FURNITURE production would be slack on the floor of Sherry’s factory on Monday mornings.
The first order of business was always football.
The Sherrys made furniture or, to put it another way, just about everyone that could kick a football in Scotstown made furniture for the Sherrys.
Up until Jimmy, Pat and Eddie Sherry started up the factory in the late 1950s, the whole area was ravaged by emigration.
In any one of the dozen-or-so Catholic churches built around Luton by post-WWII emigrants, Sunday morning sermons were guaranteed to be interspersed by whispers in a north Monaghan tone of voice.
The city’s Vauxhall car plant was the industry that employed an Irish population that is estimated now to have roots in 20,000 of its citizens.
Pete McCarron left town before Sherry’s opened and missed out on the club’s first ever senior championship titles in 1960 and ’61.
By the time he returned, his son Ray was 16.
He, like just about everyone else, would end up working for a while in Sherry’s.
So too Gerry McCarville, Gene Sherry (no relation to the owners), the Morgans, the Connollys, the McKennas.
“There’s not a doubt about it. Anything that we achieved was all down to Sherry’s factory. It definitely was,” says McCarville.
He recalls that when Monaghan beat Down in the first round of Ulster in 1979, Jimmy Sherry landed down to him the next day.
“He came into me the next morning, he said ‘Jesus yous did fierce well yesterday. If yous win the Ulster championship, I’ll give you a week off and I’ll pay for it’.”
They duly won Ulster. The factory floor was a desert island on the Monday, save for a few diehards.
Among them was Gerry’s brother who reported home that night that Jimmy wanted to see him the next day.
“I went in on the Tuesday morning, first thing down, talked away for an hour until he said ‘you have better things to be doing, aren’t yous going around the county today with the cup? You may go on home and come back next Monday.’”
When county final programmes were produced, half the team had ‘cabinet maker’ listed as their occupation.
The Sherrys knew what it was about.
They were three of a family of nine who had lost their father James when the kids were all very young, none of them older than 12, the youngest just a baby.
They took into business but also into football.
Scotstown’s team from the 1960 county final, in which they beat Castleblayney in the middle of December, contained Johnny, Jimmy, Pat, Eddie and Peter Sherry.
It was only the year previous that the Tydavnet club had given in and joined up with Scotstown. Knockatallon followed soon after, the trio merging to create the club that we know today.
The merger helped from the football end but men still needed something to do.
The Sherrys provided it to men from all over north Monaghan, while always minded to their own patch.
“They had Scotstown at heart, full-time. Anybody that could play football, out of a job or were thinking of going to England, the Sherrys were on to them straight away – ‘we have a job for you’,” says McCarville.
“They were brilliant employers. They kept the whole thing going in Scotstown for years and years.
“Eddie’s 90 years of age and still a great man, goes to all the matches, fit to drive to his matches. His son was chairman, Pat’s son’s involved in the underage structure, Cormac Sherry and Peadar are involved, they’re Eddie’s children. They’re great club people.
“You’d have to be a bad man to get your walking papers out of Sherry’s.”
There was a second furniture manufacturer’s up the road, Malachy Columb’s. His son Padraig is the club’s PRO now and a few footballers passed through their hands too, like the Boylans, Fergus Caulfield.
Fergus is on the management team now under David McCague. His nephew Emmet, like Gerry McCarville’s son Michéal, Brendan Beggan’s boy Rory, Niall McKenna’s chap Ross, the Hughes brothers, Shane Carey, all the names that have toiled for so long in pursuit of an Ulster Club title that would draw them into line with their fathers.
That history is inescapable, enveloping the village in ways that extend beyond their own local history.
While Liam Stirrat was the manager responsible for Scotstown’s three straight provincial successes in 1978, ’79 and ’80, the club has become synonymous with Sean McCague’s influence on Monaghan county teams, and a little with Páraic Duffy’s influence on policy as the GAA’s former director general.
Having done it all, McCague humbly returned to the sideline with Scotstown in the early noughties for another spell as manager.
He was principal of Urbleshanny National School early in his teaching career, from 1977 until ’81, before taking the same job in St Mary’s in Monaghan town, where he stayed until he retired.
When he left, his brother Gerard took over in Urbleshanny. And now that he’s stepped down, Sean’s daughter Nuala Mhic Gabhann is principal.
It is just shy of 50 years since the school had a principal who wasn’t a McCague.
Which feeds nicely into David, who took on the same vocation. Gerard’s son, he is now principal of St Macartan’s, where his uncle would once direct Monaghan’s training sessions.
Nudie Hughes tells a famous story of how he’d wintered well and lasted just a few minutes of the first pre-season run on New Year’s Day.
The Tuesday night, McCague produced the weighing scales and had Niall Moyna record all the weights, telling them they’d win nothing unless they were fit.
They got fit and won Ulster.
Reared in the family bar at the top of the town, Sean is buried in the graveyard that backs on to the pitch now, just yards from his own home that looked down on it from the hill above the stream that cuts the Stracrunnion townland.
Not having won Ulster lays over the top of this Scotstown team’s legacy.
Three final defeats and all manner of near misses in earlier rounds.
But without Sherry’s, none of what happened in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s happens.
On the day of the county final in Monaghan, Scotstown’s minors made it a first double in more than 40 years. None of that probably happens either.
The use of the factory has changed now but it’s still there.
When its 60th anniversary was celebrated in 2019, local man JohnJoe Sherlock penned a poem.
It talked of how the best hope of employment being emigration, that there was “no jobs, no future, no reason to stay”.
“It wasn’t all about chisels and being good with your hands,
Sometimes for employees there was different plans.
Of course it was helpful if your work was neat,
But even better if you could kick with both feet.
The Scotstown team who were starved of success,
Now had more players and were making progress.
From that winning habit was first instilled,
There’s been many years of dreams being fulfilled.”