Driving Kilcar

To find out how a club with just 300 playing members will have five players on active duty in Sunday’s All-Ireland finals, go back to 1979.

Back then, Kilcar was an entity surviving in Donegal’s football heartland. Surviving being the operative word. Then Michael Carr made his mark in Donegal colours book-marked by two Ulster titles in 1974 and 1983 and the landscape changed. In 1979, the national school, Scoil Chartha Naofa, was opened and the identity of the club returned. Before Jamesie and Martin McHugh, Carr’s presence provided the seed for a generation of domination. From 1975 to 1993, they claimed seven league titles and four county championships.

But when that generation passed, so too did the phase of dominance. While Martin McShane and Michael Hegarty kept the torch burning in the ‘90s and noughties and Mark McHugh lit the flame in 2012 it wasn’t really until the last weekend in August that the club became nationally relevant again. That was the day when club-mates Ryan McHugh and Stephen McBrearty earned man-of-the-match awards in the senior and minor semi-finals.