UNDER SIEGE
Powerful insights into history of GAA in Ulster
THERE is a great ESPN 30 for 30-style documentary series to be made on modern GAA rivalries. Think of the hurlers of Cork and Kilkenny in the first half of the noughties, or Tipperary and the Cats from 2009 into the last decade. There’s also Kerry and Tyrone through the 2000s or Clare hurlers against the world in the late 1990s.
None would provide more drama, though, than Armagh and Tyrone in the first half of the 2000s. From Francie Bellew’s angelic, butter-wouldn’t melt expression as he stops another inside-forward in his tracks to Ryan McMenamin occasionally stepping over the line, there is a slew of fascinating characters. And some great action, too.
There was a peek of that drama on BBC 2 last Sunday when the 2005 replayed Ulster final kicked off the Beeb’s re-run series, which will look at great moments in the province’s sporting past.
Peter Canavan and Oisín McConville, two of the best pundits around, were asked to describe the enmity that existed between these two teams.
And while they both did their best to be diplomatic, you got the sense that they weren’t sending Christmas cards to each other.
McConville was all over our screens last Sunday. A couple of hours after talking about the Armagh-Tyrone wars of the 2000s, he and John McEntee formed the focus of ‘Crossmaglen Rangers: A Field of Dreams’ on BBC One, a repeat of the excellent documentary first screened in 2016 that captured the spirit of the South Armagh club.
With natural wit and a pleasant manner, McConville is comfortable in front of the camera and does a fine job articulating how the club’s success was partially rooted in defiance against the British Army, who had commandeered part of the GAA pitch to build their barracks.
‘Our attitude was; F*** youse. We’re going to win the All-Ireland anyway,’ McConville remembers.
Crossmaglen is known for football now, but in the late 1970s, it was saddled with the nickname ‘Bandit Country’ because of the IRA activity in the area.
McConville and McEntee were shown archive footage of an army officer in a helicopter above Crossmaglen saying: ‘Everybody who lives in this particular area is violently pro-the IRA.’
The two friends seem taken aback by the footage. ‘That’s some assumption to make for somebody flying in a helicopter over your town,’ McConville suggests, with both friends insisting they never came under any pressure to join the IRA. ‘I know for certain I was never asked,’ McEntee says. ‘I was too busy playing football, too busy getting educated, too busy trying to get on with life.’
McConville then adds with a smile: ‘I would have been too scared s**tless anyway.’
One of the most fascinating parts is when McConville meets Lee Lavis, a British soldier once stationed at the Barracks which was dismantled in 2007. ‘In my head, the Gaelic club was where all the local volunteers in IRA active service units would sit and come up with their plans to hit the Army patrols, of which I was a member,’ Lavis tells McConville, who counters ‘as far as I was concerned, you were the enemy, you were invading.’ The pair end up shaking hands. Oisín’s mother Margaret, known as Ms Crossmaglen as she has worked tirelessly for the GAA club for more than six decades, provided the most moving moment when she talked of the death of her teenage son Thomas in a swimming accident in Donegal and how it happened on the same day a young soldier was killed in the village.
‘His mother got a knock on the door that week, and so did I,’ she recalls. ‘The trauma and the grief were as great for her as they were for me.’ Wise words that encapsulate so much painful history.