TOM Doherty is 74 but they still call him Young Tom.
His father of the same name chaired the Patrick Sarsfields club in Belfast for 28 years.
He was chairman in August 1969 when a loyalist mob set fire to the clubhouse.
Tom Snr was chairman when they came back and reached the two finals five years later, winning one, losing the other.
He was chairman a decade later when they got their football title and still chairman a few months down the line when a team that had just won a football championship split irreparably.
Tom jnr was just too young to be playing when they won a football championship in 1967, aged 17 then, but he remembers the green and black scarves and the fighting and how the Sarsfields supporters had a soccer mentality, all colour and tuneless chanting.
Young Tom is a joiner by trade.
He still works two days a week. And if he could still play football and hurling, he would.
Having wrecked the cartilage in his knee, Doherty came back too soon and tore his cruciate at 28.
In those days, unless you were Pat Spillane, that was you pretty much finished.
But when he was 36, he went back to hurling and played until he was 41.
“I got a calliper thing for my leg and went into goals for five years in the hurling. I was on the third team about three weeks and went back in the first team. I’m blind for doing goals too,” he recalls.
“It was good craic. The ego takes over, ye know? Nothing beats playing.”
Tom was one of the star turns of the ‘74 teams, a fielder and a powerhouse down the middle.
His younger brother Sean was a whippet of a lad, just 17 when he was thrown into the hurling final and scored 1-1 against Loughgiel.
Tom played five-and-a-half years of county football and a year of hurling with Antrim, winning a Division Two football league and reaching an All-Ireland ‘B’ hurling final in the same year.
The Paddies were predominantly a football club with a sprinkling of men that loved their hurling.
The small ball code bobbed along right up until late ‘73, when neighbouring Gaedhil Uladh folded.
Brothers Canice and Sean Ward, Aidan Thornberry and Tom Donnelly transferred to Sarsfields that winter.
“They put a wee flake on top of the ice cream,” says current chairman Eamon McGarrigle jnr.
Added to the McKearneys, Mickey and Sean Óg, you’d the other Wards, former Ulster footballer Jimmy and his brother Barney, the Kellys, McGarrigles, Lewsleys and Whinnerys – family names that repeat to this day.
Eamon jnr was a one-year-old when ‘74 happened but through the tales of his late father of the same name, he had long learned the weight of the torch before he took to carrying it.
When Sarsfields ever met the great St John’s team in football at that time, Eamon snr was always nominated to pick up Antrim’s first and only football Allstar, Andy McCallin.
“He didn’t abuse him, he was just as sharp on the ball as any forward. Eamon invariably came out on top against wee Andy,” says Eamon snr’s former team-mate Jim Barr.
The McGarrigles – Eamon snr’s brother Paul played both codes as well – were first cousins of Tom Doherty and his brother Sean, as well as the McGuinness’s, of whom Sean is perhaps the club’s most famous export.
Player-coach of the hurlers in ‘74 with Joe Duffy, he took over himself and guided them back to a final in ‘75 before going on to manage both Antrim and more famously Down, winning Ulster titles with both.
Those few transfers from the defunct Gaedhil Uladh pushed Sarsfields into contention in hurling and the path cleared.
Tom Doherty was on Loughgiel’s star man, PJ O’Mullan, in the ‘74 final.
In an interview with The Irish News three years ago, O’Mullan recalled it as ‘one that got away’.
“We had played them in the league about six weeks before it and we got a man sent off before the ball was thrown in – we played the whole match with 14 men and still beat them by 19 points,” said the Shamrocks man in 2021.
Doherty’s recollection is no different.
“You wouldn’t have had anybody else’s money on us. We were big, big outsiders.”
A red card just before half-time for Sarsfields didn’t do much for their prospects but it just turned into one of those days.
They dug in and held on until, out of nowhere, they were Antrim hurling champions.
* * * * *
THEY were nomads in the late ‘60s in terms of a pitch, using whatever few hundred square yards of turf they could lay their hands on.
But their base as a club was very much on Dover Street, one of the many side streets along the interface between the Falls Road and the Shankill.
Before the Troubles erupted, young players would walk carefree up on to the Shankill Road and stand with a bag of hurls waiting on a bus to take them to games.
When violence was sparked in Derry by a controversial Apprentice Boys march in early August 1969, it quickly spread to Belfast.
On the night of August 14, 1969, Sarsfields were in Lurgan playing a football challenge game against the mighty Clan na Gael.
When they returned home around 10pm they found Dover Street and the whole of the Lower Falls under attack.
A few hours later, a mob “led by the B Specials” strode down Dover Street and lit the place on fire.
In that one night alone, it was reported that 150 Catholic homes in Belfast were burned out and others had their businesses torched.
Patrick Rooney was a nine-year-old boy hunkering for safety in the family’s ground-floor home in Divis Flats when a bullet fired outside by a vehicle-mounted RUC machine gun cut through and killed him.
He was the first child victim of The Troubles.
Several people had been killed and hundreds more injured before the British Army were deployed on the streets a day later, initially restoring calm and being welcomed by nationalists.
A clubhouse fire became a mere footnote in the chaos.
But it was a symbolic attack, a way of loyalists laying claim to Dover Street by torching the nationalist community’s hub.
Many families moved “up the road” in days, weeks, months and years that followed August 14, 1969.
Sarsfields went too.
In the immediate aftermath of the arson attack, they gathered up money and took on Austin’s big shop on Divis Street as a temporary base. But by then plans were already underway to move to Stewartstown Avenue anyway, five miles away out towards the country, just off the Shaw’s Road.
To get back on their feet permanently, they availed of land that Antrim county board had bought with funds left over from the purchase of Casement Park.
O’Donovan Rossa and St Paul’s are housed on the same plot of land, able to puck a ball from their own field into each other’s. Rossa and St Paul’s stand literally back-to-back.
Sarsfields’ home quickly became known as The Bear Pit.
“Nobody liked coming to it – we used to beat the crap out of everybody,” says Doherty, half matter-of-factly, half nostalgically.
It was a time of lawlessness and fear, on and off the pitch.
The first thing you notice about a photo of that Sarsfields team that same so close to a hurling and football double fifty years ago is how lean they all were.
Sure, Jackie Kelly was ahead of his time as a trainer and before training sessions a group of them would rock up to Tom Doherty’s parents’ house and his mother and father would lay them on a salad.
But mostly it was just Belfast living in the early 1970s.
Work was hard and money was short.
Nobody owned a car. When Sarsfields were going anywhere, Noel Hughes would borrow his father’s van that he had to run his fruit shop on Divis Street, and anything up to 20 of them were piled into the back.
“Leaves of cabbage on the floor, away we went,” recalls Jim Barr.
“If you wanted to get a minor team up to Ballysillan, you just imagine 18 lads from a working-class background, the father’s probably unemployed, no cars.”
When there was enough work near home, almost the entire team Sarsfields team worked in construction.
That came in handy when they were forced to rebuild on Stewartstown Avenue.
Every human resource they needed to get up and going again was already at their disposal.
“Most of the players were bricklayers, hud carriers, plasterers, electricians. All the tradesmen that would build a club were available within the club.
“Even the architect was a lad Tom Bateson, who was left-back in the final in 1974, he got a lot of credit for it,” says Barr.
The club and the Lenadoon estate from which it now feeds were kindred spirits.
After 1969 it became an almost entirely nationalist estate, home in many cases to people in the same search as the club for a new affinity, a new identity of sorts.
A lot of the families that came up from the Lower Falls stayed and still stay.
But the club was in a different space now, trying to find its way into new hearts and minds.
It was the early ‘80s before Lenadoon started to service the Paddies’ senior team.
By the time Sarsfields did bridge the gap from 1967 to their next football championship, it was 1985 and it was their new neighbours St Paul’s they were beating by a point in the decider.
But when they reached the two finals in ‘74, which they’ll commemorate with a night on September 9, they were very much still a Lower Falls Road team squatting on Stewartstown Avenue, displaced exactly the same way as so many of their families.
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JIM Barr’s eldest son John was born that January.
They’d been in the house for 18 months and with the drive concreted in early summer, he decided it was time to start into the garden.
“We used to wake up in the morning and the cows were in our drive munching the grass.”
When the drive was finished he’d turfed all the loose timber and pegs on the grass, and thought he’d cleared them before he took his brother-in-law’s lawnmower to it.
Long story short, he hadn’t. The machine caught a peg, flipped on itself and landed on his right foot.
“I had 27 stitches and four broken toes. That was me out of the final.” He went from being one of the team’s most reliable performers in a teak-tough half-back line to sitting at home with no car and a busted foot while they trained for a county final.
“Some people were of the opinion that the club is full of euphoria, we’ll walk this, there’s such a feelgood factor. Others were saying they’ve won the hurling, they’re drinking and all that, get it put off.” John Barr, the eldest son, would go on to play county football but the entire premise of Patrick Sarsfields is perhaps best epitomised by Jim’s other son, Paul.
He’s lived in Maghera for almost 20 years but still makes the journey two or three times a week to help coach teams.
There is a rich tapestry of family history woven through their past.
“You do see the names,” says Eamon McGarrigle jnr.
“I’m chairman, my father played in the ‘74 football final, was a sub in the hurling final. My uncle McGarrigles and Dohertys played.
“Jim Barr’s three sons, one is still assistant secretary, one is taking LGFA teams with his daughters, his grandsons and grand-daughters are playing.
“The McGuinness’s who were always involved in the club, Sean’s sons are still there taking teams. The Wards, you’ve Jimmy, his grandsons are still with the club, the three Ferris’, Micheal, Shea and Niall. Jimmy’s daughter’s kids, they’re playing senior football.
“You’ve the Whinnerys, you’ve Jim Barr’s sons, Paul and John, then his daughter Olivia, her kids play.
“I’m in Glengormley and it’s a trek across, but I’m in Glenariffe a lot of the time too. My son and daughter both play for Sarsfields. They took a bit of stick in school, why are they not St Enda’s, but they make the journey across and play.
“Conor McKearney’s still involved, his daughter plays. Conor’s father Mickey, they say he was the diamond in both football and hurling, he could have took a ball off anyone and scored from anywhere…”
On and on the links go, always tracing a path back to where it all began.
* * * * *
CARGIN had never won a senior football championship but they’d also swept all before them en-route to the final.
The Toome men were rank outsiders but led by four points from John Laverty, they led from start to finish in a game where both teams missed second half penalties.
Sarsfields had won a handful of league titles and spent a generation looking through the letterbox at success, losing three finals between 1965 and ‘70 as well as winning in ‘67.
But the sting of ‘74 that was that bit sharper because an historic double was there staring at them.
In the 50 years since, only St John’s have reached both finals in the same year, twice missing out on doubles by virtue of defeat in the hurling final.
This was a time before football’s powerbase moved to the south-west and the north Antrim clubs took over in hurling.
Belfast was full of powerhouses.
St John’s were fearsome, winning seven football titles in-a-row in the early ‘60s and then ten more between ‘69 and ‘84.
The Johnnies and Rossa were part of a four-way carve-up of hurling along with Ballycastle and Loughgiel. They had won every title between 1948 and 1973 between them.
Then the Paddies came along and broke it up, winning one of five hurling titles in six years that stayed in Belfast.
History is always contextualised through the lens of the bad days.
Sarsfields were, and are, rightly proud of their sole hurling championship but their own memories are coloured by losing the football a week later, just as winning ‘85 is darkened by the split that followed just months after it.
When they were all growing up and Fra McCann was taking just about every team in the club, football and hurling, he would disappear into a side room and write a match report on every single game.
He kept every journal, hundreds of them, in the clubhouse on Dover Street, along with all the rigs.
“He always used to sneak into his wee room and write if you were good or you were a poultice,” young Tom laughs.
The charred remains of those pages were all that remained on August 15, 1969.
The jerseys were all gone too.
August ‘69 did wild, irreparable, unconscionable things to a city and its people.
Sarsfields moved up the road and moved on, blossomed into a cultural hub that hosts no fewer than 42 teams across all four codes.
Every age group from 10 down has to be split in two because of the sheer volume of players.
That leads them to train the full 12 months of the year, knowing that even despite good links with St John The Baptist school, if they ever stopped, players would just drop off and disappear.
Sarsfields have found their new identity and the same affinity for Lenadoon that it has for them.
They might never have a year like 1974 again.
And should they live another thousand years on Stewartstown Avenue, there will always be a part of them in the Lower Falls.