Piers Morgan Mixing with international stars
St Colmcille’s in Belfast’s Unionist belt fell to the Troubles but excitement heralds a new GAA club...
ONE of Seamus O’Hare’s most vivid memories from his brief involvement with St Colmcille’s was arriving at their home pitch for a game and finding that there were no goalposts.
‘They were chopped down,’ he recalls.
In the club’s short and difficult history, that act of vandalism would barely register given the trauma that was to follow.
A club long lost to time – it folded in 1973 – those like O’Hare, who were once associated with it, had their memories stirred this week as news broke of an initiative, started by former London footballer Dave McGreevy, to establish a GAA club in east Belfast.
In a reminder that these are better times, McGreevy’s tweet over breakfast last Sunday morning grabbed the imagination of so many. Within a couple of days, it had attracted the interest of 100 potential members and the patronage of Linda Ervine, the sister-inlaw of the late Unionist politician David Ervine, who had agreed to become its president.
In the giddiness that a cross-community project could enjoy such a surge of support, the usual – but very important – housekeeping details may have been overlooked.
Before the venture sees the light of day, and is formally affiliated to the Down County Board, it has
‘MALONE RFC IS OPEN TO PROVIDING A PITCH TO THE NEW CLUB’
many administration duties to fulfil.
There is, after all, a club already in existence on the Malone Road, St Brigid’s, and any establishment of a new club will have to take that into account, but this week Down secretary Seán Óg McAteer expressed confidence there would not be a difficulty.
And with Malone RFC open to providing this proposed club a pitch, in what would still be regarded as a predominantly Unionist part of the city, the excitement is justified even if a long road lies ahead.
It is a different world to the one that St Colmcille’s departed. They were a curiosity, not least because they affiliated to Down rather than Antrim – they were perched on the border, but it was deeper identity issues which vaporised them from the history books.
It would be wrong to suggest that the tensions of being a GAA club in a Unionist community always overwhelmed and in the late 1960s, several of their players were regular attendees at the nearby Oval, home of Glentoran.
But social inequality sparked a civil rights campaign that would be met with brute force, a match was lit and the GAA club was on the front line to being torched.
While a written history of the club does not exist, an outstanding BBC radio documentary ‘Death of a Dream Team’ captures the essence of the club and the trauma that accompanied its demise. And, in so many ways, it offers a window on the early years of the Troubles.
There are a number of contributors to the programme, but few hold the attention as earnestly as their corner-forward Charlie O’Donnell.
He describes an evening on their pitch in the mainly loyalist Ballybeen estate in Dundonald when he saw thick black smoke filling the night sky, as Bombay Street burned to the ground – one of the iconic images of the Troubles.
A few years later, he would be left to stumble through the ruins of his family house on Grampian Avenue, blinded by similarly thick smoke.
The clarity of his recall still haunts: ‘I lost my father and the house in ’73. I went through the front door and into the back room where my father and mother were saying the Rosary.
‘I gave them a nod to say I was calling into the neighbours and my father gave me the thumbs-up and that was the last time I saw him. ‘Somebody threw a brick through the front window and that was followed by a pipe bomb. My father went into the room to try and lift it or extinguish it and my mother went out through the front when the explosion occurred.
‘I remember seeing the flash and I left the neighbour’s house and met my mother and she was bleeding after she was caught by some of the mortar in her head.
‘I went to Strandtown (police) station and I was told by somebody what happened. I asked, “my father is dead, isn’t he” and he said, “yup, he is”.’
The murder of Charlie O’Donnell senior would pretty much be the end for the club, but it was the final incident of many that had seen its members brutalised and terrorised.
‘We were not going to let them defeat us. That was the attitude of the club but unfortunately circumstances prevailed, they did beat us,’ says one former club member.
The pub they drank in, a kind of unofficial clubhouse, Paddy Lamb’s on the Newtownards Road, was blown up, club chairman John McKeown was shot at, players were physically beaten up and one even escaped an abduction bid.
O’Hare was never a member of St Colmcille’s – to this day he is still a serving member of St John’s – but living in Ballyhackamore, he provided his help as an experienced administrator. He, too, paid with his business. ‘I had a fruit shop in Hollywood Arches and I was burned out in 1974 because I was a Catholic, a Nationalist, a GAA man. I lost it all,’ he recalled this week.
In the end, the club was deprived of its lifeblood. As sectarian mindsets grew more poisonous, Catholics fled in their hundreds.
Local primary school, St Joseph’s on Holland Drive, saw the number of its students drop from 700 at its peak to 150 in the early 1970s.
‘Players and parents felt it was too dangerous to continue playing because of the level of intimidation,’ recalled McKeown in the documentary.
The cruelest twist came six years after the club folded, when former midfielder Michael Cassidy was shot dead. He was a good friend of O’Donnell’s, who recalls: ‘He was a nice fellow and a really good footballer. He was a barman at that time when he played but later joined the prison service.’
That was enough, in the clinical language of the IRA at the time, to make him a ‘legitimate target’.
On April 15, 1979, as the 31-yearold left St Macartan’s Cathedral, Clogher, having attended his sister’s wedding, and holding the hand of his three-year-old daughter, he was approached by an IRA gunman who told the rest of the guests to lie down. Shot four times, he died instantly.
Even in times when people had been partly numbed to the horror, such savagery shocked.
The club Cassidy once played for may be long gone, but should it be replaced by one that enjoys the support of a community that has known too much division, it would seem an appropriate way to honour his memory.
There is a way to go yet, but this week was a step on the right path.
‘IT WAS TOO DANGEROUS TO CONTINUE BECAUSE OF INTIMIDATION’