Slaughtneil: From the dance floor to the mountain top

A 2016 hat-trick of Derry senior titles for Slaughtneil – football, hurling and camogie, writes Paul Keane

Wed, 28 Dec, 2016 - 00:00

A disco in Slaughtneil, at the foothills of the Sperrin Mountains. The suggestion, pitched by one of the younger members of the GAA club’s committee, got the short shrift it deserved.

“Everyone just looked around to yer man and said, ‘will ya wise up. That’ll not work up here’,” recalled Sean McGuigan. “Then the floor went quiet for a while and the next thing someone says, ‘well, hold on now, maybe we could try it’.”

Necessity, in effect, gave birth to invention in the early 1980s in south Derry. Surrounded by hills as far as the eye could see, and not a shop or a pub in sight, Slaughtneil had just built a terrific new hall - reputed to be the biggest in Ulster GAA - and were starting to get a little queasy about how they might actually fill it.

“So it was decided to give the disco idea a go, a junior disco for teenagers,” continued McGuigan, now the club chairman. “I think the success of it was that parents were content because Slaughtneil GAA people were stewarding the buses in and out and looking after the thing all night. And sure we only charged a pound a head for years so it quickly became a roaring success.”

McGuigan recalls driving back from Maghera to Slaughtneil one night maybe a decade later. The disco was on and he had a passenger with him as he carefully navigated the winding roads up around the Glenshane Pass towards home.

Guy Pearce, the actor from Neighbours who featured in Hollywood blockbusters like LA Confidential, had agreed to come out for the night.

Word had got back from another club chairman that Pearce was in Northern Ireland and sure it couldn’t hurt to invite him out. Mightn’t it bring a few hundred more through the door than normal?

“I lifted him myself in Maghera and we came out across the mountain in the car to the disco,” said McGuigan. “We must have had 1,500 young ones out that night. All there to see Guy Pearce.

“I do remember I had to console him a bit because he was wondering where all the bright lights had gone when we were crossing the mountain. It was black dark and wee, narrow roads. He didn’t know where he was going. “But he stayed for the night and had the craic. My own son went to it. He stood up on the stage and signed autographs and talked away to everyone. It went down brilliant.”

The Slaughtneil GAA disco. Chances are if you were a 15-year-old in Derry in the 1980s or 1990s, you experienced it for yourself.

McGuigan’s interest was piqued a couple of years back while listening to a sports report on BBC Radio about the club’s first Ulster football title triumph. He smiled at the sudden turn in conversation.

“When the sports reporter was finished up he passed it back over to the girl doing the main news and she stopped for a second and said to him live on air, ‘Slaughtneil, I used to go there to the discos’.”

John Joe Kearney, the assistant football manager alongside Mickey Moran, was passing through JFK Airport a few years ago when something similar happened.

“I was in the States going through clearance in JFK with my wife and we were standing in the queue,” explained Kearney. “I could hear young people behind the counter speaking and I said to my wife, ‘they’re from our part of the country you know’. I said to the girl, ‘you’ll be close to home if you’re ever around Dungiven’. I was only chancing my arm about Dungiven but she says, ‘God, how did you know that?’ I says, ‘sure I seen you around Slaughtneil disco’ and she laughed. She knew it well.”

Joe Brolly insists he never partied in Slaughtneil but was aware of the disco and its reputation. The ‘beginnings of the sexual revolution in Derry’ is how he has referred to it.

“When the car lights hit the pitch all you could see was teenage boys and girls ‘wrestling’, dotted all around like rabbits in a meadow,” recalled the Dungiven man.

If it sounds like a curious love story it’s because that’s exactly what it was, one of fleeting teenage love, every weekend for 20 years or so, but also one of longer lasting, more tangible love between a GAA member and his/her club.

The disco was a serious undertaking which required a huge voluntary effort from the local community for many years. Two club members were detailed to travel on each bus to ferry teenagers back and forth from towns and villages around the county. “Myself and John Joe partnered up on a bus out to Craigbane on the Donegal border one night,” said McGuigan. Bulging pockets were frisked and back at the disco anyone who’d made it that far with beer cans or bottles of spirits were relieved of their goods.

“We put it straight down the drain,” said Kearney. “Some people within the club who took a drink themselves weren’t agreeable with that but it was our policy.”

A labour of love is perhaps a better way of describing it all but it paid off. Big time. “Money was pouring into the club coffers,” noted Brolly. “They haven’t squandered it.”

“It was very, very successful for us,” said Kearney, pointing to the impressive facilities the club now boasts. The hall is still going strong, popping up in various newsreels whenever their latest homecoming celebration is chronicled, and outside there are four pitches that accommodate the playing population derived from 300 or so local houses.

“We generated quite a bit of funds from those discos,” said Kearney. “It allowed us to build a new stand, we developed a new pitch, all sorts.

“And you know where it all came from? A big draw back in 1983 or 1984 when we sold tickets for 50 pounds each to build the hall in the first place. The money raised from that draw built the hall.”

It was a visionary move that has reaped a remarkable reward. This Christmas, Slaughtneil teams own the Ulster football, hurling and camogie titles and a straight line can be drawn from that decision to sell tickets for a new hall right through to the disco years and the various pitch developments and on to the current champagne days.

It’s worth taking a drive out to the club some sunny day just to put it all into perspective, what they’ve built. Out of the various shades of green and brown that dominate the eye line for miles, the GAA club is a manicured oasis.

Colm Parkinson was interviewing Slaughtneil and Derry footballer Chrissy McKaigue recently about the ‘village’ and what has been achieved by so few.

“I was pulling my hair out - it’s not a village, it’s just houses and a GAA club!” smiled Kearney.

Just down the road the new An Carn complex is a welcome addition to the area. Developed by the Carntogher Community Association, in the shadow of the brooding Carntogher Mountain, part of its remit is to restore the Irish language in the area.

Their clear vision is for ‘a modern 21st century Gaeltacht’ and they are moving forward hand in hand with the GAA club to make that dream a reality.

The passing of Thomas Cassidy just days before Slaughtneil won the AIB Ulster club hurling final last month, however, has made the task immeasurably more difficult for both organisations.

One of the drivers of the An Carn project, his fingerprints can be found just about anywhere you care to look throughout the GAA club too.

Hurling was his game, a lifelong obsession, and perhaps even crueller than his passing after a long illness was the fact that just days later Slaughtneil became the first Derry team to win the Ulster title, lowering the 2012 All-Ireland champions Loughgiel Shamrocks.

His sons, Sean and Eanna, played in that game, and he had three daughters - Aoife, Brona and Eilis - on the camogie team that drew with Loughiel the same day. The camogs got the job done in the replay and Aoife captained the team.

“Daddy would be so happy today to see us as Ulster champions,” said Aoife afterwards, choked by emotion.

Dominic McKinley, the former Derry hurling manager who is part of Antrim’s current management team, fought back the tears too. “It was Thomas that brought me to the club,” revealed McKinley.

McKaigue captained the hurlers in their success and acknowledged the debt he owed to the community’s pillar.

“He made me captain of the U-12 team that won the championship for the first time in 2000,” said McKaigue. “People tend to forget those things. It snowballed from there.”

McGuigan played a little football with Cassidy in their youth. A towering man well over six foot, they used to shout at McGuigan to mind poor Thomas when they’d all go up for a ball at midfield.

This was not a man who needed minding though. In fact, he was Slaughtneil’s shepherd.

“We’ll never repay the debt we owe that man as a club and as a community,” said McGuigan. “I’d say he was out loads of money over the years, actually I’m convinced of that, but he never asked for a penny. He sold a car once and bought a bus to help bring people around to games, that’s a true story.

“I remember when he was building a garage at the back of his house he put in extra space at the back if anyone visiting the club needed a place to stay over.

“It’s down to him that we’re Ulster hurling champions. He got help surely from everyone in the club but he was a fella who just constantly went out on a limb. It wouldn’t have happened without him.”

At the recent Derry GAA awards night, it was decided that the Laoch Gael award for 2016 was to be ‘awarded posthumously to the late, great Thomas Cassidy’. Slaughtneil will be a lonelier place without its guru but the club will endure and regenerate. It’s in their DNA to do so.

In the run up to Slaughtneil’s appearance in the 2015 AIB All-Ireland club football final, Dermot McPeake expertly chronicled how the county final team of 1969 spawned so many of the present players who have picked up the baton and ran with it.

“That would be spot on,” said Kearney, who played in ‘69. “Patsy Bradley’s father, Mickey, and me would have played together. You could go on and on.”

That ‘69 Slaughtneil team was the first to reach a county final. Actually winning one remained a glass ceiling they didn’t smash through until 2004. They’ve got four titles now, two Ulster crowns and are just loving the fact that they’ve prompted a conversation at Croke Park about what they’ll do if both the Slaughtneil footballers and hurlers reach their respective All-Ireland club finals on St Patrick’s Day.

“I was lucky enough in ‘65 to be part of the first Derry minor team to win the All-Ireland,” said Kearney. “It was the first All-Ireland we’d won at any level.

“It’s a nice memory and I was saying that to my young lad recently, he’s finished up playing now, but I’ve told him to keep the clippings from all of these occasions because he’ll want to look back through them in 20 and 30 years’ time and remember how good it was.”

For the younger members of the club it’ll take a little longer for it all to seep in. A batch of minors were drafted into the senior football panel in recent seasons and have known nothing but success. They’ve won three Derry senior titles in a row and are on the crest of a wave that shows no sign of breaking.

In good time, they’ll learn about the Slaughtneil disco and how it funded the facilities they now enjoy and, eventually, the full extent of the contribution of men like Thomas Cassidy to their club and parish will dawn on them.

High noon for Slaughtneil’s quiet men

Paul Keane

“What ever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong, silent type? That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings, he just did what he had to do.”

- Tony Soprano.

There were, apparently, numerous attempts made to pull Patsy Bradley in off the construction sites and sit him down in an office role at the family business over the years, to take the strain off his battered body.

He wasn’t having it though. A lot like his long career in the Slaughtneil and Derry midfields, life at the coalface has always suited him just fine.

Bradley chatted with media on the eve of Slaughtneil’s 2015 AIB All-Ireland club semi-final appearance and was open and engaging.

Yet it was, as far as anyone was aware, about the only time he’d sat in front of a bunch of dictaphones despite a long and successful inter-county career.

“A collectors edition of The Irish News today. Page 62. An interview with Patsy Bradley “#frameit”, tweeted Paddy Heaney, the paper’s Gaelic Games correspondent.

Slaughtneil’s answer to Gary Cooper, you won’t find Patsy Bradley extending himself across social media platforms commenting on affairs of the day. Which is actually quite refreshing.

You get a strong sense that Mickey Moran (right) , Slaughtneil’s wisened manager, sees in Bradley a reflection of himself.

Bradley described Moran during that hen’s tooth of an interview as a ‘very quiet man’. Irony aside, he hit the bullseye as Moran is to ego what oil is to water.

John Morrison did a lot of the talking when he and Moran led Mayo on a summer of fun to the 2006 All-Ireland final and John Joe Kearney, the Slaughtneil assistant manager, has assumed a similar role for the three-in-a-row Derry champions.

“Whatever it is about the press or television Mickey just doesn’t want to get involved,” said Kearney. “I said in 2014 when we were in the Ulster final, ‘Now Mickey, you’re the manager of the team and this is your day’. We got back to the dressing-rooms afterwards and everyone was in a great mood. Mickey was out in a passage way and I went to get him for the media stuff. I couldn’t budge him. I knew there’d be a row if I kept on at him so I left it. That’s just the way he is.”

At this stage, Moran is not for turning. The former Derry, Sligo, Mayo, Donegal and Leitrim manager has long since made his mind up about the media. And that’s just fine with Kearney.

“He came in and talked at the interview about wanting to win one championship — he got to the All-Ireland in his first year and has done three-in-a-row in Derry, the man has performed wonders. I don’t think you’ll find anyone in Slaughtneil with a bad word for Mickey Moran.”

SLAUGHTNEIL SF: ROUND BY ROUND

Derry SFC 1st Round, Aug 19: Slaughtneil 0-15 Lavey 0-12

Derry SFC quarter-final, Sept 4: Slaughtneil 1-15 Newbridge 0-8

Derry SFC semi-final, Sept 25: Slaughtneil 2-9 Ballinderry 0-9

Derry SFC final, Oct 16: Slaughtneil 2-11 Loup 0-6

Ulster Club SFC quarter-final, Oct 30: Slaughtneil 0-12 Derrygonnelly Harps 0-7

Ulster Club SFC semi-final, Nov 13: Slaughtneil 1-11 Killyclogher 0-8

Ulster Club SFC final, Nov 27: Slaughtneil 0-12 Kilcoo 0-9

SLAUGHTNEIL SH; ROUND BY ROUND

Derry SHC 1st Round, Aug 13: Slaughtneil 6-30 Lavey 0-11

Derry SHC semi-final, Aug 28: Slaughtneil 1-29 Swatragh 0-9

Derry SHC final, Sept 11: Slaughtneil 2-19 Banagher 1-12