from former players giving a unique insight into how their participation in the Harty Cup competition framed their careers.