AT 2pm this afternoon in Carlingford, Eamónn Brady will meet his bride Coleen McCann at the altar.
Brady is the captain of Clooney Gaels hurlers. His groomsmen are his cousins, Fionnbar and Dan O’Neill.
A dozen or so of the Clooney players will stay at the hotel tonight and travel to Dungannon tomorrow morning from there before all going back to Carlingford after the match.
History has a habit of repeating itself. When Clooney last won the Ulster intermediate title nine years ago, then-captain Sean O’Connell got married the Friday of their first game.
He married Nuala Graham, connecting two of the big GAA families that uphold one of the most remarkable clubs in the north.
Sean, since retired, is one of six brothers, four of whom currently play hurling and football for the club.
Nuala, an outstanding camog, is the sister of Bernard and Patrick Graham, Sean’s team-mates and, since then, brothers-in-law.
Bernard and Pat are two of nine Graham cousins on the hurling squad. Donal, Diarmaid, Aidan and Ronan are another set of brothers. Gerard, Martin and Eoin all come from different houses, their fathers all brothers. Elder cousins Finbar and Declan are both retired.
The first six above are also cousins with this afternoon’s groom Eamónn Brady, and with Fionnbhar and Dan O’Neill.
The O’Connells – Stephen, Neil, PJ and James – are cousins with James Magee and the three Neeson brothers, Dominic, Owen and Frankie, though they aren’t cousins of each other.
Ryan Doherty on the management team is married to the Neesons’ sister Nicola. The Neesons (Shea) and O’Connells (Charlie McCloskey) both have nephews on the squad.
Tom McGlone’s brother Chris would most probably still be playing if it wasn’t for a bad arm injury that saw him sever nerves and lose power in his hand.
To complete the circle, Coleen McCann is their cousin.
“At five-past-two today, we’ll be claiming Brady as our cousin,” laughs Chris.
Pretty much every single Catholic family in the area will be represented at the wedding.
See, Ahoghill itself is an almost exclusively Protestant village.
The GAA’s football team bears its name but that’s about the height of the connection.
It was the scene of one of the most horrific crimes of the Troubles, when former Derry footballer and Bellaghy native Willie Strathearn was murdered in 1977.
He was the local shopkeeper and lived above the shop. At 2am Strathearn received a bang on the door and heard pleas from below to come down and give aspirin for a sick child. He answered the call and was shot dead on the doorstep.
Catholic families, businesses, schools were targets. Catholic homes were issued fire blankets by the police and told how to jump out of windows in the event of an arson attack.
Occasionally, the club was inevitably hit too. But in the past there’s been a pipe bomb left, two arson attacks and vandals rammed a car through the club gates and burnt it out.
Every time, St Mary’s maintained a dignified silence and just got quietly back to work.
When the old hall was left fire-damaged in one attack, it just became the catalyst for them to build a bigger, better hall.
It’s been all quiet in recent years, a welcome sign of the times.
At the start of this year, Ballymena rugby club sent a contingent of children out for a morning where they played half Gaelic, half rugby.
Most of the club’s existence has been about surviving.
An underage amalgamation with Portglenone, known as Sean Stinson’s, was one source of oxygen but when something gets cut off, they just find other ways to breathe.
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BECAUSE here’s the truly remarkable bit when it comes to their hurling and football teams.
Ahoghill survives off half-a-dozen families and whatever else they can pull together.
Next year they hope to have an U13 football team. They have Clooney hurling teams the whole way up, but it would be the first time they’ve had an underage football team of their own in years.
Yet their footballers have been in the senior championship for 13 consecutive years, and only once outside Division One of the leagues in that time.
They’ve played five years of senior hurling championship and will be back up next year.
Their hurlers face Liatroim tomorrow as Antrim intermediate champions. When they last won Antrim nine years ago, they won Ulster. That was seven years after they’d reached an All-Ireland junior final and were beaten in Croke Park by a Danesfort team that contained Richie Hogan and Paul Murphy of Kilkenny fame.
Thirteen of their starting fifteen are the same in football as they are in hurling, and it’s never been any different.
A huge chunk of their team is now in their mid-30s. That’s fifteen years and more of Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday for all of them.
“My uncle Colum and my Da took the football team when we got up to senior football and their message to us was always to play as long as you can because there’ll be injuries and you’ll be away from it long enough,” says Donal Graham, who doubles up as club secretary.
“It’s just the routine. You’ve a lot of supportive wives and girlfriends at home that pick up a lot of the flak. You can’t get away from it.”
Phonsie Agnew, who was the McGlones’ grandfather, screwed seats along the back sides of a white Transit van and would do a lap of the square to pick up young hurlers and ferry them to matches in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
That drove hurling in the club and they won a junior championship in 1989, captained by Phonsie’s son Ciaran with a team containing Harry, Colum, Paddy and Dermot Graham, Neil O’Connell senior, Bernard O’Neill, Seamus Magee. The names carry on.
Brendan Kelly would pick up where Phonsie left off, coaching a litany of underage teams from the late 1990s. All of the current senior team’s elder statesmen came through his hands, and he would go on to manage the seniors when they reached that All-Ireland junior final sixteen years ago.
“For the club it was massive,” says Kelly.
“After we drew the Ulster final with Strabane we became so focussed on the game and training and matches, we didn’t really get into the fuss and fun on the periphery.
“But I was talking to one of the senior members of the club afterwards and he said ‘to see your club colours run out in Croke Park is such a proud moment’.
That’s when it struck me what we had done, that it was such a fantastic thing.”
He still coaches the U15s. When you start in, there’s no stopping. On Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings, a handful of the senior players are up coaching underage teams.
“On top of the four nights they’re out already, they’re up Thursdays and Saturday mornings as well,” says Donal Graham.
“You just give whatever you can.”
The Grahams’ were all reared about a mile from the main cluster of houses. Most of the rest of its tiny Catholic population are out towards Crosskeys, where the pitch is at.
Their big worry for the future is the same as many rural clubs. There’s land around Crosskeys that they could build on but nobody can get planning permission. Virtually every application has been turned down.
That’s meant all those men in their early 30s, getting married, having children, have had to flit when they haven’t wanted to.
They mostly bring them back for hurling because their adopted lands don’t have it but spread around Toome, where the Cargin flags flutter for their own Ulster Club adventure, or Bellaghy or Portglenone, it’s harder to pull the children away from their football there.
The next generation of Grahams’ and O’Connells and Magees and O’Neills would loved to have been able to stayed around Clooney (usually pronounced Cloney), but the draconian legislation around rural houses is killing them.
Yet they’ve always been there and they always will be.
Donal Graham will be 36 next month. Aidan and Gerard Graham, Stephen O’Connell and Dominic Neeson are all older. Bernard and Neil O’Connell are the same age. Diarmuid and Martin Graham and Frankie Neeson are a year younger.
“Even what we’d consider the younger ones like Patrick Graham and Fionnbhar O’Neill and Eamónn Brady, they’re all the same age but they’re all turning 30 next year,” says Donal.
“But it just keeps going. I remember thinking at the start of this year we’re gonna really struggle and there now we’re training with 28, 29 boys every night.
“We’re not gonna be a senior football team forever and what odds? To us that wouldn’t matter anyway.
“I’ve played hurling and football championships at junior, intermediate and senior, all six grades. That is mad.
“Growing up, the senior hurling team was always in the bottom division, the senior football team was always an intermediate team, Division Two or Division Three.
“I never once dreamed we’d play senior anything, it just wasn’t on the radar.”
They say your club is family, the fabric of your place and your being.
There’s not a town or village on this island a better fit for that statement than Ahoghill.
