BEEP. BEEEEEEP. Niall Murphy. Cool as you like. One hand on the steering wheel. Driving his 4x4 like a maniac. Oblivious to the impending doom in our car.
Seconds earlier, we'd swooped under the Musgrave Park underpass, got a green light as we crossed the Lisburn Road before finding ourselves on the outer lane where the traffic begins to merge.
Normally – normally – when a vehicle is on the outside lane, the driver behind gives you time and space to drift inside, and everyone goes on their merry way.
But not Niall. Nope. He carried on regardless. Zoom.
My wife beeped her horn, but he was already a speck in the distance by the time we eased ourselves into the one, obedient lane of traffic.
“I think that was Niall Murphy,” I mention to my wife.
“In fact, I’m sure it was Niall Murphy. That’s the worst piece of driving I’ve ever seen. The maniac.”
We gather ourselves and settle down. The kids are in the back - oblivious as Niall to our near-miss.
It’s marathon day in Belfast. I decided to run a leg of the race for a couple of charities on behalf of my daughter’s school. The Belfast Marathon is one of the best days of the year in the city.
I never believed the hype until I ran a leg a couple of years earlier.
On this bright and breezy afternoon, the Ormeau Embankment is buzzing. Thousands of runners are pounding the road, still many miles in front of them – unless you’re Niall or me who have chosen the shortest leg of the race.
And we won’t mention it unless someone asks, that ‘Yes, it was only a leg of the marathon, not the whole thing. But still, a leg's a leg...’
After the last couple of stretches beside the flood of incoming runners pouring in from the Ravenhill Road entrance of Ormeau Park, I’m like a kid on my first day at school anxiously looking for my relay partner.
A quick shout and embrace and now I’m taking part.
I actually didn’t know Niall was running the same leg of the marathon until I caught up with him just past the front of the city hall.
There he was, Naomh Éanna’s finest, pained expression, wearing a yellow t-shirt with the club’s crest resting on his chest - ‘Courage in our hands. Truth on our tongues. Purity in our hearts.’
I was delighted to see him. I didn't mention his driving.
He grunted towards me. I grunted back. No words were spoken. At least nothing that was remotely decipherable.
On that May afternoon I couldn’t say we strode across Wellington Place with any great gusto or deftness. And we certainly weren’t living the moment.
Every stride was to be endured.
Just as we reached the Opera House, we exchanged grunts again before parting company.
A few days later, Niall sent me a photograph of the pair of us running and looking utterly destroyed by the marathon experience.
It was taken just as we bid farewell to Wellington Place, turning left and heading for the bright lights of Shaftesbury Square.
I replied to his photograph: ‘Two heart attacks waiting to happen!’
He shot back: ‘I see two old gunslingers, sporting icons, crusading for their communities.’
Another messaged pinged seconds later, with Niall adding: ‘A cuppla old-school tough guys. The strong silent type. Like Gary Cooper.’
I roared with laughter…
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GROWING up in north Belfast, I never knew Niall Murphy well but we had a number of mutual friends, one of whom was the late Dermot McCoy.
Dermot loved talking about life in Glengormley and Naomh Éanna.
He held Niall, the late Gerry Devlin and Ciaran McCavana, currently the Antrim county chairman, among many other Naomh Éanna club members in the highest regard.
I also knew Niall’s father, Liam. One of the finest wordsmiths and story-tellers to come out of Belfast.
There is nothing Liam Murphy doesn’t know about the Hightown Road club.
Prior to Naomh Éanna’s All-Ireland Intermediate Football final against Kilcummin of Kerry in February 2019, Liam helped with a column I was compiling to illustrate what the north Belfast club had endured during the conflict.
Liam told me the story about the day the club’s makeshift changing rooms were nearly blown to smithereens and how their big full-back Gerry ‘Tank’ McLaughlin inadvertently saved the lives of about 25 footballers.
It was the mid-70s and Naomh Éanna were preparing to play north Belfast neighbours Ardoyne Kickhams.
‘Tank’ was a big man.
Unknown to the St Enda’s players, a booby-trap device had been fixed under the floorboards of the changing room.
“The bomb was designed in such a way that if someone of lesser weight had sat down on the chair, the springs would have brought the two wires together, completing the circuit and we would have been blown to kingdom come,” said Liam, a former club chairman.
“But ‘Tank’ being a big heavy fella, he just plonked down and broke the springs, and broke the circuit.”
Sitting facing ‘Tank’ was Dermot McCoy, a young teenager at the time, who noticed some wires and a battery under his team-mate’s seat.
Dermot raised the alarm.
“There were 25 people in the hut at the time,” said Liam. “If that bomb had gone off there wouldn’t have been a St Enda’s club today.”
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NIALL Murphy was a fine hurler in his younger days. He played full-forward and was often the team’s go-to man. When his team needed a goal, they'd aim for Niall and his eye for goal pulled Naomh Éanna out of many tight spots.
He was good enough to be on Antrim’s radar and was part of the 2002 All-Ireland winning junior hurling squad that defeated Meath in the final.
As Club Aontroma chairman, one of his many roles, Niall was chatting to Darren Gleeson, the current senior hurling manager and All-Ireland winning goalkeeper with Tipperary.
Darren and Niall hit it off.
For as long as they can remember Ciaran McCavana and Niall Murphy have been joined at the hip.
After Darren and Niall's conversation ended, McCavana joked: ‘What were you and Gleeson talking about – your All-Ireland collections?’
Niall fired back with a grin: ‘You see, Ciaran, All-Ireland winners don’t talk about their past glories!’
“He’s like the unofficial historian in our club,” McCavana says.
“Anything that needs done nine times out of 10 Niall Murphy is in the middle of it. He is one of the dynamos of our club.
“The success of our club wouldn’t be possible without Niall - that’s just fact.”
He remains one of the driving forces of Nailscoil, Gaelscoil Éanna and the new £1.8m community hub recently built.
He’s currently vice-chairman of the club and has been serving on the committee since his early 20s. He is an instrumental member of the Saffron Business Forum.
He is a human rights lawyer and partner with KRW Law firm, established by Kevin Winters, and is a leading figure in civic group Ireland’s Future.
If there’s a booklet needing printed at the club, Niall will be at the helm. He produced a fascinating document that covered in forensic detail the murder of young Naomh Éanna footballer Gerard Lawlor (18) who was gunned down as he walked home one night in July 2002.
Thirty-six-year-old Gerry Devlin, a leading figure of the Glengormley club, was shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries as he left the premises five months after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
In an interview with The Irish News in 2018, Niall explained: “I think it’s a native American phrase: ‘A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.’
“We keep people’s names alive at our club. We will always ensure the new generations know that times weren’t always as comfortable as they are now and that we were borne of adversity. It’s important they know that.”
When the club wanted to commemorate Gerry Devlin’s life, Niall pulled all the various strands together and produced an outstanding booklet, a fitting and quite emotional tribute to one of their own.
“The booklets Niall has put together are more like glossy magazines,” McCavana says. “And he’s a terrible man for getting a couple of thousand copies printed rather than 200. He’d say to me: ‘It’s better value if you get an extra thousand copies printed.’”
Niall's love of print can probably be traced back to his childhood when his father and a few friends travelled to every nook and cranny of the country watching football and hurling matches.
It was on those long journeys home Niall devoured the match programmes. They'd be read cover to cover and the information was banked.
His knowledge of Gaelic Games is encyclopedic.
“We call him 'Statto' because if you were having a table quiz, he would know who the goalkeeper was in the 1987 National League final.”
When the county board decided to reinvigorate Club Aontroma late last year, Niall Murphy was the man for the job.
“One of the first things Niall wanted to do was to produce top quality match programmes," explains McCavana. “We couldn't ask for a better PRO than Sean Kelly - the work he does in branding Antrim GAA is incredible. But Sean is only one man and couldn't be putting programmes together as well as what he's already doing for the county.”
Another WhatsApp landed one night from Niall.
‘Could you write a piece on Terence McNaughton being inducted in the GAA’s Hall of Fame for the county final programme?’
‘No problem,’ I replied. ‘How many words?’
I was merely returning the favour to Niall.
When the footballers of Naomh Éanna appeared on the provincial radar in December 2018, I decided to profile the club's at-times torturous rise.
Like many clubs during 'The Troubles', Naomh Éanna suffered tremendous losses.
Gerry Devlin (36), Gerard Lawlor (18), Liam Canning (19), Colin Lundy (16), mother Kathleen Lundy (40) and Sean Fox (72) were murdered by loyalist paramilitaries.
The clubrooms were firebombed more than a dozen times.
It was a daunting task condensing the life and times of Naomh Éanna into two pages of The Irish News on a Saturday morning.
But Niall short-circuited everything. He was effectively my executive producer for the article, the avid researcher who plied me with times, dates, accounts, influential club members, roll of honour, big games, successes, failures.
WhatsApp after WhatsApp landed with reams of information that no journalist would have been able to unearth. Niall Murphy’s name should have been on the article, not mine.
He even organised the photograph for the piece.
Two days before the article was to appear, he summoned McCavana, Philly Curran and Thomas McNulty to the club at 8am.
Niall knew what was required to do these sorts of things, and to do them right.
So, when it came to producing match programmes McCavana knew his club-mate and close friend would go above and beyond the call of duty.
“Earlier this year, Antrim were playing Mayo up in Loughgiel,” McCavana says.
“It was a crappy old day, there wasn’t a great crowd there and I’m not being disrespectful to Mayo hurling but people weren’t expecting it to be a tight match.
“When I drove up through the gate, who’s there an hour-and-a-half before the match standing selling programmes - Niall Murphy. One of the most well-known and respected solicitors in Ireland.
“He saw the importance of profiling the players through the programmes and it showed Antrim in a professional light.
“People might describe him as a high flyer but he’s someone who gets his hands dirty. He’s one of the best orators you’ll get. He’s meeting the Taoiseach and heads of political parties but he’ll go and take an U14 hurling team. He’ll stand in the car park and do stewarding.”
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NIALL Murphy’s best trait is that he’s a doer not a talker. He gets things done. The fact that he talks about Gaelic Games like an obsessed nine-year-old kid with a filled Panini sticker book is just another endearing trait.
Before the Naomh Éanna footballers took to the field in Navan for their All-Ireland semi-final against Galway’s An Spidéal last year, he was like a child on Christmas Eve.
Wrapped in a thick black and amber scarf in the big wooden stand of Páirc Tailteann, he swung effortlessly between his native tongue and English when a TG4 journalist stopped to say hello.
And when Joe Maskey scored that wonder goal beneath a low lying winter’s sun he punched the air like that nine-year-old kid, watching his team, his club-mates, heroes of his.
Niall comes from a generation that armed itself with the most powerful instrument known to man: education.
“He went into law because he wanted to right injustices,” McCavana says matter-of-factly.
His pursuit of justice for the families of the Loughinisland massacre of 1994 was illustrated magnificently in Alex Gibney’s 2017 documentary 'No Stone Unturned'.
He is part of Ireland’s new intelligentsia - and is joined by the likes of Paddy Murray, Sean Murray and John Finucane among others - all of whom have uncovered an open wound of our bloody past. But, often those who uncover the wound administer the balm.
Niall is 43-years-old and is married with three children. For the last couple of weeks, he’s been battling the ravaging effects of Covid-19 in an intensive care unit.
Even the faithless among Antrim GAA and the legal fraternity have been offering up prayers so that he pulls through.
Earlier this week, he was finally weaned off a ventilator and is making good progress. But the gradient on his road is still tough.
Niall has achieved a lot in life but has so much more to do.
He has also left an indelible, radiant mark on more people than he realises.
We all look forward to seeing that unmistakable child-like grin again.
The gunslinger. The old-school tough guy, the strong silent type. Just like Gary Cooper...
*Many thanks to Ciaran McCavana.
