Hugh finally gets his hands on O’Donnell Cup medal
THE name McGinn is one that is synonymous with Louth’s most successful club - so it might come as a surprise to many that Hugh McGinn snr actually left Newtown Blues and lined out with O Raghallaigh’s for one season in 1973.
Not only that, but the father of current Blues forward Hugh jnr and former rugby international Vikki won a Cardinal O’Donnell Cup with the North Road men that year - but he never received his medal..... until now!
Hugh snr’s former O Raghallaigh’s teammate Terry Kelly, who captained that successful 1973 team, got to hear of the saga quite recently and he decided to sort it out once and for all.
And so, last Friday week, Hugh got a knock at his door in Drogheda’s Hardmans Gardens and there was Terry with a special delivery, albeit 47 years late!
Taking up the story, Hugh told this newspaper: ‘I’d been a sub in the Blues team the season before and I just wanted to play senior football, so I decided to go to O Raghallaigh’s for one year and we got through to the league final down in Ardee against St Bride’s.
‘I can’t remember if I was supposed to start that day or not, but Barry Coyle got injured in the warm-up, I was put in at centre half back and we won by three or four points I think.
‘Terry said to me what happened was that the medals were being handed out at a reunion night the following February. But the transfers were done before Christmas and I’d already gone back to the Blues by then, so they forgot about me.
‘I said it to O Raghallaigh’s fellas over the years ‘I never did get that medal off you’ and a few of them said ‘I must see about that’, but nothing happened.
‘I never said anything to Terry, but he told me he was out walking with the dog one day and someone said to him that Hugh never got that medal. Terry didn’t even know about it, but he went and got the medal done below in Aidan Brennan Jewellers in Dundalk.
‘On the day he came I was out the back, there was a knock at the door, my brother opened it and I could hear a man outside asking did Hugh McGinn live here. I was trying to figure out whose voice it was.
‘It was Terry and when he came in he said he had a medal for me.
‘It didn’t bother me that I didn’t have it before, but I should have got the medal and I want to thank Terry very much for looking after it for me after all these years.
‘I won four Senior Championships and two leagues with the Blues, and now I have three league medals. I’m delighted to get it, and it’s funny that O Raghallaigh’s have won nothing in senior football since!’