The Gweedore star doesn’t have time for politics just now
Life may be bursting at the seams with contentment following the arrival of twins earlier this year, but football continues to sweeten life even more for Eamon McGee
IF HE ever gets the chance, Eamon McGee would like to reach out and grab the hand of Seamus Hickey. McGee’s deference to the Limerick hurling star has nothing to do with his role as head of the Gaelic Players Association, and everything to do with his dual status as an All-Ireland winner and the father of baby twins.
‘I was reading about him this year and I was thinking to myself he deserved two All-Ireland medals for managing that,’ laughs McGee.
He is only half-joking; his own life is bursting at the seams with contentment. The arrival of Luca and Evie eight months ago to provide company for two-and-a-half-yearold Daisy has meant that for him and his partner Joanne, life is a gloriously, sleepless fairground ride. And out of the house, football continues to sugar what could hardly taste sweeter right now.
Today, he steps out with Gweedore at Healy Park as they seek to reach a first ever Ulster Club final. And even though, at 34, he is in the twilight of his career, he has been issued the licence to go play for fun once more.
He finished his inter-county days reddening the ears of the likes of Kieran Donaghy and Sean Cavanagh as a powerful man-marking force in the heart of the Donegal defence, but with his own club he is more Messi than messer.
He plays in a more advanced role, loading bullets as he did in the county final where he had three assists for their first four points against Glenties, including one for Kevin Cassidy.
The photograph of the pair of them afterwards beaming into a smartphone was a reminder that more than a county title was at stake.
Once the tightest of friends, their relationship fractured when McGee, and his younger sibling Neil, stood behind Jim McGuinness’s decision to expel Cassidy from the county panel, owing to his unauthorised contribution to a book in 2011.
It cut so deep that it ended up poisoning a friendship. However, playing and winning together has done much to heal the rift, even if the scar will always be there.
‘We would still disagree. I have said it to Kevin that the nature of our personalities is that we are going to disagree until the day that we die. We are two big personalities and we are going to disagree on a lot of things, and we are diametrically opposed on a lot of things, but it was important to build that bridge over how he felt he was let down. Hopefully now that we have won a county together again that will go towards the healing process,’ McGee states.
‘Even sitting down and having a conversation is something we would not be able to have four years ago. He has twins and I am just starting out with twins, he is eight years into that journey and I am at the start, and just to be able to bounce off him as to when will there be light at the end of the tunnel, and when will we start sleeping again, is a great thing. We had not been able to do that. It is only in the last year when we all started putting our shoulder to the wheel with Gweedore to win the championship that that has really happened. ‘I honestly don’t think we will be best buds again but we are well on the way to healing that hurt,’ says McGee. But then McGee’s gift is never backing away from deep and personal issues, and finding the resolve to overcome strife. He has been open about his own mental health issues, having suffered from panic attacks as a young man, and about what was, at onetime, a dangerous relationship with alcohol. But in coming out the other side, he has become a strong voice for social change. He was one of the most prominent faces in support of same-sex marriage campaign, and subsequently in the Repeal the Eighth referendum last year. But while he has no regret about the latter, he was left shocked with just how low the faceless go.
‘There were times when you were thinking, because it was much more emotive than the marriage referendum, “Is this worth the hassle?” There were times when it became very difficult. For me personally, and for people I know, it was important that we repealed it because I have two daughters and a partner,’ says McGee
‘But it was very hurtful. I mean you have people talking s***e about you, writing about your twins online. I know how toxic Twitter and Facebook can be, but it is not until you actually experience it that you realise how bad it can be.
‘I was at work one day and a friend of mine pointed out some of the stuff that was being written about the twins online. I was thinking, “Why are my twins being brought into the conversation? Why am in being referred to as being a ‘baby killer’?” It was deeply hurtful.’
His social activism had left him toying with a career in politics, but it is something he has parked now because he believes the personal price would be just too high.
‘I have had these conversations about a possible political career. It is something that definitely did interest me but, and this is my experience, you can have all of these grand plans but you will not change the political system,’ McGee says. ‘It changes you and, in the end, you have to bend to it. I would not be willing to bend.
‘You see how Labour sold so many of their principles just so that they could be in government. They betrayed a lot of what they were
‘YOU HAVE TO CHANGE FOR POLITICS, AND I WOULDN’T BE WILLING TO’
about. My fear is that I would have to betray my principles if I were to get involved.
‘It would just not be for me at the minute but that can change, too, because I was looking at the clousters in the presidential campaign and it left me thinking, “Is that really the best we can come up with?”’
Right now, though, the best he wants to come up with is for Gweedore.
They are Donegal’s must successful club, and yet they are perceived to be renegades as much as aristocrats. They have always been seen as a law unto themselves and if McGee has one regret, it is that they tried too hard to live up to that image, which is one reason why his third county medal came 12 years after his second.
‘As a club we just got into a rut. There was a bad culture. It was just not a healthy culture for winning,’ he admits. ‘We were probably like the Cork of the club scene. If there was a chance we could have sailed off and created our own little republic, we would have.
‘That is the way we were viewed and to be honest that held us back as players for long enough. We lived up to the reputation as to whatever the outside world saw Gweedore as,’ he suggests.
But a glut of young talent – their Under 21s romped to the Ulster title earlier this year – and the momentum gifted by the appointment of Mervyn O’Donnell as manager has taken them to this place.
‘This seemed so far away for so long in my career but this year made me realise just how much it means to win with the club and with the lads you grew up with.
‘We are trying now to turn our identity into a positive where, I don’t know if “madness” is the right word, but where there is that rawness which says we will not back away from any challenge.’
And he never has.