The Ballybofey battle that spawned a bitter Ulster rivalry
They’ve never been great neighbours and the archives detail two infamous clashes between Donegal and Tyrone in 1972, another in 1989 and several other fractious affairs. None, though, compares to the anarchy in 1973...
ON the morning of Friday June 29, 1973, the Donegal public woke up to the news that the county had plans to relocate to Connacht. ‘Donegal GAA will withdraw from Ulster?’ asked the Donegal Democrat in its front page headline. Five days had passed since a toxic Championship match with Tyrone in Ballybofey, but the anger remained raw.
As the two counties renew hostilities in today’s final Super 8 game, it is worth recalling what happened when the Red Hands last won a Championship game in Ballybofey. It’s a match that lives in infamy in Donegal and not because the county, defending their maiden Ulster title, lost by two points. The game itself was arguably the most controversial ever played inside Ulster – a province that is no stranger to contentious Championship matches.
Brian McEniff doesn’t know where the anger had come from. He was Donegal’s player-manager at the time, having led them to their first ever Ulster title the year before, at the age of 28. They beat Tyrone in the final, the two sides having clashed earlier that year in the National League.
McEniff’s own mother was from Carrickmore, the famous club that would later spawn Conor Gormley. He reckoned before that afternoon, there was always a friendly rivalry between the neighbours as they rarely met. They met for the first time in 1919 in Strabane – and only met on a dozen more occasions before that fateful day in 1973
But there was something different about that dark afternoon. A sinister air. By the end of what Pauric McShea, Donegal’s full-back, remembers as ‘the most physical game of football I was ever involved in’, bottles and cans were being flung on the field and Donegal players had to climb over the wire to get away from the anarchy on the terraces.
The following morning, the county secretary Frank Muldoon rang Ulster Council head Gerry Arthurs to demand an investigation. By the end of that call, Donegal was threatening to pull out of the province and move to Connacht.
Neilly Gallagher, the Michael Murphy of the day, had been coaxed back from a two-year sabbatical by McEniff and was the leader of the Donegal attack. By the 14th minute, the Gaoth Dobhair man had scored all three of his team’s points as they raced into an early lead.
And then all hell broke loose. With the ball at the other end of the field, Gallagher lay on the ground, a victim of, according to the Donegal Democrat ‘a savage assault… in cold blood with premeditation’. Muldoon would later claim that the blow was with something ‘other than a fist’.
Gallagher was knocked out cold and rushed to Letterkenny General Hospital, where swift surgery saved his eye. McShea remembers visiting him in the hospital that evening after the match.
‘He was a cult hero among our supporters so when he was taken off injured, it infuriated the Donegal supporters,’ McShea recalls.
There was more than 15,000 in Ballybofey, a big crowd in those days, and McEniff reckoned that more than half had travelled across the border.
‘That contributed to the nasty atmosphere around the ground. It was a politically-charged time in the North, and that spilled over into the crowd. You could hear the insults coming down from the crowd, that we were nothing but free state bastards. You heard that from supporters and from opposition players a lot around that time.’
McShea agrees that the Troubles fed into what transpired that day.
‘Life was sinister in Ulster at the time, in the Six Counties. There was a lot of violence, it was happening almost every day, and maybe that whole situation did feed into it,’ he says,
At half-time, with Donegal leading by a point, the teams had to run the gauntlet of flying bottles and cans as they made their way to the dressing-room. Control was lost, both in the crowd and on the field.
Fights were breaking out in the terraces. Kieran Keeney, who made his Championship debut that day as a sub for Gallagher, has recalled before of not even being able to warm up because of the threatening behaviour of the visiting fans.
Tyrone, captained by a teenage Frank McGuigan, won by two points, 0-12 to 1-7, but Martin Carney, in the Donegal half-back line that day, recalls that the most frightening experience came after the match.
‘We couldn’t get to the dressingroom. There were bottles and cans being flung onto the field. I remember we had to go down to the end of the pitch, climb over the wire and use a path along the river to get back to Jackson’s Hotel. I don’t ever remember a game of Championship football like it, it was played in an atmosphere of absolute anarchy,’ Carney says.
As the players made their way to Jackson’s Hotel, all the pubs in Ballybofey and Stranolar bolted their doors. With a concussed Gallagher lying in a hospital bed, Donegal County Board felt they needed to act swiftly. And they did so by undermining the whole provincial structure that underpinned the Association for 89 years.
McShea, who had a connection to Tyrone through his mother who came from Glencull (home to Peter Canavan and Mickey Harte) concedes it was a nasty game but felt the threat to go to Connacht was knee-jerk.
‘It was torrid, unsporting and vicious. In all my time involved in
Life was sinister in Ulster at the time, lots of violence
football, it was the most physical game I can remember, But the suggestion made at the time that Donegal were going to leave Ulster and join Connacht, I thought was misguided, and an extreme reaction to what had happened,’ McShea says.
‘Donegal people are very proud of being from Ulster. We wouldn’t want to play in any other province. What happened in that game, and afterwards, left a sour taste but I don’t think that should have been broached as a possible solution.’
The plan was discussed at the next county board meeting but never really got off the ground. It is unlikely to have had much support among Connacht counties, especially the big three. McEniff had avoided all that controversy. The morning after the anarchic match, he packed his family into the car and headed for Ballyhea in Cork, to visit his wife’s family.
He remembers stopping to ask directions off a farmer on a bicycle outside Doneraile. ‘You didn’t do too well yesterday was the first thing he said to me,’ McEniff laughs. ‘He was lucky him and the bike didn’t end up in the ditch. How he knew me, I don’t know.’
The following year, the draw pitted Donegal and Tyrone together again in Ulster, this time in Omagh. Mindful of the madness of the year before, McEniff (right) was taking no chances. The team stayed in Jackson’s Hotel the night before the game and togged out in Ballybofey before boarding the team bus.
‘Michael Lafferty, who made his Championship debut in that 1973 game, his father was driving the bus and he knew a few backroads and short-cuts both to and back from Omagh. We didn’t stick around. Came off the bus togged out, got the job done and went straight back on the bus,’ McEniff recalls. McShea was Donegal captain in 1974 and he felt that once they had beaten Tyrone in Healy Park that they were well on their way to regaining the Ulster title. At the time, they were driving each other on. Making each other better. Forty-five years on, Donegal and Tyrone meet in the biggest Championship game to be played in Ballybofey. It will be tense and the atmosphere will be heated. But it will be nothing like what happened back in 1973.