MULLINGAR was a sea of orange and white and the Championship buzz was building as Armagh fans met and mingled before their county played Westmeath.
Rory Robinson moved through the throng with his daughter by his side. He’d told her there was someone special he wanted her to meet.
“He’s down here,” he says.
“Ok daddy.”
They walked down the street and there he was: Joe Dolan, or the late Joe Dolan’s statue to be precise.
“You’re so funny daddy,” she said as they posed for a picture with the ‘Good Lookin’ Woman’ singer.
His pranked played and the smile he’d hoped for in the bag, the pair of them walked on towards Cusack Park. Tall and slim, Rory was a familiar figure as a well-known referee on the Armagh club scene and he stopped to chat to a group of fellas from South Armagh.
“Who’s this girl?” they asked him, referring to his smiling companion.
“This is my Maria,” replied Rory and he smiled a smile as proud and wide as any father ever has.
THE Robinson clan is well-established in Maghery on the southern shores of Lough Neagh. Family ties run deep in that tight-knit community and strangers tend to choose their words carefully in case they unwittingly offend a cousin, an aunt or an in-law when speaking with a native.
Rory played in goals for the Sean McDermott’s club and became active on the committee. He represented Maghery at county board meetings and was encouraged to become a referee. Soon he discovered he had a natural knack for a difficult job so, after beginning at underage level, he progressed to senior games, then championship games and was brought into the Ulster referees’ panel.
Over many seasons with the whistle he blew only when he had to, he earned a reputation as an even-handed, unbiased official. Even the players he sent off didn’t hold it against him.
“I always used to tell Maria: ‘The GAA is a great way of meeting people’,” he says.
“I’ve met more people through the GAA, it’s unbelievable.
“When I was refereeing people would give you both barrels but after the match was over it was all forgotten about.
“When I was going out with Fiona (his wife) we used to go to Lacey’s (then a nightclub in the Carrickdale Hotel) and I’d say: ‘We can’t stand here’. She would ask me why and I would say this is where the Cross boys are standing, or Carrickcruppen, or Whitecross.
“I would say: ‘This is GAA territory and they’re all watching me to see who I’m standing with! We have to go and stand in a neutral corner. Fiona didn’t understand GAA politics!”
HE understood the GAA and he followed Armagh wherever they went. As soon as Maria was old enough, she went too and that road trip to Mullingar was one of so many they made together.
The match against Westmeath began in disastrous fashion for Armagh when Jamie Clarke got sent off after just a few seconds.
Maria wasn’t impressed with the referee’s decision.
“What do you think of him daddy?” she asked.
“He’s just doing his job,” Rory answered, trying to defend his fellow whistler.
“He’s not daddy.”
Joking, he told her a Hollywood director might be in touch to ask if Clarke would star in his new movie.
“What movie?” she asked.
“A remake of Gone in 60 Seconds,” he said with a giggle.
“That’s not funny daddy,” she said but Armagh won in the end and they went home happy.
Their first away game together was Armagh Ladies versus Cork Ladies in 2006. Maria was in her pushchair then and they got the bus in Newry and headed for Dublin.
“She was wide-awake with excitement,” says Rory.
“I remember she put her hands over her ears with the noise of Croke Park, she couldn’t get over the noise of it. That was her introduction to Armagh and the GAA and she had an absolute ball.
“Mags McAlinden was playing that day and when (a few years’ later) Mags came to Poyntzpass school to coach her class, Maria couldn’t believe that.”
Mags was always popular but Maria’s favourite Armagh player was a fella Rory has watched develop from a football-mad youngster into his county’s captain.
“When we went to watch Armagh I would have told Maria about Aidan Forker,” he explained.
“The Forkers lived across the road from me in Maghery. He had two brothers (Paul and Stefan) and two cousins (Niall and Conor) next door. They had a mini football pitch in their front garden and on Christmas mornings they would have been out with all the new football gear on them.
“I would buy them a ball for Christmas and throw it over.”
There yous go lads…
“I told Maria all this and she would ask me: ‘What number’s Aidan the day daddy? He’s number four or number seven’. When the ball was thrown in, Maria would be hitting me and saying: ‘Look daddy, look daddy: They’re picking on Aidan again.’ She was always looking out for him.
“She thought the world of Niall Grimley and she had a soft spot for Blaine Hughes too. I remember one game we were at she asked me: ‘Daddy, who’s that boy with the tanned legs?’ I said that’s ‘Soupy (Stefan) Campbell’.
“That’s when I realised my wee girl was starting to grow up.”
IT wasn’t just Armagh, they went to Old Trafford to watch Man United and they followed the razzmatazz of the Dubs. The packed houses, the dashing forwards, that a-live-a-live-oh on the Hill…
Maria asked Rory to bring her to watch the Boys in Blue.
“Why?” he asked.
“The way they play and the singing and the craic daddy,” she answered.
So of course he brought her and, that was it, she was hooked on Dublin.
“When Dublin and Tyrone played in the All-Ireland final (2018), I was driving (Rory worked as a bus driver) a bus full of Tyrone fans down and I bought two tickets off this fella,” Rory explains.
“I rang Maria and asked her did she want to go. She did and I picked her up at Fiveways roundabout in Newry and she got on the bus decked out in all the Dublin gear with a Dublin flag.
“Malachi Cush was on the bus and he shouts out: ‘Daughter, you’re on the wrong bus!’ Everybody else was wearing Tyrone gear, including me because one of the boys put a headband on me! It was a good laugh.
“I remember we went to Wexford for a match and she was the navigator. She was 17 then.
“This time next year, I’ll be driving you to the matches daddy,” she said.
“I said: ‘That’s great, I’ll be able to go for a sleep.”
Sadly that never happened.
MARIA Robinson would have been 21 last weekend. She was a young person who genuinely seemed to have everything going for her.
Intelligent, pretty, bubbly, talented, kind, sociable… Parishioners in Poyntzpass would have known her for reading the bidding prayers at Mass and serving on the altar. She loved Irish dancing, she sang in the choir, she was in the Newry Pantomime Society, she loved horse riding…
She was deputy head girl at Our Lady’s Grammar School in Newry, planned to study medicine at university and had been chosen out of her school to shadow doctors at the Royal.
She gave up her last Christmas Day on this earth to help deliver dinners in Newry.
“When she came home she said: ‘Daddy, it was brilliant’,” Rory recalled.
There was shock and sadness when the news spread that Maria had been found dead at her home in Poyntzpass in September 2020.
No-one knows what happened or why. No-one ever will.
She was laid to rest wearing a Dublin jersey and an Armagh top.
“You just think: ‘What if?’” says Rory.
“She’s an angel in heaven.
“She was so funny without realising it, good craic and she wanted to be a doctor to help people.
“That was her ambition in life. She had a heart of gold and never gave us a bit of bother. I miss her every day, every minute.
“I was in my mum’s house in Maghery when her uncle Christopher phoned and told me the news and you could have heard me roaring in Belfast.
“I drove like a madman, Formula One, to Poyntzpass. Not in a million years would you have thought something like that could happen, there were no signs. Nothing...
“We couldn’t have been more proud of her, we were so blessed to have her and we wish it would have been longer.
“We just hope that by sharing this we can help PIPS and maybe help other people because you don’t know what’s round the corner.
“We didn’t have an inkling.”
Last Saturday night, on what would have been Maria’s 21st birthday, Rory and Fiona were joined at the Canal Court Hotel by friends and family for a celebration of their cherished daughter.
‘A night for Maria’ included fashion, singing, dancing, football and fun… Some of the many things that decorated a life that was far too short.
The beneficiaries of the fundraiser were PIPS and Target Ovarian Cancer. It was a difficult night for Rory and Fiona but they bravely went through with it in the hope that sharing Maria’s story might impact on someone in need of help or motivation.
“It was an amazing night, beyond our expectations,” said Fiona.
“The doors had to be closed after we reached 300 people. We ran out of raffle tickets but people just put money in the buckets anyway. All the performances were brilliant as was Lianne McCooey as MC and The Canal Court did us proud as did Maria’s friends and everyone involved in the night, especially PIPS staff who remained with me all day and evening. Everyone spoke about the amazing atmosphere.”
RORY looks after Maria’s four dogs now. When he takes them for a walk along the lough shore he says their ears still prick when they hear a girls’ voice.
He says they seem to know when he’s having a bad day.
“They run off when I take them for a walk around the shore but then they come back to check on me,” he explains.
The friends he made over his many years in the GAA check on him too. Sadly, he lost his mother recently and the crowd at the Athletic Grounds stood in solidarity for a minute’s silence before the game against Meath.
“The GAA family has been unbelievable,” he says.
“The help, kindness and support... I used to say to Maria: ‘The GAA is one big family’. You come across people who are hard as nails and when they cross the white line they’d go through you for a shortcut but after Maria died they would come over to me and say: ‘I’m so sorry Rory, so sorry…’
“Only for the GAA I don’t know where I’d be. The amount of help and support and the phone calls and messages I’ve got, they’ve been so kind to us.”
But even with the support of the GAA family, Rory lost his way. Broken-hearted, his grief choked him. The loss of his only child overwhelmed him.
Without Maria there was no joy, no sunshine in his world.
“I wasn’t going to go back near football after what happened, I was thinking: ‘Right, I’m going to lock myself away’,” he says.
“The first Christmas Maria was gone, we put a wee tree on her grave with photographs on it. The tree was blown down in the wind and the photos went all over the place.
“I went to the graveyard and I was going up the path and the first one I found was a picture of Aidan Forker and Maria that I took in Tipperary.
“To me that was a Maria moment. It was her saying: ‘Daddy, you need to keep going to the football, you need to get out’.
“After that (in February 2021) Armagh were playing Tyrone at the Athletic Grounds during Covid.
“Only the players and the stewards at the ground. I pulled into the car park and the first car that pulled in beside me was Aidan.
“So I stayed at the football and every time I’m a steward at Athletic Grounds, or Croke Park or wherever I take a photograph.
“Look darling,” he whispers, “This is where your daddy is today…”