GAA in The Troubles: ‘Results were smuggled into jail. You would hear a cheer if their club won a big game’
A British soldier on patrol in Belfast in March 1971. Picture: John Minihan/Evening Standard/Getty Images
For those signing up to the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, the choice was spelled out to them before they took their oath.
The fluffy stuff, the romance and all that, they got from monuments and old songs and stories about the glory of Old Ireland. The Belfast Brigade would dispense with niceties.
Being lucky was to spend the best part of your youth in prison while those outside were socialising and going to college, enjoying relationships, getting married, having families.
Could be worse though. Chances were, you could be mown down in a gun battle or blown up by your own bomb.
Fitting in a bit of Gaelic football? Sure, they had that four days a week in the Long Kesh cages.
Winning a senior Championship while on Active Service? It happened one man. Maybe more. We’ll come back to that.
In the meantime, picture the scene in the Aztec Stadium Mexico, when Brazil are crowning themselves the greatest most flamboyant and adored soccer team of all time as they hammer Italy 4-1 to lift the World Cup on June 21st, 1970.
On the same day, another team in a shade of yellow had arrived. The latest batch of great Antrim footballers had come along and beat Down in Casement Park, denying them a place in the Ulster final for the first time in 12 years.
In midfield, the huge figure of Frank Fitzsimons blotted out the cerebral Joe Lennon of Down. The All-Ireland champions of 18 months ago were gone.
But Fitzsimmons was jumpy about the whole thing. Once the game was over, he got offside. Staying about wasn’t an option for someone in the PIRA.
Onto July 5th and Taoiseach Jack Lynch makes an appeal for every illegal firearm in Belfast to be dumped.
The night before, the British Army stormed the Lower Falls Road, seizing ammunition and arms and placing the residents under curfew.
That included the Antrim centre-back Billy Millar who was smuggled to Newry for the Ulster semi-final. Antrim beat Monaghan 2-10 to 1-8, Aidan Hamill’s two goals and Andy McCallin’s threat carrying them through.
Derry, inspired by Eamon Coleman and Mickey Niblock beat them by four points in the Ulster final, but as 1970 made way for 1971, the footballers of Antrim would have been forgiven for thinking of themselves in a good place.
This is where dates get hazy, memory clouds over.
A lot of the time, that’s intentional. Some of this information is sensitive.
Here’s what we can nail down in sporting terms.
In 1969, Liam Boyle captained Antrim U21s to an All-Ireland U21 Championship. A few years later he was in prison.
The Antrim Vocational Schools team win an All-Ireland in 1968 beating Galway, and lose to Mayo in the 1971 final.
St Mary’s Christian Brothers won the MacRory Cup in 1971.
Antrim seniors were in the Ulster final of 1970.
But society in 1971 was curdling. Belfast was at the epicentre.
On January 13th, there were riots in Ballymurphy. Two days later, Ardoyne went up in flames.
From February 3rd, the British Army began conducting a series of house searches in Catholic areas of Belfast, prompting rioting and gun battles that lasted days.
Three days later, the first British soldier was killed by the IRA. Gunner Robert Curtis, a 20-year-old from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne was in Belfast less than a month and found himself dispersing a crowd in the New Lodge Road. Trying to evade a nail bomb blast, he was caught with a rake of fire from a Sterling submachine gun.
The same night, a Catholic civilian Bernard Watt and IRA man James Saunders were killed in north Belfast by the British Army.
The most stark statistics come in the raw data. Between police, British Army, paramilitary and civilians, there were 16 deaths in 1969. 26 a year later.
1971 had 171 deaths. 1972 had 476.
Throughout 1971, word was everywhere about the old British RAF base outside Lisburn that was being converted into a prison. It became known as Long Kesh.
It was opened on August 9th, when 342 men and boys were lifted from nationalist homes and interned without trial. 14 of them – The Hooded Men – were subjected to days of continuous torture. So as long as internment remained a policy, many others had to go on the run.
In that environment, family traditions came into play. Frank Fitzsimons’ father Francis had been a Republican in the 1940s. His mother was an O’Rawe, another staunch family.
“I have to be honest, my family was steeped in Republicanism,” he begins.
“My mother and father, the way it was in my house was family first, country was next and county was after that. Those were the things that kept us going at the time, and they were hard times.
But for years he played for club, county and his province.
“Football back then was the Holy Grail to us. You loved the club.
“I’ll give you an example. I travelled from Cork in the back of a container lorry, just to play a match.
“I was just in Cork and a fella called, he said he could bring me up. Five hours in the back of a container lorry. But I wasn’t the only one. There were a couple of lads who would have done the same. We loved the game that much.”
Others not from the same traditions were drawn in. Mickey Culbert was left-half forward on the U21 team that won the All-Ireland in 1969 and was a social worker getting married in August. He was far away from the ‘unemployed barman and bookies’ runners’ stereotype of an IRA man. He had relatives that fought in the First World War.
“I wasn’t a Republican, per se, I was more aware that things were not right. Basically, I was more Civil Rights-ish,” he says.
“But when we are talking about the currents of change, probably the major change was coming and it had nothing to do with me, was internment in 1971.
“The build-up of stuff was going on around us. I worked in the City Centre as a civil servant. And everything changed, there were no buses, people were walking to work. I remember walking down the Falls Road down to the top of Albert Street and there was a massive, massive mound of empty shells. The British Army must have been firing heavy machine guns.
“I wasn’t paying any attention to the Republican Movement at that stage. My intertest was still in the GAA, basketball and my girlfriend. To get up and down the Falls Road was very difficult from where I lived to where she lived.
He continues: “I would always have had an underside of support for violent Republicanism. I think probably the books you used to read about the IRA in the ‘20s and ‘30s and stuff. I know it might sound ridiculous. But my sympathies would have been with the IRA. And gradually I came to realise that the British Army weren’t there really, as they had said, to protect the Nationalist areas from the B Specials and the RUC.
“I came to that realisation with internment in 1971. That was a major catalyst for me. ‘This is like other countries, they are an invading army,’ which gradually led to me thinking, ‘ah, I might have to do something about this myself.’”
Andy McCallin didn’t want any of that. He was more concerned with perfecting his football and hurling and becoming one of the best exponents of either code in the country with St John’s and Antrim. His father, Andy senior, was Chairman of St John’s and they only had eyes for the GAA.
He won an All-Star in 1971, Antrim’s only such award in football, in the first year of the scheme. Seldom can an All-Star have been won in such trying conditions.
He acknowledges that, “Life was difficult. I was going with the wife, she lived in Beechmount at the time and I got over the barricades and would have walked the Falls Road, because you daren’t get a taxi or transport, and then walk home.
“You are trying to get to work, and in the middle of the night the bin lids are banging away like mad because that was to tell everybody the Army was about.
“But the things we had to go through in those times, and we did! I lived 600 yards from Casement. John Burns (Antrim full-back) lived on the other side of the town in Glengormley and he was able to make it to Casement come hell or high water.”
Domestically, subtle changes became massive. Entire clubs split between those who supported the ‘Officials’ and the ‘Provisionals.’ One club house was emptied one night and firebombed as the in-fighting between Republican factions raged.
Watching from as far away as America was Bob Murray. He had been a veteran of the Border Campaign in 1956 to 1962 and entered Crumlin Road gaol at just 18 for a ten-year sentence after an arms raid in Belfast.
Once he got out, he made for America. He was only there a matter of months before he was conscripted into the American Military. They didn’t ask about previous experience.
The pay was poor, but he discovered how to get a bit extra.
“You got $55 a month if you jumped out of the aeroplane, so I joined the 82nd Airborne Division. And that almost doubled my pay. Most of the time I was in America. There was a skirmish in the Dominican Republic once, but you were only in for two years,” he says.
He was working for NORAID (The Irish Northern Aid Committee, an Irish-American body that fundraised for the Provisional IRA) and looking at the front page news of American newspapers throughout 1971 when he decided to come home.
“I was involved before I went and I came back again. I didn’t spend any more time in prison, but I was arrested many, many times,” he says.
As soon as he got back, he got back involved with his club, St Paul’s. In times of curfew, the ability to go down to your local club and drink there in relative safety was a small comfort.
Maintaining a full programme of games was in itself another part of the resistance.
“It was sort of normal, the games were very important and very important for kids. You always kept the show on the road and we could get stopped going to games. We would be held up. But the games went on regardless.
“Everything went hand in hand. The war was going on, on a daily basis. It was going on in the street you were living in, and when you were going to play football and hurling.”
The sound of a helicopter above head was a constant throughout 1971.
Fitzsimons had to be secretive about his whereabouts. He saw little of his children for many years. Whenever there was a team photo, he would duck out and warnings were delivered to newspaper reporters to put his name down as AN OTHER.
Yet, he played throughout that summer.
He even went to America and played a few games with the Cavan team in New York and came back to captain Antrim in their Ulster Championship first-round 0-8 to 0-4 defeat to Derry.
Special Branch were gathering intelligence on GAA activity though and made a swoop once.
There were other audacious escapes, including one night in Glenavy when he was captured and in a police car. His captor took out a packet of Gallagher’s Blues cigarettes and after Fitzsimons’ request for one was turned down, he headbutted the policeman and forced open the door, making for safety when he and his accomplices all scattered in different directions.
But the most daring of all was the county final of 1971 in Casement Park. Lámh Dhearg won their very first title with Fitzsimons at centre-back, fending off McCallin’s St John’s who came with a late flurry of scores.
In the Ulster club, they were drawn to play Bryansford in Newcastle. But word came that a raid was in the offing. Fitzsimons stayed away.
Another day, Culbert was playing for St Gall’s against St John’s in Corrigan Park, half-deafened by the rotating blades of helicopters.
“It would have been around that time,” he recalls. “Low-flying over us. It was only later in the day when we realised they were taking the men from the Maidstone Ship (a prison ship moored in Belfast harbour) and moving them out to the new jail at Long Kesh. That was the flight path.”
In late July 1972, the biggest British Military operation since the Suez Crisis, Operation Motorman was launched with 22,000 soldiers deployed to take back control of nationalist ‘no-go’ areas.
Part of it was to take over Casement Park.
The following week, the Belfast clubs staged a protest and arrived outside the ground, before playing a series of small-sided games up and down the Andersonstown Road.
Being on the run, taking part in battles, the occasional snatched visit to relatives was a way of life. There was nothing glamourous about any of it. Prison or death was still only seconds away.
In 1974, Fitzsimons was charged and did a deal of sorts, admitting he was a member of Sinn Fein, getting three years.
Once inside, he introduced a Gaelic football league between the different huts in the compound.
“You had four huts, A, B, C and D,” he explains.
“‘A’ would have been the Tyrone lads, who would have fought with their fingernails. ‘B’ would have been Derry, ‘C’ was Down, and ‘D’ was Antrim. Antrim was always the best team. We had one of the best players in jail at that time, Liam Boyle (captain of the U-21 team in 1969).”
Clubs and counties sent in footballs and equipment. Some had snazzy rigs in the colours of their county, although they could have stood up by themselves with the stench.
Fitzsimons recalls going down to a hut to see an inmate, Dal Delaney who was in a bad way. People said he wasn’t far from death.
“So down I goes to him and the cell is like a Grotto. I said, ‘Well Dan, what about you?’
- “‘Ah, I am gone big man, I am gone,’” came the reply.
This was Antrim’s day to play Derry and Fitzsimons went back to his hut to get togged. While there, he told another to fetch what homemade Poteen they had left and run it down to Dal in the ‘Derry’ hut.
“The Gaelic pitch was right beside his cage. We were playing the lads in that cage and they were Derry lads. I was playing away and could hear this shouting halfway through the game, ‘Get into that big bastard! Hit him!’
“And who was it? Dal Deleaney swinging on the cage. He got better very quick with the help of the Poteen!”
He adds: “The whole secret inside jail was to keep the morale up. Everyone can get a blue day, they get blue days now. But whenever you are in jail, with a big sentence hanging over you, and you see friends walking out every other day...
Nowadays, Culbert helps former Republican prisoners as co-ordinator of COISTE, leaning on his social worker background. But he put down 16 years in Crumlin Road prison and Long Kesh after being found guilty through the Diplock judicial system of the murder of a UDR officer in Lisburn.
While inside, he was the results man.
“Every week I was smuggled in the GAA results,” he says.
“You used to shout out the results. The Irish News had a column with a narrow long piece of results from all the counties. So it was cut up and rolled up very tight, smuggled into jail. And I used to call out the results.
“So they came in every Monday. And you would hear the odd cheer from those inside if their club had won a big game.”
Around this time, Antrim football fell off a cliff. In senior football Championship, they won four games between 1970 to 2000. Internment and The Troubles decimated them.
Casement Park is still off limits to them, this time by more subtle means, a lack of will from political Unionism contributing to its’ ongoing dereliction.
“It went on too long. The Troubles,” adds Fitzsimons (Frank also had a son named after himself, who both played for and managed the Antrim senior football team and brought St Enda’s Glengormley to the All-Ireland Intermediate final in February 2019).
“What we took from the British Army and what we gave back was unbelievable. People think the IRA had thousands and thousands of men. You had the support within your own community, but as far as soldiers went, you hadn’t that much. And what you were working with wasn’t great.
“The British, what they had, well you might as well as went out with a catapult.”
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