BRIAN Seeley lives in the first of a trio of modest red brick dwellings side-by-side in the labyrinth of Lurgan’s Taghnevan estate.
When he sat in the front room before a game in the 1970s, Clan na Gael’s three-time Ulster-winning manager found himself picking the team half a dozen times.
Noel ‘Bumpy’ O’Hagan lives next door. He played on those teams and was part of the Armagh squad with his brother Jim for the 1977 All-Ireland final. Noel’s son Barry won an All-Ireland in 2002 with his next-door neighbour on the other side, Diarmaid Marsden.
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Stefan Campbell was born around the corner in the house still occupied by his brother John.
Proud sons of the Clans, in the heart of St Paul’s territory.
Around the corner, Andrew Murnin’s mother has the house decked from head to toe in orange and white, two little flags angled perfectly on the front gate.
Murnin could step out his back door and kick a ball into the grounds of St Paul’s, where he’s adored.
Gerry McConville coaches the local boxers out of a gym in the car park of the St Peter’s club in the north of the town.
He took his grandson to Croke Park two weeks ago for the semi-final. When a Kerry fan came in and sat in front of him, the young lad couldn’t see. But he wouldn’t move, holding tight until the obstacle in front caught on and shifted seats.
The lad wouldn’t budge because his seat was number 14 in the row and that is the number every youngster in St Paul’s wants.
When they play an underage game, the bag of jerseys is opened and there’s a scramble. Everyone wants to be Andrew Murnin.
His father, Andy Joe, moved in from Hilltown years ago but still goes up home to farm ewes on his uncles’ land. He is reckoned to be one of the fastest sheep-shearers in the country.
When he moved down, Andy Joe transferred from Clonduff to Éire Óg, the club that has Craigavon pretty much to itself just out the other side of Taghnevan.
Yards from the entrance to their ground, St Paul’s stalwart Shane McConville calls the car to a halt and points across the road at a memorial stone.
His cousin Eugene Toman was 21, same age as Sean Burns. Gervais McKerr, the driver, was ten years older when the car the three IRA men were travelling in was hit by 109 bullets in the moments after passing through an RUC checkpoint.
The police claimed at the time that the trio – who were suspected of involvement in a bomb that killed three RUC officers two weeks earlier - had driven through the checkpoint, which was strongly disputed by relatives of the trio.
Three officers charged with murder were later acquitted.
Several attempts to hold an inquest, resulting in numerous hearings, were abandoned.
Their killings were the first of six carried out by the same RUC unit in north Armagh over a five-week period in late 1982.
Portadown is six miles away.
This stretch of road ran through what was known as the north’s murder triangle during the worst of the 1970s.
Between them, Lurgan and Portadown will contribute seven men to Kieran McGeeney’s panel for Sunday’s All-Ireland final. All seven played some part in the semi-final win over Kerry.
There’s a lot of history on these roads and in these streets. Nobody wished it that way.
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THE high-peaked black roof of Brian Mallon’s house peeks over the trees and in at the Tír na nÓg pitch.
His timing, like that of his namesake Andy and peer Aaron Kernan, was just a bit lousy. They all arrived on the scene just after missing out on the greatest day in the county’s footballing history.
He played for Armagh for a decade, winning a few Ulster titles before retiring back to his roots.
Mallon lives at one end of the field and through the fence behind the other goal, you have a straight line of vision to Oisin Conaty’s front door.
Both men dabbled in a bit of soccer, one with Glenavon, the other with Portadown before they threw their chip stack in on Armagh.
Conaty is young to have done so but it was time to make a call. He’d played county minor under Ciaran McKeever and they’d kept tabs on him to the point where he made his championship debut with Armagh before Tír na nÓg.
Barry McDonald played on the same All-Ireland U21 winning team as Brian Mallon in 2004, and is now the club’s youth officer.
He wore seven the day of the final, just as Andrew McCann had two years previous when they’d brought Sam Maguire home.
Even though McCann had just transferred down that year to Senechalstown in Meath where he’d been living since 1997, he had enough townie confidence infused in him by the time his family had moved out from Tullylish when he was a young boy.
McCann went to Lismore Comprehensive and when he first went near an Armagh setup, found himself surrounded by MacRory footballers from the Abbey to St Colman’s to St Pat’s Armagh. But he dug in and made it anyway.
That’s just how things are in Portadown.
Before Brian Mallon owned that house he now lives in, rooms would have been rented in summer to American journalists there to cover the Drumcree dispute.
The Orange Order have not been allowed to complete their march down from the church through the nationalist Garvaghy Road since 1997.
Yet still they try. The Portadown Lodge have notified the Parades Commission of their intention to do so this Sunday at 3pm.
Despite their claim that residents of the Garvaghy Road will be too occupied with the match to be bothered, the two bands they’ve applied for will not be given permission.
The road is decorated with Armagh bunting from the bottom up to the turn into Ballyoran Park, where the Tír na nÓg club is sheltered in around the back.
The place would be taken over by soldiers hopping out in their hundreds from Chinook helicopters that would land in the middle of the pitch.
The fields beneath that roll down and then back up towards Drumcree church on the height would have been lined with rows of makeshift barbed wire fencing, complemented by the steel barricades placed on the road.
Standoffs had begun in 1995. Major violence became a staple of the summer.
Catholic taxi driver Michael McGoldrick, a graduate of Queen’s University days earlier, was murdered in a nearby sectarian attack at the height of the dispute in July, 1996.
Marchers were allowed down the road again in ‘96 and ‘97 before the newly-appointed Parades Commission said no more.
In those years, the club never had a home game in July.
Tír na nOg would like to buy the field nearest the club off the church because it’s the only place they have to expand their single-pitch facility. Maybe in time.
Linda O’Neill is the all-action community youth worker with Drumcree Centre at the entrance of a car wash organised to pay for the bunting that dresses the road.
One person who said he was a member of the Orange Order had just called in with a £25 donation.
In contrast, another driver screwed his window down going past and said had no change. “I only have this,” he said, holding up his Orange sash to them.
Some you win, some you lose.
They’re well accustomed to it, experts in gallows humour. It’s easy to be right now, baking beneath the warm glow of Armagh’s run to only its fifth ever All-Ireland final, seventy-one years after the first.
“The resilience within this community is second-to-none,” Linda says.
“Anything this community has, it has to campaign and struggle for.
“In the 1970s, when Catholic families were being people being forced out of their homes in other parts of Portadown, people moved here into houses that were still being built because there was nowhere else. The Catholic people were nearly like refugees, in all honesty.
“This is a triumphant celebration of our culture, but not in any triumphalist or supremacist way, not in the same way that bonfires go up and they burn things that remind them of us.
“These young people that I work with, they wouldn’t be permitted to do it. They’re not brought up to do it.
“They genuinely are enjoying the buzz. Oisin’s a role model, he works with the school, he works with Healthy Kids, he coaches and these kids all know him personally.”
Like so many towns, Portadown stays trying to shake off the hangover of its past.
It’s only in recent years that Tir na nÓg have been able to take down the spiked fencing and barbed wire on the open side of the pitch, remove cages from the dugouts that had to be put in because of anti-social behaviour.
Now the gates are open, the youngsters wear their jerseys about the place and they want to play.
Just like Andrew Murnin, Oisin Conaty’s father played for Eire Óg, but his mother’s people are Portadown and his grandfather on that side lives just around the corner.
On just about every winning Armagh team, you will find a Portadown link despite it all.
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THE sun is peeking through as Ruairi Lavery puts Clann Eireann’s senior footballers through an early Sunday morning session.
Urban and ambitious can be awkward bedfellows. They have several different bases dotted around the place. Main pitch here, second pitch there, a social club elsewhere.
In the way that GAA success stories often tend to, their 2021 county title hatched out of a row. It happened years earlier, when their ambition told them things had to change. Coaches had to be told that their years of service were involuntarily ending.
Time and trophies heal. All is good again, barring the impatience to win more.
Their ladies’ teams have been on the march for almost as long too and last year won their first Ulster senior title.
Shane McConville managed them to their first three Armagh titles back in the day, as well as an Ulster intermediate and a heartbreaking All-Ireland final defeat.
The senior championship trophy they play for and have won is the Marie Hoye Cup, named after his sister-in-law who passed away in 2006 after a long battle with cancer, far too young a woman.
She started ladies football in the club. When they claimed their first Ulster senior title last year, Dearbhla Coleman – whose father Tommy guided the men’s team to their county title three years ago – dedicated the win to Marie.
“I can’t even imagine what she would be thinking right now. Everyone in our team is related to Marie in some way, shape or form. It just means so much.”
There’s a bit of whatever you want at Clann Eireann. When Barry McCambridge pulled the cord on their revival two weeks ago, it was duly noted that he’d played handball for the club as a youngster.
They’ve traditionally fed off the Kilwilkie Estate that hasn’t had it easy either.
This is north Lurgan, where Clann Eireann run into St Peter’s, who meet Clan na Gael in the middle, who sit south alongside St Paul’s, who run into Éire Óg.
Heading out of town towards Lough Neagh, you have Wolfe Tones and Sarsfields.
Demarcation lines are impossible. Family ties are often the first criteria.
Clann Eireann’s Ryan Owens comes over to chat to McConville, the St Paul’s man who’s managed the rest, and Maghery too, taking them to glory in 2016.
Owens was supposed to play for St Peter’s. His uncle Brian McGeown was off the early ‘80s Armagh team and was supposed to pick Owens up for training one day when he was a beansprout.
“He didn’t come down to get me. He gets a bit of stick for that yet.”
Into the mix, McGeown is McConville’s godfather from a time when Brian dated Shane’s sister.
McConville lives out in a traditionally unionist part of Lurgan that has become Clann Eireann territory.
His sister Roisin lives just around the corner and is chairwoman of Clann Eireann. Her son Conor plays senior football.
Shane has a daughter on their committee and another on the St Paul’s committee. It’s all just impossible to untie.
One of the key figures in Clann Eireann’s rise was Brian Turbitt. He arrived in from Omagh, where he played his football, and took into coaching. He has no grandchildren yet but is back in with the Eireann Minis from four to eight years of age.
His son, Conor, has been one of Armagh’s star turns.
They’re a club that reaches out to suburbs that are laced with young professionals, yet retain their deep connection to the strongly republican Kilwilkie Estate that backs right on to the pitch.
As the crow flies, St Peter’s is less than 900m away.
Their patch of Lurgan is known as Freecrow, which local legend has it comes from crows being free to fly and feed there unlike in the Brownlow demesne opposite where wild bird and game shooting were a sport of choice.
The people would call Woodville ‘the Vatican City’ when rows of Catholic housing were erected in the 1970s.
The car park outside the Woodville Arms became known as ‘Wounded Knee’ because of all the punishment shootings that took place there.
St Peter’s club is based down the Back Lane. When they were at their height and competing with Clan na Gael’s greatest team, they would descend from Freecrow to Davitt Park in black and white like the Dutch oranje.
They’d bring a band with them and the Clans players would stand at the end of laneway watching them come down the hill, tunes going, women pushing a cavalcade of prams beneath a huge flag they’d unfurl.
That was the big Lurgan derby of the time, attracting crowds of over 3,000 people any time they met.
St Peter’s land is on the site of an old quarry and dump that the unionist Craigavon Council refused for years to let it.
The club took them to court in 1984 and were awarded £100,000 in compensation. The council appealed but that too was rejected by Lord Chief Justice Lowry who told the court that “in reaching their decision, unionist councillors in Craigavon appeared to have been motivated by sectarian bias.”
He found the council guilty of discrimination.
That’s almost 40 years ago. Now, Glenavon FC often train on their MUGA pitch. The boxing club shares a car park, they’ve a homely stand and work still to do.
Like an old overlord offering a reminder, an enormous Union Jack flag flies high right above them off the roof of Brownlow House, the home of the Orange Order that sits up two hundred yards away on a height.
Once a month on a Friday evening, the order would parade the town from top to bottom.
The third building down at the head of William Street in the nationalist part of town, the boarding on the ground floor windows and doors are painted over but the stained glass on the first floor remains.
‘Rosemary Nelson LLB Solicitor’.
Nelson was a solicitor in the town who became a target after taking on a number of high-profile cases. She had confided her fears to friends and employees, saying to one that “they are going to do a Pat Finucane on me”.
The last time Rosemary’s mother Sheila spoke to her daughter was the day before she was murdered in March 1999.
Sheila Nelson had noted the cold weather and unusual helicopter presence above the Kilwilkie Estate where Rosemary had been brought up.
One of the cases she’d taken on that led to death threats was that on behalf of the family of Robert Hamill, the Catholic man kicked and beaten to death coming home from a dance with friends while an RUC Land Rover sat parked yards away in 1997.
It was two months after she was killed by a booby-trap bomb left on her car that a band marched past her old office during a parade playing The Sash.
Pretty much since then, parades haven’t been allowed past the war memorial in the middle of town, out from where the unionist end lies.
The majority of people killed in Lurgan during the Troubles were Catholics, but there were Protestants and RUC men and soldiers murdered too.
“There was no limit to the suffering. Protestant people suffered too. Everybody suffered,” says Shane McConville.
The negative roll on his memory flicks back and forward as he sits in the passenger seat through the town he’s lived in and loved since he was born.
He’s 60 now.
At the heel of the terracing in Davitt Park, you back on to a small gate that leads into the grounds of St Paul’s school.
On a Friday afternoon, the call would come to their classroom and they would push through the gate to collect balls for the legendary Jimmy Smyth as he warmed up for whoever Armagh or the Clans were playing that weekend.
McConville tells a story of being caught ‘mitching’ off school one day, his handwriting failing the headmaster’s test.
“He said ‘you go down to Jimmy Smyth, he’ll give you your punishment’. And he made Jimmy take the captaincy [of the school team] off me and I wasn’t allowed to play for two matches.
“I hated school but I never mitched after it.”
Hated school but loved Jimmy. They all did. Adored him.
“He helped so many people around Lurgan, never mind football. Jimmy was a go-to man. It wouldn’t have mattered what your problem was.”
Violence could erupt as easily on the grass as the road. The lawlessness of 1970s football was in correlation to the frustration of what was happening to people and their inability to do anything about it. The field was somewhere you could release it.
But out on that grass, there was freedom and joy and skill and culture. You fought and then you shook hands. Everything was different.
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AT the door of St Paul’s committee room, a huge framed portrait of one of Armagh’s most famous sons.
Bill McCorry, to those that recall him, never deserved being best remembered for missing a penalty in the 1953 All-Ireland final.
They wouldn’t have been there without him. Even in the run-up to the game, he practiced penalties at training.
He just happened to miss that day in Croke Park, is all.
In those days, part of the Armagh training was to pair up in boats from Maghery and row a kilometre across to Coney Island.
“One day we got over and we were that tired we fell asleep and they had to send somebody from Maghery over in another boat to see where we were,” Brian Seeley chuckled in an interview for the GAA’s Oral History Project a few years back.
McCorry, Seely, another Clans stalwart Gerry McStay and fringe player Jackie King married four Scullion sisters.
As a player, McCorry had been a Wolfe Tones man out towards the country before he moved to Taghnevan and threw his lot in with St Paul’s, helping take them from the bottom to winning two Division One titles in the 1980s.
They were never loved by Clan na Gael because they were never supposed to exist like that.
St Paul’s started out as a feeder initiative, an extension of the south Lurgan heavyweight’s underage academy that would eventually feed back into them at senior level.
But they were no sooner up and going than they had a senior team in and they climbed up to the top level.
Jim McCorry, Denis Seeley, Paul McGlone, McConville, they had a cluster of men to come through in the 80s to join Kieran McNally, relative veteran of two Ulster finals with Armagh in his early 20s, three or four years older than the rest.
They’d won an intermediate in ‘84, minor and U21 championships and then McConville was player-manager when they reached their sole senior final in 1989.
“I remember Jimmy Smyth sent word via somebody to tell me don’t play centrefield, but nothing would f***ing do me and I did. Mark Grimley was outstanding. He was 19 years of age, he was at himself, nothing I could do about it. Beat by four.”
They’ve never been back. Won another intermediate, reached three of the last four finals, dabbled in senior football.
They had their own wranglings with the council over land. Peter Mortimer, Joe Fitzsimons and Martin Campbell fought with them for 17 years.
Since the transition into a more moderate Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon Council softened matters, they’re now sitting on a million-pound joint-ownership development with two full-size pitches and two other good areas for playing.
To one side, 2,000 square yards of allotments that kept people going during Covid. Above the main field, a memorial garden where bereaved families plant trees and shrubs in memory of their lost ones. They come and sit on the picnic benches and be with their souls.
They adore Andrew Murnin here now. He comes into the changing room the same way, shoulders almost slunk, eyes on the ground, modest to a fault. Same way Kieran McNally was.
“McNally would walk in with a wee bag that size and his feet were that [same] f***ing size, pulled out a pair of odd socks and went on and played. You should have seen him fetch a ball.”
McNally left for Chicago in the late 80s but they flew him home every summer for championship.
Mickey McDonald died a little over 18 months ago. He was reared in Taghnevan with his brother Greg and four sisters, one of whom was Rosaleen. She married Gerry McIlroy in 1988 and eighteen months later they had a son called Rory who turned out to be half decent at golf.
The site leads back around towards Clan na Gael territory.
They traditionally picked from the Shankill Estate, home to most of their Ulster-winning crop of the 1970s.
The Clans were the original trailblazers, smuggling gold medals across the border after winning the first unofficial Ulster Club title in 1949.
It hadn’t been long formally recognised when they came back around with the team that would dominate the 1970s, winning three provincial titles in a row from five finals in seven years. They took home seven Armagh titles out of nine and more leagues than they could count.
Brian Seeley was playing for Armagh when he was still a minor but ditched county football shortly after the 1953 All-Ireland final after a fallout with the selectors.
He had invited his girlfriend up to Portadown to go to the pictures but recalled that he was told by Fr McKnight it wasn’t permitted. He went on anyway. They gave him his place for the final but he didn’t hang about much after it.
Clan na Gael found that to their benefit.
Coming past the Master McGrath Arms, its owner James French stands out the front.
“He must have three championship medals,” McConville says, wishing the words to part his lips fairly rapid.
The Master McGrath Arms is named after a famous greyhound that hailed from Lurgan in the late 1800s.
It was going for a third successive Waterloo Cup when it fell through ice on the course and almost drowned.
It came around and was retired, brought back out, won again and then retired properly.
When it did die a year later, a post mortem found that its heart was twice as big as that of a normal dog.
A heart twice as big.
How very north Armagh of it.