Gaelic football is the lifeblood of Sally O'Brien's bar on Omagh's John Street. It is the place to go if you want to hear everything from considered opinion on the fortunes of the Tyrone senior team or the results of last night's under-14 league games. All GAA gossip is there but it is delivered with understated insight and occasional flashes of knowing humour.
Last Thursday night was no different as the air hung heavy with talk of Omagh CBS' MacRory Cup final replay coming up in just two days' time. Many of the men and women in Sally O'Brien's had associations with Omagh CBS, either as former students themselves or as the mothers and sisters of past pupils, and the thought of the school's first MacRory in 27 years was consuming everyone.
Omagh had gone into the drawn game a fortnight before as confirmed underdogs and had not been expected to mount a serious challenge to a previously rampant St Michael's Enniskillen side. Football at schools level has so much to do with tradition, real or imagined, and the Fermanagh school's emerging pedigree over the last decade suggested that everything was running in their favour.
By Thursday evening the plans for a Saturday out were at an advanced stage. The current rude health of the under-age game in Tyrone and the vagaries of the fixture system had combined to produce a supremely attractive double bill of games. The MacRory replay would be the opening salvo, to be followed by the provincial under-21 final which matched Tyrone, the current All-Ireland champions, against Fermanagh. Two important championships, spiced up with a little soupcon of local rivalry and enmity, contained the prospect of a fine afternoon's entertainment.
Less than 24 hours later all that talk of football, of cups and provincial titles, seemed skittish and inconsequential. The confirmation of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the east Tyrone area of Ardboe tilted life in the county and beyond on its axis. Football and the success and failure that accompany it seemed little more than irrelevant afterthoughts as the economic and social structures that hold rural communities here together threatened to crumble completely.
The site of the outbreak could not have been more cruelly chosen. The fertile land around the environs of Lough Neagh is the centre both geographically and economically of the agriculture industry here and any ravaging of it and its livestock has disastrous implications for everyone and everything around it. If you were looking for a place where the heartbeat of Northern life beats strongest this would be it.
It is also football country. The accident of geographical boundaries means that the area surrounding this outbreak encompasses parts of both Tyrone and Derry. The names of the clubs are redolent of football history and deepseated tradition. Ardboe, Ballinderry, Moortown and Loup have all been production lines for footballers of exceptional ability and their closeness had done much to make the locking of horns between Tyrone and Derry one of the most vivid parts of Ulster's football canvas.
This foot-and-mouth outbreak threatens the economic future of the immediate area. But it is also a hammer blow to cultural and social life there and for the vast majority of people that means the playing of Gaelic football. All GAA activity has automatically been suspended for 30 days and if the infection cannot be contained there is every likelihood that will be extended into the summer and beyond.
The most immediate ramification of all of this was the postponement of both finals last Saturday. The blow was a cruel one particularly as preparations were at such an obviously advanced stage.
From there the ripples continued to have an impact. Tyrone's senior football side, on the cusp of a sequence of games when their championship ambitions would be tested in the latter stages of the National League, had no option but to withdraw from the league with immediate effect. The county's hurlers endured a similar fate.
The future for all concerned is decidedly uncertain. If the MacRory replay is to go ahead at all it does not look like it will be in time for the national Hogan Cup competition and the indications are that St Michael's will be nominated for that series. Similarly, the Tyrone under-21s may not now get the opportunity to defend their national title and once again it appears that their opponents will simply be nominated to progress.
The prospects for the Ulster championship itself seem equally bleak. With foot-and-mouth outbreaks now confirmed in Tyrone and Antrim, it seems barely tenable that GAA life can unfold as normal this summer in Ulster.
So far there has been a stoicism about all of this, underpinned by a realisation that the stakes for everyone concerned are considerably higher than the results of a few games of football. But more so than ever before this is a situation in which the GAA has to take its lead from its people.
With what appears to some to be indecent haste, the cancellation of games and the removal of teams from competitions impacts psychologically on those affected. On one flank the farmers are coping with the ravages of disease and on the other any remaining social and sporting dimension to their lives is being destroyed.
The stringent precautions to stem the spread of foot-and-mouth are obviously necessary. But the seemingly overwhelming imperative that GAA life should continue outside the affected areas and competitions be completed on schedule is insensitive in the extreme. Putting the competitions into cold storage until this terrible storm has passed would be a tremendous act of solidarity from the GAA hierarchy to its people. Much more would be gained than lost.