{"id":38839,"date":"2026-02-24T03:02:16","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T03:02:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.creativeireland.gov.ie\/event\/the-charlie-oleary-story-from-johnny-cullens-hill-to-the-olympic-stadium-rome\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T03:02:16","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T03:02:16","slug":"the-charlie-oleary-story-from-johnny-cullens-hill-to-the-olympic-stadium-rome","status":"publish","type":"event","link":"https:\/\/www.creativeireland.gov.ie\/en\/event\/the-charlie-oleary-story-from-johnny-cullens-hill-to-the-olympic-stadium-rome\/","title":{"rendered":"The Charlie O&#8217;Leary Story &#8211; From Johnny Cullen&#8217;s Hill to The Olympic  Stadium, Rome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A film based on the life of former Irish football kitman Charlie O&#8217;Leary. Charlie was born in&nbsp;<br \/>Dublin on the 1st of Feb 1924 &#8211; he is today 101 years of age &#8211; he is best known for being kitman on the&nbsp;Irish football team which qualified for the European Championships in 1988 and the World Cup in 1990&nbsp;and 1994. The team was then managed by legendary figure Jack Charlton and reached the Quarter&nbsp;Finals of the World Cup in 1990.<br \/>In 1945 as a teenager Charlie started the football street leagues for teenagers in East Wall, Dublin&nbsp;where teams were formed based on the street you lived on. The street leagues took off across Dublin&nbsp;and spread throughout the country to towns in Wexford, Carlow, Kilkenny, Cork, Limerick, Galway and&nbsp;Waterford.<br \/>These leagues led to alot of participants becoming professional footballers in England and in the League&nbsp;of Ireland in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s.<br \/>Through the street leagues Charlie became a referee and started off as a Junior League referee in 1959.&nbsp;By the 1960s he was a well known League of Ireland referee and became one of the first FIFA affiliated&nbsp;referees from Ireland which led Charlie to refereeing both club and International matches across&nbsp;Europe through the 1960s and early 1970s.<br \/>Charlie is the only referee in Irish modern history to referee a Junior, Intermediate, Senior and National&nbsp;Cup Finals in football in Ireland &#8211; the last match he refereed was the 1972 FAI Cup Final it was the first&nbsp;soccer cup final to be televised on RT\u00c9.<br \/>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":38840,"template":"","class_list":["post-38839","event","type-event","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Charlie O&#039;Leary Story - From Johnny Cullen&#039;s Hill to The Olympic Stadium, Rome - Creative Ireland Programme<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A film based on the life of former Irish football kitman Charlie O&#039;Leary.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.creativeireland.gov.ie\/en\/event\/the-charlie-oleary-story-from-johnny-cullens-hill-to-the-olympic-stadium-rome\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Charlie O&#039;Leary Story - From Johnny Cullen&#039;s Hill to The Olympic Stadium, Rome - Creative Ireland Programme\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A film based on the life of former Irish football kitman Charlie O&#8217;Leary. 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