When Kerry GAA's special branch spotted Donegal spy out on a limb
Donegal manager Jim McGuinness suggested espionage was rife in the GAA previously. Pic: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
Fitzgerald Stadium is a special place to Jim McGuinness.
When Donegal went down by double-scores (11 points), to Kerry in March 2012, five months before they reversed that result in an All-Ireland quarter-final and six prior to lifting the Sam Maguire Cup, he wasn’t too down in the dumps.
“This is the first time it’s happened to us in the last two years. It’s going to happen sometime and if it’s going to happen anywhere, this is the place.”
On Sunday, McGuinness returns to the Killarney venue with many expecting the visitors to turn over a depleted home side. It will also revive memories of the amusing Spygate story that preceded the counties’ 2014 All-Ireland final when a friend of the Donegal manager was spotted perched on a tree overlooking the stadium as Kerry trained five days out from the decider.
The ties between McGuinness and Patrick Roarty were undeniable. McGuinness had been his best man nine years earlier, they both hailed from Glenties although Roarty had been living in Kerry for some time.
So when Roarty was twigged (excuse the pun) up the tree on the grounds of St Finian’s Hospital, it was an awkward one for the Donegal manager. Roarty might not have been identified were it not for the fact he dropped his wallet as he made a dash for it.
Kerry had ended their long-held practice of open sessions the year before and on the evening in question Colm Cooper played his first game of football since he tore his cruciate against Castlebar Mitchels in Portlaoise the previous February. "That night he [Roarty] was there was the one night of the year I played football," said Cooper. "I played on the reserve team and just joined in.”
According to then county vice-chairman Ger Galvin who believed Roarty was recording the training session, he apologised for his actions the following day. Roarty had no official role in the Donegal set-up although McGuinness had joked after the semi-final that he might recruit somebody to do his biding. “I have a great group of friends down there and I am sending them an odd text at the moment that if you hear anything in the Kerry team to let me know.”
It was current Kerry chairman Patrick O’Sullivan, holding the same position in 2014, who noticed something unusual at the training session. “Nobody knew where Kerry were training at the time, which was a departure because it’d be said that you could read Kerry like a book,” recalls O’Sullivan now. “We would have gone to Fota Island in the past and there were probably people waiting above in Fota looking for us but we had the closed A v B session in Fitzgerald Stadium.
“I remember it being the sunniest of evenings, not a puff of air but I saw this tree shaking 100 miles an hour above the field. I said to [selector] Mikey Sheehy that there was somebody in the tree and he told me I was doting.
“Eddie Walsh and Niall O’Callaghan went up to have a look, came back and said there was nobody there. But no sooner had they come back the tree took off again. They were our two Sherlock Holmes and they saw him the second time around. I think he left a wallet behind him and Eddie, the pure detective, did some sleuthing into who he was.
“That bit of attention was something Kerry used at the time because we weren’t really expected to win that game. We were up against a Donegal team that had beaten Dublin.”
Speaking the day after the final in the team’s CityWest Hotel base where Roarty was also present, McGuinness addressed the story. “He [Roarty] is not associated to our camp but there’s no doubt he’s probably watching training. And we have that, we train in MacCumhaill Park some days and we have people in the [nearby] hotel, looking down from the hotel.
“I’m not saying it was Kerry. I’m not saying that. Previous years as well. We were playing a team and we worked out that one of the coaches was staying in a local hotel. This is what goes on.”
Privacy certainly means a hell of a lot to McGuinness. Insisting players give up their phones before matches and sign contracts during his first spell in charge were two means of how he tried to ensure everything in-house remained there.
But keeping out prying eyes was essential too. Training sessions and matches were and are under the proverbial and literal lock and key. When McGuinness was photographed helping out Galway in Tuam in 2020, he bemoaned: “That's social media. And it doesn't help when you've got somebody behind the goals filming it. But if you're being put up there as having fellas up trees in Kerry and filming training sessions, you can't be too hard on somebody behind the goals in Tuam."
Soon after being appointed for a second time in 2023, he went about raising €55,000 for a privacy fence around the team’s main training pitch in their centre of excellence in Convoy. Asked about the project a month later, McGuinness was flippant: “I can confirm that it’s not eight metres, it’s eight foot! I’m hoping we can get it triple-secured so the people who put out the stories in Donegal stay out! There’s no moat but there could be an electric fence!”
There have been anecdotal reports of the lengths Donegal have gone to in order to keep their recent challenge matches under wraps, although they wouldn’t be much different to what Dublin and others have been doing. Whatever about wanting to be a Marcelo Bielsa, nobody wants to be snooped on by one.
As for Roarty, he has played an active role in Kilcummin GAA and Killarney Celtic soccer clubs. He has also been the president of the Killarney Toastmasters, a member of the town’s musical society and is the lead singer with The Hardy Bucks band. Inspired by events in September 2014, “The Spy from Donegal” to the tune of “The Homes of Donegal” is not believed to be in their set-list.
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