Errigal Ciarán's strength through unity

By John Harrington

Sometimes a painful break-up leads to reconciliation that produces an even stronger union.

That’s certainly been the case for Tyrone club Errigal Ciarán who are the very happy mending of a previously broken relationship.

The club was founded in 1990 as means of healing the divisions that had fractured the Ballygawley St. Ciaran’s GAA club which represented the parish from the 1920s until the 1980s.

Rarely has a hatchet been so successfully buried when you consider that since their inception Errigal Ciarán have appeared in 15 Tyrone county finals, winning nine, and are the only club from the county to win an Ulster title with two so far and potentially a third to come on Sunday when they play Kilcoo in this year's final.

All of the above is arguably even more impressive considering the Tyrone club championship has a well-earned reputation for being one of the very hardest in the country to win.

The success they’ve enjoyed means the darker days of ‘The Split’ that begat Errigal Ciarán don’t register at all on the radar of those in the community under the age of 40, while the memory of those darker days don’t now draw much more than a rueful shake of the head from those of an older vintage.

You could even argue that Errigal Ciarán wouldn’t be the force they are now were it not for that turbulent period from 1982 to 1990 when footballers from the Glencull region of the parish refused to play for the club.

That was certainly the view of two of the central protagonists in this tale of reconciliation – Mickey Harte and Peter Canavan – when their shared their memory of it with the GAA’s Oral History Project back in 2010.

The story begins with the sort of idea that many other GAA clubs have also come to regret – a decision by St. Ciarán’s Ballygawley to play an internal parish league in the winter of 1982.

The Errigal Ciarán parish has four distinct areas each with their own primary school and church – Ballygawley, Glencull, Garvaghy, and Altamuskin – and so the parish League was made up of these four teams.

Anyone who has participated in a parish league will attest you’re often asking for trouble by dividing a GAA club along geographical lines because long dormant or even never previously active local rivalries can suddenly combust.

That’s precisely what happened when Glencull played Ballygawley and Mickey Harte and a Ballygawley opponent were sent off for tangling with one another.

For some reason the club proposed a suspension for Harte but not his opponent, which not surprisingly went down like a lead balloon in Glencull.

“We in Glencull didn't feel it was dealt with properly and we felt we were a bit victimised so a group of us decided that unless this was sorted out in a fair manner to our liking then we would withdraw our services,” recalled Harte.

“Many people didn't think at that time that we were as serious as we were about it but we were serious about it. Ultimately for the next eight years St. Ciaran's continued to exist but we formed a club which we called St. Malachy's, Glencull.

“We were refused affiliation on each year for the next eight years. We stayed together and organised our own club in every fashion that any club was and maybe better than a lot, but we couldn't play official games and we weren't recognised.

“So, stubbornness, resilience, call it what you will, but it was there and we did it for eight years.”

They might not have been affiliated, but St. Malachy’s very much operated as a fully fledged GAA club, not just arranging training sessions and challenge matches for the senior team, but also for juvenile teams.

The longer this went on the more entrenched positions became on either side of the split and for those eight years Gaelic football was what divided the community rather than united it.

“There would have been ill-feeling,” admitted Harte. “No overt aggressiveness on the street, people weren't tearing strips off each other, but a silence existed or the talk became trivial among people that it shouldn't have been.

“In the north of Ireland when the politics was a serious issue for so many years people had a great capacity to sound each other out to see who it is they're talking to and see what you can talk about.

“So you'd have to find out what school they went to and what area they come from and what their name is to see if it's safe to talk about things political.

"So we did this bit of stand-off if you like and it was the same in our parish. We should have been talking about football and how the team was doing and we should have been talking about the GAA but we were talking about the weather and safe things that seemed to not matter.

“That's the analogy that I can draw that it brought out in us. That went on for eight years.”

Ultimately a few factors led to a thawing of relations that, in time, led to reconciliation and the foundation of Errigal Ciarán.

Ballygawley St. Ciarán’s reached the 1989 Tyrone County Final where they were well beaten by Coalisland, but club-members couldn’t help but wonder what the club might be capable of if the parish was united under one banner again.

Around the same time former Armagh manager, Fr Seán Hegarty, moved to the parish and did great work bringing both sides of the dispute to the negotiation table.

But perhaps the greatest catalyst of all for reconciliation was the footballing genius of Peter Canavan. There was a desire on both sides that a generational talent such as his be given the platform it deserved.

He’d never played competitive club football due to his affiliation with St. Malachy’s, but in 1988 the then Tyrone minor football manager, Francie Martin, had the bright idea of getting Canavan to register as a member of Killyclogher hurling club which made him eligible to play county football.

By the following year Canavan was already a county U20 player at the age of 17, and even then it was apparent he was destined for greatness if his talent was suitably nurtured.

Growing up in a GAA club that officially didn’t exist must have been a strange footballing apprenticeship during his adolescence, but Canavan himself thinks it ultimately served him well.

“First of all, the split in the club was an indication of how serious people took football,” said Canavan. “People didn't speak virtually for nine years in the parish though they were friends and worked together in a club up to that. That gives you an indication of the strength of the feeling and what it meant to people.

“What it meant for us was we were deprived of competitive football. The football we got was just based on challenge games. The people in charge of the club at the time arranged challenge games for the senior team and likewise for the underage teams.

“We would meet up for training and then would travel around various clubs looking for challenge matches. Looking back on it from a personal point of view I would say now that a lot of the youngsters growing up now have too much football.

“They get too much competition at an early age and maybe not enough time to practice the skills of the game which was something I had because I had less matches and less competition so there was more time to go down to the local pitch and do shooting practice and to work on the skills of the game, kicking and catching.

“Plus, it left me more hungry when I was ready for playing U21 and senior football. The fact that I didn't get as much competition at underage level probably meant a greater degree of hunger and a willingness to work harder and to do well. I'd say that was the positive side of it.

“From a club point of view when the club did reunite and reemerge under the new identity of Errigal Ciaran, I think people were much more focused on how important the club was and the importance of doing things right and making sure that this didn't happen again.

“A lot of people were hurt, a lot of people had lost out on different things as a parish when the split was on, so a lot of men were determined that this wasn't going to happen again. I think we have a better, stronger club as a result of that difference of opinion that we did have.

“As a result of that the club has gone on to win county titles and Ulster titles which may not have happened had it not been for the split. I suppose out of adversity came great enjoyment and memories since winning the county title in 1993.”

Even when St. Ciaran’s and St. Malachy’s were reunited under the Errigal Ciaran banner in 1990, the old divisions didn’t immediately melt away.

Part of the agreement was that the Glencull players would be allowed to play together for a year in the Junior League with the Errigal Ciaran seconds team while the St. Ciaran’s players played with the Errigal Ciaran firsts in the senior league.

“That's how they got us over the hump so to speak in terms of having us achieve what it was we set out to do, to have our own autonomous unit, even thought it was within the context of the parish unit,” says Harte.

“We did that for a year and after the year we actually got promoted to Intermediate. Then within a few months of that we felt it would be better if the best players in the parish played for the first team and the rest played for the seconds and that's the way it went then.”

1992 was the first championship season Errigal Ciaran were truly a united force and just a year later they showed the strength of that union by winning the parish’s first Tyrone senior championship since 1931 and promptly followed it up with an Ulster title when they beat Lavey in the final.

A young Peter Canavan was their team captain and played a pivotal role in both successes.

“Looking back, I was only 22 so I suppose our manager Danny Ball took a gamble to make me captain at such a young age,” he says.

“We played Moortown in the final in Edendork and it's a day that will live long in the memory. To see the amount of club people on the pitch afterwards and to see what it meant for those men like my father, Barney Horisk, Peter John Mullin, great men in the club who had solidered away for a lifetime and never thought they would see their own club win a county medal.

“A lot of men spoke that night that they could die happy that they were there to see us do something they had been trying so hard for so long to try to achieve. That was a night I'll always remember.

“There were men high on emotion who didn't drink and you would have thought were intoxicated such was the euphoria and degree of excitement.”

As for Mickey Harte, he happily finished his playing days with Errigal Ciaran, managed the senior footballers to silverware, and the one-time rebel even became Chairperson of the club.

He's thankful that almost immediate success Errigal Ciaran enjoyed in 1993 was a great and lasting antidote to the poison of old grudges.

“You can imagine what that was like,” said Harte of their county and provincial double in 1993.

“That left behind for most people the begrudging or angst that had happened before. They just identified with this new-found success. The fact it went on to Ulster level and no Tyrone team had won the Ulster title before that or since, unfortunately.

“It's funny, the acrimony or angst that existed then, typical of adversity, you had people coming out and taking sides.

“Because we were there more people identified with St. Ciaran's and because we were in our own area we had people identifying with us who weren’t necessarily GAA people at all prior to that. So it's an ill wind that doesn't blow some good

“The dispute actually attracted more people into the two elements of the GAA within the parish which ultimately now means that there's more associating with the GAA in the entirety of the parish.

"It's all well that ends well.”