“YESTERDAY, while you were winning the championship, I was being sent to Carrickmore for my sins.”
Fr Sean Hegarty plants a kiss on the O’Neill Cup, raises it aloft with his left hand and addresses the bob cuts and bald spots that fill the hall in Ballygawley.
It’s the autumn of 1993. Mickey Harte warmly embraces him on the stage, the hair and beard jet black and tousled in a fittingly rebellious Che Guevara-like state.
So it should be equally fitting that his son Mark is the joint head of state now with Adrian O’Donnell, leading a club whose history will never leave it but no longer defines it.
To each generation, a refresher course is required. None of the current team would be old enough to properly remember this time 30 years ago, when Errigal Ciaran won its first championship game.
They beat Dungannon 0-13 to 1-5 in the first round in 1992 before losing to Trillick. The following year, Errigal were county champions.
For eight years, the old St Ciaran’s club in Ballygawley was down a considerable sum of its powers. In bare naked terms, Glencull represented one of four parts that make up Errigal Ciaran.
Down on the site of Paddy Donaghy’s seven-acre farm of land in Dunmoyle, Cardinal MacRory Park stands home to all the men of Glencull, Ballygawley, Altamuskin and Garvaghey.
From the Ballygawley roundabout to the club’s base is almost seven miles. It’s a huge expanse of territory in the context of a rural GAA club in a county so densely populated with them.
To offer some context, Clonoe, Coalisland, Killyman, Edendork and Stewartstown clubs all co-exist in an area smaller than the one Errigal have to themselves.
Errigal’s power and size as a combined unit are a factor, but divided they were too easily conquered.
The Hartes were Glencull and Mickey has recounted several times how he was at the very heart of the row that led to the break-up forty years ago, in 1982.
A parish league had been dreamt up to keep them occupied in the autumn but Glencull’s first game against Dunmoyle led to the incident that would split the parishes and the club up for almost a decade.
Harte clashed with Brendan McCann, the pair swinging at each other and both ending up sent off.
But where Mickey was suspended, McCann played a handball game for the club the same evening as the Tyrone player was called in front of the club committee.
When Cathal McAnenly from Glencull was asked to leave the meeting, it quickly festered. Glencull pulled out of the parish league and then pulled out of the club altogether.
St Malachy’s Glencull became their identity. They would have played at The Holm. Problem was they had nothing to play.
Tyrone county board refused to affiliate Glencull as a proper club and so the 100-or-so houses contained young men left in footballing limbo. They hosted nine-a-side carnival tournaments that some others in Tyrone attended in spite of the county board’s warnings around the absence of insurance.
But mostly they relied on challenge games here, there and everywhere around Ulster, against anyone willing to play them.
Six years running, Mickey Harte, Sean Canavan and Peter Quinlivan attended the Tyrone convention and pleaded to be allowed into the leagues. Six years running, even despite Ulster Council’s backing, they were turned away.
“The board were not going to back down to these bearded rebels from Glencull,” wrote Harte in his first book, Kicking Down Heaven’s Door.
What had been ripped apart by a few moments of anger in Dunmoyle was sewn back together after Ballygawley reached the county final in 1989, only to lose to Coalisland.
Pascal Canavan missed out on U16 and minor football over the row, but they’d lost elder siblings Stephen and Barry altogether. They still reckon he would have been playing for Tyrone in the All-Ireland final in 1986 had things not been the way they were.
Everyone in Tyrone was intensely aware of the younger sibling on the way up.
Peter Canavan lost all of his underage football. His part in Errigal’s reformation is critical but so too was that of his father Sean. He was the moderate voice that Fr Sean Hegarty chose to transmit his message in Glencull, with Barney Horisk fulfilling the role from the Ballygawley end.
His disciples chosen, the priest who had managed Armagh to two Ulster finals and two National League deciders through the mid-80s set about his work.
“He would tell us in Glencull that the rest of the parish were ready to listen. He would then tell them that we were ready to talk. Basically - and he’s very proud of this now – he told lies. But it got us thinking, meeting and talking,” Harte wrote.
Glencull slowly gravitated its way back into the fold. A new club, Errigal Ciaran, was formed in 1990. Glencull played a year as Errigal B in the junior championship in 1990 before embracing the waiting arms of unity.
As Fr Hegarty embraced the waiting arms of Mickey Harte, veteran sub and club chairman, on the hall stage three years later, peace and reconciliation flowed through the place.
He’d just been informed of a move to Carrickmore parish the day of the final, in which they overcame Moortown. Superstition kept him away from the games anyway but his part in the parishes reuniting was up there with Danny Ball’s influence on the changing room.
Before they went out, Mickey Harte told them 62 years was too long for the people to have waited. Peter Canavan implored them to play like ‘wicked wee men’.
Between the wicked men and the bearded rebels, they would gather up three county titles in five years and have won another five since. What makes them unique has been their ability to gather two Ulster crowns as well, something no Tyrone club has done before or since.
Pascal Canavan was the man the Ulster final in ’93, taking on Down All-Ireland winning duo Conor Deegan and Barry Breen in the air and driving Errigal to glory against Downpatrick.
Careers died at the feet of the row but enough of the friendship remained. The eight years seemed long at the time but they weren’t so long that the strands were so frayed nothing could be put back together.
In a different guise Peter Canavan would have won a Nobel peace prize. Imagine the travesty if his talents had never been given to the world, for club or county. It so nearly happened.
Forty years on, the golden sash that runs across beneath the sponsor on the Errigal Ciaran jersey represents the Glencull colours, mixed with the old blue and white of Ballygawley.
Once more they go in pursuit of the chalice that nobody else in Tyrone has had a drink from.
They go as sons, fathers, grandfathers; as Glencull, Ballygawley and the rest.
They go as one.
