A journey, and a day, that lives long in Martin O’Neill’s memory
His speech was a charming, thoughtful discussion of the great anomalies, ironies, paradoxes, and even downright contradictions which characterised his life.
He remembered in fine detail his upbringing in an Irish working-class family in County Derry and told of how his family — like most of the nationalist families in his area — paraded their strong GAA background like a great defining banner, all the while looking askance at soccer.
Put simply: involvement in the GAA was a badge of real Irishness and a matter of considerable pride in that community. Martin O’Neill’s father was a founder-member of the Kilrea Pearses GAA club and O’Neill, himself, loved to play Gaelic football. His older brothers played football for Derry and this was something which he, too, aspired to do.
In his lecture, O’Neill recalled how many of his earliest memories revolved around travelling to Gaelic football matches.
And the highlight of these memories was the journey to the 1958 All-Ireland football final.
He was just six years old and was brought to the game by his mother. The fact that his brothers, Gerry and Leo, were part of the Derry team only added to the lustre of the occasion. This was the sort of pilgrimage that shines like a beacon from every childhood, a defining moment.
The journey to Croke Park in Dublin that September was, he remembered, their ‘Holy Grail’, the thing they had dreamed of and were now able to live.
And what a journey it was. The family left at 5.30am to drive the six hours to Dublin. The journey was shortened (despite the fact that they stopped to take mass on the way) by giving a lift to two young women who were hitching to Dublin for the match.
The women, he remembered, were marvellous singers who sang the county song of each county they passed through. They began with the Mountains of Pomeroy when they reached Tyrone and continued as they rolled across Armagh, Down, Louth and, finally, into Dublin.
Presumably, they even managed to wade their way through the sludge that is ‘Cockles and Mussels’.
Derry had been trained in 1957 by Paul Russell, the great Kerry footballer who introduced the methods used by the legendary Eamonn O’Sullivan to bring decades of success to Kerry.
The team had improved, but not enough to win an Ulster championship. Then, in 1958 the de facto trainer and manager of the team was their injured star, Roddy Gribben. Gribben was assisted by the team’s best player, Jim McKeever, a PE instructor who was one of the new generation of northern footballers who had reaped the benefits of the expansion of second-and third-level education in the years after World War Two.
A narrow first-round win over Antrim was followed by a breathtaking defeat of Cavan in which Derry scored four goals. The Ulster final against Down was played in front of 22,000 people and, although the match was disappointing, it resulted in a four-point win for Derry.
Next stop was Croke Park for a meeting with Kerry on a famously wet day. So brutal was the rain that the pre-match parade was abandoned. Kerry missed a succession of chances and were shocked by Derry, who claimed a one-point victory, with Sean O’Connell outstanding.
They were led to the final by the brilliant Jim McKeever and entered the game bathed in great hopes of defeating Dublin.
The footage that survives in the Irish Film Archive of that day is a reminder of how much Irish society has changed — and how much it has not changed at all.
The grainy colours of the film show people walking and cycling and heading by horse drawn tram down to Croke Park. There is nobody in a replica jersey; instead, there is a stream of people in their Sunday best, some wearing crepe paper hats and rosettes, and a couple have flags.
The best bit of the footage shows a few dozen men and women wading across the canal to get in to the terrace behind. And at the back of the Canal End Terrace there is a huge press of people attempting to push in through the turnstiles, driven on by the cheers of the crowd inside. Eventually, more the 73,000 people made it through the gates.
Dublin beat Mayo in the minor final on that day, but it was the senior game that brought the kind of novelty that renders an occasion historic.
When the Derry men took the field, their supporters were wild with excitement and the swell of their cheers during the parade rose above the stands — and up beyond the people who were sitting on the roof of the Nally Stand.
The religious aspect of Ireland in the 1950s was made vivid when the Bishop of Derry walked to the centre of the field to throw in the ball to start the match. As he reached the centre of the field, the referee (Simon Deignan from Cavan) went down on one knee and kissed his ring. The captains of the two teams — Jim McKeever and Kevin Heffernan — did exactly the same thing. In the background, two men were walking along the roof of the Upper Deck of the Cusack Stand, while others were lying back on the same roof, taking in the day.
The highlights of the match are fascinating to watch. There is fine fielding and kicking and some ferocious tackling, and there is a real stark difference when you see the amount of fly-kicking and dribbling on the ground by both teams. All over the field, time and again, there are contests for the ball. Gaelic football in the late 1950s was a game based on gaining territory rather than holding possession. And, just like modern hurling, the thrill of the game rested in the contest for the ball.
In the end, Dublin defeated Derry by six points (2-12 to 1-9) and claimed their first All-Ireland in 16 years. A joyful pitch invasion duly ensued. Indeed, a huge crowd was pouring out of Hill 16 even before the final whistle had blown.
Although his team had been beaten and his brothers had been denied an All-Ireland medal, Martin O’Neill recalled the occasion with great warmth as an extension of his Irishness, and a celebration of family and place and belonging.
In time, of course, O’Neill’s dream of playing for Derry and bringing the Sam Maguire across the border for the first time was displaced by dreams of soccer and of playing in the great soccer stadiums of England.
The place of soccer in Irish life was growing by the decade and the spread of television through the 1960s facilitated this process. The glitz and glamour of that world were now beamed into more and more Irish homes and drew in a new generation of Irish boys (girls were still left marooned and marginalised on the sidelines).
It is not that boys were not already interested in the game — more that TV sprinkled a little more magic dust onto the field.
The pull of the past and of tradition and of family remained powerful for Martin O’Neill, however. He continued to play Gaelic football throughout his schooldays and was a star of the St Malachy’s college team for whom he played after the family moved to Belfast. He was, equally, a brilliant soccer player who was making a name for himself with Distillery soccer club in the city.
With the ban on GAA members playing soccer then in place, O’Neill’s growing profile made controversy somewhat inevitable. When that controversy came, O’Neill saw it as a challenge to his Irishness and it left a foul taste in his mouth (and in his father’s).
Ultimately, O’Neill pursued a career in professional soccer in England and became the first Catholic to captain Northern Ireland, helping them to reach the quarter-finals of the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
Nonetheless, he retained vivid memories of his GAA past. And when he sees the boys from his home county run out onto Croke Park for Sunday’s minor final against Kerry, perhaps his mind will drift back almost 50 years to a day like no other in his childhood.
