DONEGAL ICON BRIAN McENIFF SEES A WAY OUT OF CRISIS PLUS
Cocooned in an otherwise empty hotel, 77-year-old Donegal icon Brian McEniff retains his firm belief in human resolve and points out that ‘when you are in the GAA, you are never really alone’…
THE way Brian McEniff tells it, he might as well be reading a Donegal adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. The plot line is pretty much on the same track. A married couple looking after a big hotel during the off-season are faced with such numbing isolation that the man house-sitting starts to unravel.
But where King played it for shrieks of horror, McEniff can see the funny side.
Well, kind of anyway.
‘I am lucky in the sense that I have a big car park at the rear of the Holyrood Hotel so I do my exercise here,’ remarks McEniff.
‘The only car in the cark park is my own, so I walk around it three times a day, up and down, up and down, up and down.
‘It got so bad that one day last week, I got into the car, started it up, put on the radio and drove it around the car park, just to do something that I had not done in ages.
‘I think if anyone had seen me, the men in white coats would have called for me,’ he jokes.
These days, you take your laughs where you find them and for McEniff’s generation, right now, they take some unearthing.
As the nation tests positive in ever larger numbers for lockdown fatigue, those over 70 remain cocooned until Tuesday, when they have been advised they can go outside.
At the outset, that term drew up images of nesting – some place safe and warm – but for those living it, the reality is something very different.
McEniff is 77 and knows how vulnerable he and his wife, Mary, are to Covid-19.
‘We actually cocooned early, even before the lockdown. My nephew is a doctor and he rang us up and told us to “get in and stay in and let noone in”.
‘And that is where we are at now. ‘I am asthmatic so I have to mind myself. I did not develop it until I was 42 but it is something that you really have to watch given what we know about this virus.
‘But it is not right the way things are. I am chairman of the local club (Bundoran) and I am so used to going up to the pitch two or three days a week to watch an Under 8s match, or a ladies game or whatever was going on.
‘It is only walking distance for me up to the pitch. And all that now is gone, gone, gone.
‘I think people will have to take on the responsibility long-term to observe social distancing and all the other regulations because, until there is a vaccine for people like my wife and I, we will have to stay away so that we can stay well.’
IN many ways, McEniff serves as a reminder that business mirrors sport. The family have been in the hotel industry ever since his father John saw the potential in Bundoran as a holiday destination and bought the Holyrood Hotel in 1951.
As with football, what you get out of business owes much to what you have put in and he has paid his dues.
He now has six hotels, five in the north west – the Holyrood and the
Great Northern in Bundoran, the Sligo Southern and the Yeats Country Hotel in Sligo, as well as and the Westport Woods, along with the Dublin Skylon Hotel.
‘I would say, at this time of the year, about 400 people have been impacted in terms of their jobs in our hotels. That is hard,’ says McEniff.
‘I came through the
Northern Troubles,
I came through a couple of recessions
but this really bottoms it out in terms of what we are facing now.
‘And on top of that, the football is a big loss. Sport is a big thing to a lot of people, and it certainly is to me. I love football and hurling.’
The manner in which he conflates both of his passions in one stream of consciousness extends to finding a way out of this.
As ever, he is up for the fight. He believes the business he has built is robust enough to take the trauma and, in his eyes, the GAA can never be cowed.
This is the time, he argues, that both should rise up.
Speaking prior to the Government’s phased plan allowing hotels to reopen on July 20 and pubs by August 10, McEniff was adamant it could all be achieved.
‘There is a way to open the pubs,’ he explains.
‘For example, the fire officer could come into my bar in the Holyrood, and it is a big bar which could probably comfortable take 120 people, and he could turn around and say I am giving you a maximum of 50 people and that’s it.
‘I think if you do that, you can police social distancing. The first thing you would do is take every bar stool away because people are naturally drawn towards the counter and you leave just enough tables and chairs spaced out to facilitate 50 people. I am not saying it would be easy, but it is doable.
‘And in doing that, it would give people in the trade clarity on what they have to do and how they do it.’
But can he really see that happening this summer?
‘I would like to think so and I am not just saying that because I am in the business but the pub is a big part of Irish life and our culture.
‘My fear is that, if we are not in a position to let people out, then we are creating a whole new set of health issues, and mental health ones in particular.
‘And I think what is even worse, and should be of great concern, is that there seems to be an awful lot of drinking going on at home, according to what we are reading regarding alcohol sales.
‘I say this as a non-drinker and a pioneer, but I know that there is nothing worse than excessive drinking at home.
‘It is not healthy, it becomes more about the drink than actually going out and going into a bar, where it is more about the chat and who you meet than the tipple you are pouring into their glass.’
It would seem the return of inter-county action will be the final frontier on the precarious trudge back to something approaching normality.
But he can also see a pathway for the latter, too.
‘I would have a smaller Championship. You take the Ulster Championship, you could run off two quarter-finals on the Saturday, one in the east and one in the west, and the same on the Sunday.
‘The following weekend, you have two semi-finals, followed by the final a week later and the winner goes straight through to an All-Ireland semi-final.
‘If it has to be a reduced capacity, then so be it. But then all you have to do is move the games to the bigger venues with a reduced attendance where social distancing can be policed and if that means teams having to forego home advantage, then so be it because we need to think of the bigger picture now.
‘I think this is doable but we have to be willing to adapt. For example, we may need to cut down on the size of playing panels and backroom teams to make testing and social distancing easier.
‘I mean you could cut panels down to 21 and, just for one year, go with 13-a-side teams.
‘People are always talking about what the game might look like when
played like that so why not show them?
‘It would add interest and it the current circumstances, it would be practical. I think it is important that the inter-county Championship is played because I think if it goes ahead in some shape, it will give the whole country a lift. I can’t be the only one missing it.’
McENIFF isn’t the only one but few will be missing it more. Last week, in one of the better ideas to fill the sporting media vacuum, it was Donegal’s turn to feature on Newstalk’s Off The Ball Mount Rushmore challenge to name the county’s four most iconic sporting figures.
Naturally, he made it – Michael
Murphy, Packie Bonner and Sinéad Jennings the others – with his visage now metaphorically chiselled into the side of the Bluestack Mountains.
Oddly enough, even if this was a classic exercise in the subjective, the evangelical force that is 2012 All-Ireland winning boss Jim McGuinness didn’t make the cut.
That may all be down to opinion but here is a core truth – without the Life of Brian, the Jimmy’s Winning Matches sequel would never have aired.
McEniff’s fingerprints are all over Donegal football. He was the county’s first All-Star recipient in 1972 and of the 10 Ulster Championships they have won, he was involved in five and led them in 1992 to their first All-Ireland title, all of that and he even served a stint as county chairman.
It is almost 60 years since he first togged out for Donegal in the Championship – he was still a minor when he came off the bench in 1961 against Armagh. He spent four years in Canada but, while home on holidays in 1965, he lined out with the now defunct St Joseph’s and won a county medal.
‘The first time I ever saw a
Donegal county final, I played in it, because growing up I would have spent most of my childhood and teenage years in a Monaghan boarding school and, do you know, I never once spoke about Donegal football when I was there.
‘When I was a young boy growing up, there was absolutely no belief that Donegal could do anything and I would say that went for those who played as well. We had no belief, we went out hoping, not believing.
‘We played Leitrim in December 1971 and they had not won a match in over 12 months and yet they hammered us below in Carrick-onShannon. After that game, we had a chat in the dressing room and we said we would find a team manager but we could not find one and that is how I finished up there.
‘I will never forget that, sometime shortly after that, in The Sunday
Press, we were ranked 31 out of 32 in the country and the only team below us were the Kilkenny footballers.
‘But, you know what? With 13 of the lads that lost to Leitrim, we ended up the following year winning our first Ulster Championship. I always said that winning Ulster as a young player/manager in 1972 was as good as winning the All-Ireland in ’92 and I have always meant that.’
In a way that 1972 win changed everything, most importantly how Donegal viewed itself. Young Donegal boys were no longer sworn to a vow of silence when football talk peppered conversations.
Regrets? He has a few, but all ones he can live with it.
He believes he had a team good enough to win back-to-back All-Irelands, but it all got washed away in the 1993 Ulster final monsoon against Derry.
‘I always felt we won our All-Ireland late in that team’s cycle. Even still, ’93 is the big regret for me.
‘We ended up playing in a bog in Clones and the same day, we were without Martin ‘Rambo’ Gavigan, Noel Hegarty who was suspended, Donal Reid with a broken jaw, Tommy Ryan, our captain Anthony Molloy whose knee had given up at that stage and the biggest loss of all was Tony Boyle at full-forward, who picked up a mysterious injury that put him out of football for 12 months.
‘If you count those that is an awful lot of people to be short. Even then that game should have been played at Croke Park because they would have got a huge crowd.
‘The surface in Clones was not right. They grew the grass outside the town and when they put it in it was just like polythene, players were just sliding around the place.
‘In fact, in the minor game played before it one of the Tyrone players broke his leg, but, look, fair play to Derry, they had a really good team at the time too.’
Another regret is not getting the opportunity to manage Michael Murphy when he returned for a final stint as manager in the midnoughties, leading them to an AllIreland semi-final in 2004.
‘I just missed having him by two years. The greatest compliment I heard paid to him was when we went down to Cork last year and I called into Larry Tompkins and I asked him what he thought of Murphy and he said straight up he was the best footballer in the country for the last 10 years. That coming from Larry Tompkins said it all for me.
‘Murphy, for me, is an unreal footballer and an unreal man as well. He is someone who as a people and a county we are very proud of.’
High praise, but also the kind he might find coming straight back at him as he has made the time in recent weeks to reach out to old friends.
‘The one thing I have been doing for the last while is I have a list of telephone numbers in front of me for lads from 1972 to 1992 up to 2004 when I was last with them and I have been ringing around just to say hello to a number of the boys
‘These are some I would not have talked to in years, and if there is one good thing to come out of this, it is that it has given me the time to do that.
‘And when you are in the GAA, you are never really alone.’
‘I THINK IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THE CHAMPIONSHIP GETS PLAYED BECAUSE IT WILL GIVE US ALL A BIG LIFT’