FROM MAYHEM AND CHAOS TO THE NORTHERN POWERHOUSE

Peace process a parallel for the fortunes of the Ulster teams

Derry edged past Kerry in Tralee. Monaghan (inset) had a point to spare over All-ireland champions Dublin while Donegal, Tyrone, Down, Antrim, Cavan and Armagh also started with a W.

That leaves Fermanagh as Ulster’s outliers. Their game with Meath ended in a draw.

Once upon a time a Royals draw with Fermanagh would have been viewed as an embarrassment.

Not now.

Since Meath’s last All-ireland final appearance in 2001, eight of Ulster’s nine counties have reached an All-ireland semifinal, performances backed up by a level of consistency not seen elsewhere in Ireland.

While Dublin and Kerry remain football’s standard bearers – Dublin claiming nine All-irelands this century, Kerry seven – no province has come close to matching Ulster for depth.

Consider this: 17 different counties have reached an All-ireland semi-final since the turn of the Millennium. Eight have been from Ulster.

Since 1990, ten different counties have won the Allireland, five from Ulster, five from everywhere else.

Before this quiet revolution began, Ulster’s champions won just two All-ireland semi-finals between 1969 and 1990. There have been 14 semi-final victories by Ulster teams since.

There have also been ten All-ireland wins by Ulster teams in that timeframe (Tyrone four), Down (two), Donegal (two), Derry (one), Armagh (one) – compared to just eight in the previous 104 Championships.

Once the sick man of Gaelic football, Ulster football is now a force.

So what changed? If you think it is a coincidence that the general upturn in Ulster performances on a national level stems from a more stable political background, then run your eye over what happened in the decade before the Troubles began and the decades after it ended.

In the 1960s, Down were the game’s dominant force, winning three All-irelands, three National Leagues. The last of those came in 1968, a year before the Troubles began.

And then the slide began, not just politically but also on the sporting fields.

The mayhem of the 1970s and 80s was best described by the late Sean Mcguinness, the former Antrim and Down hurling manager.

“It was chaos, those years,” he told me in an interview back in 2001.

“We’d travel to games and regularly be stopped at checkpoints. Five fellas in a car, we’d be told to empty the contents of our car boot. They (British soldiers) would snap our hurls in two. Pure badness. Once they found toothpaste in a fella’s gear bag and they squeezed every drop of it over our kit.

“That sort of thing happened week after week, year after year. It was a nightmare trying to run teams then. But it hardened your resolve, too. We kept at it.”

It wasn’t easy. Crossmaglen, remember, had part of their pitch taken by the

British Army. GAA members, including Bellaghy chairman, Sean Brown, were murdered. GAA clubhouses were targeted by arsonists. Eventually, when peace came, results improved.

In the 70s and 80s, Ulster’s champions were routinely hammered in Croke

Park in the Allireland semis,

Down losing by seven points in 71,

Tyrone by 15 in 73,

Derry by 16 in 76,

Down by 11 in 78,

Monaghan by 22 in 79.

Then, by 1991, something stirred. The ceasefires were still three years away but the political chaos of the 70s and early 80s had been replaced by a stalemate. A form of normality existed. Intercounty GAA teams responded, Ulster counties winning four Allirelands in a row (1991-94), Ulster’s club champions winning 10 All-irelands from 1997 on, having won four up until this point. A coincidence? Far from it.

Yet the changing political landscape wasn’t the only reason behind the upturn.

It is an unglamourous subject but there is little doubt that the coaching masterminds, starting with Derry’s Dessie Ryan, influenced Ulster football. Success started to arrive in the club, school and college scene in the 1980s in the Hogan Cup and Sigerson Cup.

“Winning wasn’t unusual,” said Down’s James Mccartan junior (inset), man of the match in the 1991 All-ireland. “After all we had won a Hogan (with his school St Colman’s, Newry), an All-ireland minor (with Down).”

They kept winning. Success begat success.

Coaching innovation was everywhere.

Mickey Harte brought in the blanket defence; Rory Gallagher and Jim Mcguinness (left) evolved those methods into something different.

Others copied and caught up. And yet even though Kerry and Dublin remain ahead, Ulster’s counties have stayed competitive. For a couple of decades they were anything but.

That’s what success looks like.