Monaghan GAA
Gaelic football is the sport of this county in a way that takes some explaining to people from outside it. Monaghan is one of the smaller counties in the country by population, it has no city, and it has spent long stretches competing in the top division of the national league against counties several times its size. That gap between size and standing is the whole story of Monaghan football.
The county team
Monaghan, the Farney County, have won the Ulster senior football championship sixteen times. Most of those came before the Second World War. Then there was a long gap, three titles in the 1980s, and another long gap after that.
The modern run is the one people mean. Monaghan won Ulster in 2013, ending a twenty five year wait, and again in 2015. They reached the All-Ireland semi-final in 2018 for the first time in thirty years, and again in 2023 after beating Armagh on penalties in the quarter-final. In 2026 they lost the Ulster final to Armagh after extra time at Clones, the first time the two counties had met in a provincial decider since 1938.
What Monaghan have never won is an All-Ireland senior football title. It is worth being straight about that, because it is the shape of the county’s football history: repeatedly good enough to be a difficult day out for anyone in Ulster, and never quite enough beyond it.
The county’s only senior All-Ireland titles are the women’s. The Monaghan ladies football team won back to back All-Ireland senior championships in 1996 and 1997. That is not a footnote here and it is not treated as one.
St Tiernach’s Park, Clones
Clones is about half an hour west of Monaghan town, sitting almost on the border, and St Tiernach’s Park is the reason anyone outside the county knows the name. It is owned jointly by the Clones club, the county board and Ulster GAA, and it has been the home of the Ulster final for most of the last eighty years. The final moved to Croke Park for three years in the middle of the 2000s when capacity was the issue, and has been back in Clones every year since 2007. The ground holds 29,000 now, reduced from a much larger figure after a safety review in 2019.
Ulster final day in Clones is the single biggest day in the county’s calendar. A town of a couple of thousand people takes in tens of thousands, the hill above the pitch fills, the pubs and chip shops do a year’s trade in an afternoon, and locals describe the week as the town’s second Christmas. It is also a logistical event. If you are going, go early, expect to park well outside the town and walk in, and expect the roads in from Monaghan, Cavan and Fermanagh to be slow for hours afterwards.
Big championship games sell out in advance and tickets are not reliably available on the day.
The clubs
Monaghan Harps is the town club, founded in 1905, playing at Gavan Duffy Park. It fields men’s and ladies’ football, hurling and handball, which makes it one of the broadest clubs in the county, and it is the obvious first call for anyone in the town looking to get a child playing.
The county championship itself is generally won elsewhere. Scotstown in the north of the county have dominated it in recent years. Clontibret O’Neills and Ballybay Pearse Brothers are the other names that come up most often on the roll of honour. Club football here is taken seriously and the county final is a large occasion in its own right.
Hurling and camogie exist but are minority codes in Monaghan, and handball has a longer tradition than most people expect.
Fixtures, tickets and going to a game
Fixtures, results and ticket links for county and club games are on monaghangaa.ie, which is the only source worth using. Club fixtures change at short notice, particularly in the summer when county players are unavailable, so check the day before rather than the week before.
Club championship games are cheap, unticketed in advance in most cases, and played at grounds around the county on summer evenings and Sunday afternoons. If you want to understand what football means here without paying Ulster final prices, that is where to go.
There is more on the rest of the county’s sport, including soccer, rugby, swimming and golf, on the sport and leisure page. If you are in Monaghan for a match and have a day to fill around it, things to do covers the museum, the forest park and the town itself.
Details on this page last checked . If something here is out of date, it probably is our fault rather than yours.