All-Ireland SFC Group Three: Donegal v Tyrone (Saturday, 7.15pm, MacCumhaill Park, live on GAAGO)
WHEN Eddie Devlin died last September at the age of 92, Coalisland Na Fianna shared the photograph taken in his living room of the club’s four All-Ireland winning captains.
With Devlin seated, Padraig Hampsey stands to his left with Sam Maguire resting on the arm of the chair.
In the middle, Peter Donnelly, captain of the 2001 minor side.
And to his right, a smiling Niall Devlin, the newest member of the group after Tyrone’s U21 success in 2022, which gave birth to the idea of the photo.
Ciaran Corr came close to joining as captain from ‘95, winning Ulster and losing the second All-Ireland final in their history by the ball that wouldn’t bounce.
Jody O’Neill was the 19-year-old captain when Tyrone won their first ever Ulster title in 1956 and then manager in ‘73.
Since Peter Corr, captain away back in 1905, through the brilliance of Damian O’Hagan in the ‘80s to the current day, Coalisland Na Fianna has always been like the branding on the stick of rock that is Tyrone’s footballing legacy.
Eddie Devlin’s name is etched in history as the county’s first ever All-Ireland winning captain, leading the 1947 minor team to glory.
It was his fourth year at the grade. He and Iggy Jones were the schoolmates, the MacRory specialists, the 5′7″ superstars that would drag Tyrone football into the limelight.
Six of the seven Devlin brothers played for Tyrone, Jim being the most famous of them.
His performance in keeping top-scorer Frank Stockwell scoreless in the 1956 All-Ireland semi-final is famous, as much for the £5 he wagered Sean Purcell in the bar the previous night that he’d shackle the other half of Galway’s ‘Terrible Twins’ duo.
Eddie was made captain the following year when they won Ulster again.
Just eight weeks ago, Coalisland lost Tom Sullivan, neighbour and friend of the Devlins, a classmate of Eddie’s at school.
The first Tyrone player ever to score in Croke Park, he was the second-last survivor of that team. Only Liam Campbell left now, an ‘Island man too.
Tom Sullivan ran a newsagent, sweet shop, travel agents and a much-loved toy shop on the main street.
The day that Jim Devlin and his wife Gertrude were murdered on May 7, 1974, she had called into Tom’s shop to buy a birthday card for their daughter Patricia, who would turn 18 the following morning.
That night, loyalist gunmen waited at the entry to their home as Gertrude collected Jim from work at the bar he owned with his brother John, above which another sibling Frank lived.
Despite being shot several times, Patricia survived the attack that robbed her and her three brothers of both their parents by playing dead, before staggering to a neighbour’s house after the murderers had departed.
She wasn’t able to attend the funerals but still organised them from her hospital bed, where she spent her 18th birthday.
It was a shocking, senseless murder of two innocent people a time when such events became unbearably common.
That was 50 years ago this month.
On the date of Jim and Gertrude’s anniversary they had a commemoration night at the club. The following evening, after almost 20 years in cold storage, the Jim Devlin Cup was played for and won by Dromore.
Two of Jim’s sons, John and Eamon, travelled back from England to be there.
All four of their children had moved away. The three boys are in England and Patricia watched the commemorative event from Australia.
Jody O’Neill took the microphone as it was passed around the floor and recalled how, at 19, he didn’t know what to say to the players when thrust into the captaincy on Ulster final day. He asked Jim for help.
“You just leave that to me,” Jim said to him, and made the speech to the players that afternoon.
It is from a completely different line of Devlins that Niall comes.
His father Gerard was the Fianna’s zestful wing-back on their consecutive championship winning teams in 1989 and ‘90.
An ardent clubman, Gerard raised more than £20,000 for the club last year by running a full marathon every week for an entire year.
Any time the clubhouse has started to look a bit tired, Gerard gets an army of men together and they go and paint the place.
His son Niall had captained Tyrone U20s to All-Ireland glory that spring.
Three months ago, they became the latest family to fall victim to the never-ending cruelty of the A5 road.
On the very same evening that the Assembly heard pleas for a long-overdue upgrade of the road to proceed urgently, Niall’s brother Caolan was killed when his car collided with a lorry on the Curr Road stretch.
Caolan played a bit for Coalisland when he was younger but his real love was for the black and red strip of Naomh Colmcille hurlers that sat neatly folded on the middle of the altar floor the day he was buried.
Just a week ago, Killyclogher man Michael Rafferty walked in Niall Devlin’s exact footsteps, lifting the All-Ireland U20 title as captain. He too lost his brother, John, to an accident on the A5. Too many families in Tyrone and beyond have had that knock on the door.
Seven days after Caolan Devlin’s funeral, the entire Tyrone panel and backroom lined up on the 45 in Healy Park for a moment’s silence before their league game against Monaghan.
Right in the middle of the line, the number seven on his back, Niall Devlin made the incredibly courageous decision to play.
Around him for that moment, the right arm of the father of the group, Mattie Donnelly, and the left of Padraig Hampsey.
Hampsey’s grandfather Paddy guided the Fianna to a county final in 1969. His uncle Brendan was in goals, and 20 years later he too was manager of a championship winning team.
Padraig is a cousin of Catherine McHugh, whose son Ruairi has won two All-Ireland U20 medals in the last three years with Tyrone.
Coalisland’s fourth All-Ireland winning captain has quietly returned to the peak of his defensive powers over the last few months.
Having had Paddy Lynch under lock and key, the harsh black card Hampsey picked up against Cavan facilitated the 10-minute spell in which the Breffnimen hit 2-2 to come from eight down and force extra-time.
Against Donegal, he bettered Oisin Gallen, as he will seek to do again in Ballybofey this evening.
Tyrone’s named side for Ballybofey includes an all-Fianna full-back line of Devlin, Hampsey and Michael McKernan, who could lay claim to being Tyrone’s best player this year if it weren’t for Darragh Canavan.
It is not the honour they take with them, but the heritage they leave behind.