Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
O JOE MCAREE about how cold, rainy evenings inspired a stadium
and I knew every coach, and while I still know the coaches and managers, the players, I just can’t keep up with the names, there are just so many,” he said.
For the origins of the club, you have to go back 47 years. The story begins in April 1972 when Mcaree first joined the Swifts, then a junior side in the Mid-ulster League.
Back then, his focus was solely on developing the senior set-up – a job he would enjoy spectacular success with as the Stangmore Park men progressed into the old B Division, then into the Irish League’s top flight and all the way to the high watermark of their 70-year history, European football in 2006.
But it was in the early Eighties that the course of Mcaree’s career would change for ever after his son Rodney – who would go on to sign for Liverpool, then return to become a Swifts legend in his own right – turned up at his dad’s door with a football and a handful of friends demanding a proper game of football.
These were the early flickers of what would become Dungannon United Youth, formerly Dungannon Swifts Juniors, now a full-fledged youth football club independent of, yet still associated with, the Senior side half a mile down the road at Stangmore.
Today, they boast 16 teams including mini-soccer, one of the best football complexes in the country – The Joe Mcaree Junior Stadium, no less – a legacy of sending a host of players like Niall Mcginn and Liam Donnelly to fame and fortune across the water, while the driving force behind it all even has the initials MBE appended to his name now.
“But I didn’t name the stadium,” snapped Mcaree comically.
He had been away in Spain for 10 days with one of the youth teams and returned to see it renamed.
“It was a week before I could look at that sign. As I was walking past it I made sure I looked elsewhere because I didn’t want anyone to think I put that sign up of my own accord,” laughed Mcaree.
“It was Dixie Robinson who instigated it, got the committee to agree on it, and his words to them were, ‘What is the point in doing it when Joe’s gone and knows nothing about it, we might as well name it that now and at least he will be able to see it’.
“And I couldn’t wait until the local paper came out so I could clarify how it came about.
“But it’s an honour really, as was the MBE, and the part that I liked about that was when you go into the Great Hall in Buckingham Palace, they announce it, and when they announced, ‘Joe Mcaree, for services to sport and the community in Northern Ireland’, you know when they used that phrase, it was just very good, very good.” Joe Mcaree MBE everyone, some man for one man.