ALMOST three months have passed since Mickey Harte’s shock appointment as Derry manager, and it wasn’t until Wednesday night in Armagh that his self-imposed silence was broken.
That wasn’t by accident.
Knowing media outlets from all over would be at the Dr McKenna Cup launch, especially once word seeped out earlier in the day that Harte was attending, it was an opportunity to get the whole thing dealt with in one go.
No one-to-one interviews since, no recent comments to be cross-referenced, instead the pot had been taken off the boil and allowed to simmer. Harte has seen enough through his years in the game to know how these things work.
Among the topics up for discussion was his and Gavin Devlin’s exit from Louth, and how it had been “misrepresented slightly”.
“When myself and Gavin met with [Louth chairman] Peter Fitzpatrick, we shook hands over three years work with Louth, which we completed,” said the former Tyrone boss.
This was a considered response to subsequent dispatches from the ‘Wee County’, with Fitzpatrick having claimed Louth had been preparing for the new campaign before Harte’s departure, having “given an extra programme to the players”.
That was backed up by captain Sam Mulroy, who said there had already been conversations between management and players about next season.
But the big one, at least up here, was the Derry question, and the fall-out from Harte’s switch across enemy lines. Months on, and with the start of the 2024 inter-county season suddenly looming large, heads are still being shaken on both sides of the county border.
Not necessarily disquiet or even disgust – though there has been a fair amount of both. No. The prevailing mood more closely resembles a kind of a stunned stupor, as though it isn’t in fact reality.
How could a man so emblematic of Tyrone’s greatest days suddenly pitch up in Owenbeg, home of the back-to-back Ulster champions, intent on driving the Red Hands’ neighbours to success at the expense of his native county and all others?
Some of the commentary has been cutting, not least from Joe Brolly on his Free State podcast weeks after Harte’s appointment.
Guest Pat Gilroy - former Dublin manager and university friend of the Derry All-Ireland winner - admitted he couldn’t wrap his head around Harte’s decision to take charge of Tyrone’s fiercest rivals. Brolly went further still.
“He’s a stranger to us, and he shouldn’t be near us,” he said in an emotional address, “the Derry board is a caravan of fools. F**k them and f**k Mickey Harte.”
Having been in Brolly’s crosshairs long before the latest chapter in his managerial career, Harte would have expected nothing less. Not that he pays any attention to what is being said, of course – or so he would have you believe.
It was with that familiar glint in his eye that he faced the BBC’s Mark Sidebottom on Wednesday. The pair enjoyed the occasional joust when the three-time All-Ireland winner joined the Beeb’s Championship coverage in recent years, so Harte knew what was coming.
What about the noise Mickey? The “visceral hullaballoo”?
“Naw it didn’t shock or surprise me at all,” he said, a smile playing across his lips, “I don’t indulge in that kind of stuff. Whatever goes on on these other platforms that I’m not on, the people need to realise that it doesn’t bother me.
“Because there’s a lot of loud noise comes from places, doesn’t mean there’s a lot of people talking like that… a few people can make lots of noise and give the impression everybody’s talking like that.”
Perhaps Mickey Harte pays little attention to what is said on social media, we would all be better for doing so, but there is little doubt his skin has not always been as thick as he might make out.
“There’s a lot of loud noise comes from places, doesn’t mean there’s a lot of people talking like that… a few people can make lots of noise and give the impression everybody’s talking like that”
— Mickey Harte
Take even this excerpt from his second book, published in 2009, as an example. Discussing the aftermath of Tyrone’s Ulster Championship exit to Down in 2008 – the same year the Red Hands would go on to lift Sam again – it becomes clear that, back then at least, Harte didn’t miss too much.
“Beyond the training camp, the county was in turmoil about the team.
“There are plenty of supportive people out there, but the critics are never far away, even at home. All I know is, the farther I get from Tyrone, the more respect I seem to earn. It’s something like the old cliché about never being a prophet in your own land. I can live with that, but sometimes you have to wonder.
“Those enlightened, anonymous souls that keep the Irish News’s ‘Off the Fence’ column going every week were busy agitating for my removal. Martin McHugh threw his two cents on the BBC one evening. He reckoned it was time for me to step down. I had been there too long, he said. Essentially, he said, the team was the victim of same-voice syndrome.
“After 11 successful years with Tyrone teams, I found that insulting. How would I have survived 11 years transmitting my message using the same voice? It told me nothing about my situation, but confirmed that Martin didn’t know what was needed to last 11 years in this job. To survive, you always have to change.”
Harte has evolved over time, stayed relevant where others have slipped from the scene, but keeping a close watch on what is being said, and written, has always come with the territory.
Whether that is to gauge aspects of public opinion, or mine some motivational nugget that might stoke the fire in his players’ bellies, Mickey Harte’s ear has seldom been far from the ground.
It is part of what makes him the competitor he is, a strand of the single-mindedness that saw him give barely a second’s thought when sounded out by Derry a crucial clue to his longevity at the top.
It is hard to imagine that will change now he is back in the bosom of Ulster football.