1981 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship
gaelic football tournament
The 1981 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship was the 95th staging of the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship, the Gaelic Athletic Association's premier inter-county Gaelic football tournament. The championship began on 10 May 1981 and ended on 20 September 1981.
Kerry entered the championship as the defending champions and were hoping to win a record-equalling fourth successive championship title.
On 20 September 1981, Kerry won the championship following a 1–12 to 0–8 defeat of Offaly in the All-Ireland final. This was their 27th All-Ireland title and their fourth championship in succession.
Offaly's Matt Connor was the championship's top scorer with 1–31. Kerry's Jack O'Shea was the choice for Texaco Footballer of the Year.
Munster Championship format change
The normal system of 2 Quarter-final's and 2 Semi-final's is back.
Results
Connacht Senior Football Championship
Quarter-finals
Semi-finals
Final
Leinster Senior Football Championship
First round
Quarter-finals
Semi-finals
Final
Munster Senior Football Championship
Quarter-finals
Semi-finals
Final
Ulster Senior Football Championship
Preliminary round
Quarter-finals
Semi-finals
Final
All-Ireland Senior Football Championship
Semi-finals
Final
Championship statistics
Top scorers
Overall
Single game
Miscellaneous
London after six years in the Connacht championship play their games this year on home ground at Ruislip.
Mayo won their first Connacht title since 1969.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1981 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship” is gaelic football tournament. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through All-Ireland, Senior and Football, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “gaelic football tournament” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3612014. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 1969.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1981 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.