IN Bellaghy, the GAA club lies in a hollow just off the main street. In every other respect, the Wolfe Tones club lies at the centre of life in the village.
It would be difficult to find a better example of a sporting organisation more in tune with the psyche of its constituency, Bellaghy people play their football and hurling here, learn Irish and Irish dancing here, drink here, play basketball and bingo here, Life revolves around the GAA club.
Wolfe Tones is a shining example of how sport can glue together a community. A village set in the south Derry countryside, Bellaghy couldn't breathe without the GAA, Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney has said of his upbringing there that, as part of a minority in that part of Ireland claimed by Britain, "it emphasised rather than eroded" his sense of Irish identity.
The murder of Sean Brown isn't the first time sectarian politics has visited the club. As a symbol of nationalist confidence, Wolfe Tones CLG has long attracted the resentments of certain elements of loyalism. Twice the splendid club premises has been burned down, Twice the local RUC failed to find the guilty party. Twice Bellaghy has rebuilt its club from the ground. The first arson attack was in 1971. A year later the club was rebuilding and had also won the All-Ireland Club Championship.
The GAA runs to the heart of things in Bellaghy, The taking and killing of Sean Brown as he locked up the premises after another function will touch an extraordinarily raw nerve in the community. In Bellaghy, the GAA is not a part of the community; the community is a part of the GAA.
A popular and dedicated GAA official, Sean Brown had been central to the club's successive regenerations. His energy and devotion drove the endless fund-raising campaigns which, bought the bricks and mortar. His son, Damian, played for the second Bellaghy team to reach the All-Ireland final in 1995. Sean Brown served as the club chairman for the past few years.
Bellagby Wolfe Tones were founded in 19,19, winning the first of 17 county championships in 1956 and becoming, in 1972, the first club (as opposed to college or divisional) side to win the All-Ireland Club Championship.
They won the county title in 1994 after almost a decade of barren years. The momentum of their young team, some of whom were still in school at the time, brought the club all the way to the All-Ireland final. It was Sean Brown, ever busy, who organised the fleet of buses which served the evacuation of Bellaghy on that March day.
To be with him in the run-up to that final was to enter into the world of the dedicated GAA clubman, fretting over tickets and raffles and bar takes and numbers. The club had difficulty getting the RUC to keep an eye on its premises and Sean Brown would be there most nights until the last member left, so he could lock up and set the alarms.
Bellaghy lost that final but the club's irrepressible spirit survived. The county championship was regained in 1996 but the club lost out in the Ulster championship to eventual All-Ireland winners Crossmaglen Rangers.
When Derry won its first All-Ireland senior football title, players from Bellaghy and their great neighbours and rivals Lavey, were the backbone of the team.
The club has a concert hall which can hold 2,000, a bar in a smaller hall for dancing and classes, a championship standard pitch and a smaller pitch for training
Drawing from a small catchment area (the local region has 11 other GAA clubs vying for talent),
Bellaghy have drawn on the same families for several generations now. The surnames of the team who played in the All-Ireland of 1972 are largely the same as those on the team beaten in 1995: Scullions, Cassidys, Diamonds, Mulhollands, Donnellys, Downeys, Quinns and Browns all recur.
Like Sean Brown, most nationalist people in Bellaghy choose to express their identity through the playing of and attendance at Gaelic games.
Inevitably, however, running parallel to Bellaghy's history of footballing prowess is a long tradition of republican involvement which has sometimes overlapped with the football club's existence.
Frank Hughes and Tom McElwee, two of the hunger strikers who died in summer 1981, were Bellaghy men. Once In the 1970s, the authorities issued a poster of the three most wanted men in the North. All three were from Bellaghy and two, Dominic McGlinchey and Frank Hughes, now lie in the small graveyard there.
In 1969, on a weekend cited as formative by many south Derry republicans, the long civil rights march from Belfast to Derry was denied the right to walk through the mainly nationalist village by the local RUC. It was stated that the sight of the march would offend a local unionist whose house was perched high above the roadside. A prolonged stand-off ensued at the Ballydermot Crossroads. Eventually the march was rerouted.
Some things don't change. For the past two summers, the Bellaghy community has been involved in other stand-offs, this time refusing to permit the local Orange lodge to march through William Street In the town's centre.
To understand the heart and soul of northern GAA and the sometimes subtle but crucial distinctions between the passive expression of cultural identity and the violent pursuit of political ends, one has to come to Bellaghy and talk to men like Sean Brown who are so steeped in the love of the game that it consumes their lives.
When those distinctions are blurred and they are murdering good men like Sean Brown, Bellaghy's sporting culture seems more precious, not more trivial.