Bellaghy choose Seamus Heaney to commemorate a past glory

Had they wished, Bellaghy Wolfe Tones GAA Club could have reached into a darker past.

They could have laid bare historical grievances, run their fingers across the scars of their shared experience of the 1970s and the decades that followed.

The Co Derry club, winners for the first and only time of the All-Ireland club championship in 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday, more resonant in Derry than anywhere, was, like many communities at the time, ripped apart by conflict.

The town of Bellaghy is situated just to the north-west of Lough Neagh, and west of Lough Beg on the River Bann. The GAA club shares the town with poet Seamus Heaney, who grew up there and drew much of his material from the area.

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Among the many who were killed from Bellaghy and around its narrow roads to Castledawson, Magherafelt, Toomebridge, Portglenone, Gulladuff and Clady was Colm McCartney, a cousin of Heaney and the subject of his poem, The Strand at Lough Beg.

Two years before Bellaghy won the club championships, the 22-year-old was murdered at a bogus checkpoint as he returned from an All-Ireland semi-final between Derry and Dublin.

Bellaghy’s main pitch, Páirc Seán de Brún, is named after their former club chairman Seán Brown, who was attacked and abducted by a Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) gang on an evening in May 1997 as he locked the main gates of the grounds on the Ballyscullion Road.

Less than an hour later the lifeless body of the father-of-six was found beside his burnt-out car near Randalstown in Co Antrim. He had been shot six times.

There are other stories of local people from which Bellaghy could also have drawn in the last 50 years since their famous championship win.

It could have remembered 25-year-old Francis Hughes, another from the parish, who died after 59 days on hunger strike. He followed Bobby Sands MP, becoming the second prisoner to die during the turmoil in Long Kesh prison throughout 1981.

Hughes and 23-year-old Thomas McElwee, who died after 62 days on hunger strike, as well as former INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey, came from Bellaghy.

But for their 50th anniversary commemoration of the 1972 success, the club chose poetry over polemic, reflection over revisiting. They chose local man Heaney and a reading by the surviving team of the poem Markings, ostensibly about children playing summer football.

Put to music and filmed, the short celebration, perhaps in the voices and accents the poet had imagined when he wrote the poem, is without drama but authentic and in its simplicity forceful and moving.

Spoken words, Derry accents, it begins: “We marked the pitch: four jackets for four goalposts, that was all.”

Each player gifted one line of the poem, the scene is set on the Heaney land at Mossbawn, where a crowd of boys gather on a summer’s evening to play football, the game continuing long after dark when the ball is no more than a shadow.

“Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

As the light died and they kept on playing

Because by then they were playing in their heads”

The poet’s memory of laying out a pitch, marking the goalposts with jumpers, picking teams and playing football is not just a melancholic picture of the stretched out, timeless summer days before community distrust and civil unrest arrived and when the night became something to fear, but also about limits.

It speaks about the boundaries, the imagined touchlines, the goal and the square in front of the goal, those margins that define the area as a football pitch and something more than a piece of bumpy waste ground. It describes the perimeters to which the rules of the game apply.

“The corners and the squares

Were there like longitude and latitude”

They are the boys’ imagined and agreed grids and lines like the Border dividing Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland or the walls of the Presbyterian church. They are the gates of the GAA club, the hedge dividing a field between farmers of different communities, the invisible bisections, the buildings where people go to worship, the shops mothers go buy fish on a Friday.

The innocent picking of the opposing teams in the poem instantly divides the loyalties of the group and as the game progresses squabbles break out, a ball that was over or not over the line.

“Agreed about or disagreed about

When the time came.”

The 1970s was an era when the conflict, by its nature, consumed human decency. The delineations of a surname, or uniform, or school were the boundaries that often decided life and death.

The town constable, the GAA committee man, the local councillor, a boy coming home from a football match, they had no choice, when they lined up, about the side in which they were picked to play.

The club have had county wins since the 1972 team beat the fancied UCC that day in Croke Park. But even with half of the team on the county panel, never again have they won a national title. Given its past and the storied lives of the players, the commemorative sequence could have looked so different.

Poignantly they chose to celebrate their piece of history through verse. In that Bellaghy clearly marked out their hinterland, reached a settlement on what they have come from and where they have arrived.