Mattie McDonagh

Matthew Mattie McDonagh, who lived from 1936 to 11 April 2005, was an Irish Gaelic footballer who played for his local club Ballygar and at senior level for the Galway county team from 1956 until 1968. He is the only man from Connacht with four All-Ireland Senior Football Championship winner's medals. As a teenager he starred with Summerhill College in Sligo, winning the Connacht Colleges title and a Roscommon minor hurling medal with Ballygar, and he came to the national stage in 1956 in a Galway midfield partnership with Frank Evers that won the All-Ireland final over Cork. In the 1960s he was part of the Galway team that, after losing the 1963 final to Dublin, won three consecutive All-Ireland titles by beating Kerry in 1964 and 1965 and Meath in 1966. He took over as manager of the Galway senior team in 1980, and the following year he led Galway to what proved to be their last National League success, beating Roscommon in the final at Croke Park.