PSNI’s Gaelic football team - a long road to winning community trust

In their first match, 20 years ago, the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s (PSNI) Gaelic football team was captained by Damien Tucker, one of the founders of the club. He was 38 then, having spent his adult life playing rugby, cut adrift from the GAA by a century-old rule that excluded members of the British security forces. Tucker joined the police force in 1984 as an idealistic young man, jumping off a cliff.

The Troubles were raging. Hostility towards the RUC in nationalist communities was fierce and deep-rooted and intractable. Fewer than 5 per cent of the force were Catholic. Tucker wanted to be a policeman. In his innocence, and in his convictions, he believed he could make a difference. His courage lay in knowing what he was doing.

“When I joined the police force it wasn’t something that was widely seen as viable,” he says now, seven years after his retirement. “One of the things when you’re young – it’s nearly like a rebellious mentality – you think you can change the world. In those days, one of the problems with the police force was that there weren’t enough people from my background in it and [I’m thinking], ‘Maybe, if I go in now I can change it.’ I was probably a good 15 or 20 years ahead of my time.

“It was a really big deal. I came from a small nationalist village. I came from a background of playing GAA. Went to a Catholic primary school. It was a really, really big deal in your own community [joining the RUC]. They didn’t like it. They saw you as a turncoat. Traitor maybe – some people would have put it as strongly as that. And then, the other side of the community, they treated you with suspicion. They thought you were an IRA spy. You didn’t win either way.”

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Collie played in that first match too. A panel of nearly 50 players was assembled, including everybody who had expressed a desire to play for St Michael’s, as the club was named. Their team bus was escorted from Belfast and met by Garda outriders near Dublin, scattering the daytime traffic as they went, arriving like diplomats.

The PSNI was a year old, a rebranded, reconstituted police force, canvassing hard for cross-community trust. The 1998 Belfast Agreement, and the report of the Patten Commission on policing in Northern Ireland, leant heavily on the GAA to repeal the rule that had excluded members of the British security forces; at a Special Congress in 2001, two weeks after the PSNI came into existence, Rule 21 was deleted.

For security reasons Collie doesn’t want to be identified by his second name, or by his home GAA club. He joined the PSNI in the first wave of young Catholic recruits, emboldened by a holding peace and a more temperate political climate. During the Troubles, and in the fraught years that followed, gestures and symbols were an alternative language. The existence of a GAA team in the new police force was a more powerful symbol of inclusion, and outreach, than any recruitment campaign could have expressed.

“I think we were aware [of the symbolism],” says Collie, “but we probably didn’t understand the extent of it, in a wider context. When there were speeches being made [at the post-match dinner in Westmanstown, after the first match] people were talking about historic, and these sort of words, but we probably didn’t understand it in the context we would now. Looking back on the development of the team, and how far we’ve come, we can see how challenging a time it was – but really, for a lot of us, it was just playing football.”

Collie has been all things to the club: player, captain, manager, administrator and chairman now; 20 years of unbroken, unblinking service. Over the years, putting out a team wasn’t always simple. The importance of doing so was not lost on them. Come what may.

After Tucker, the next captain of the team was Peadar Heffron. He was a young Catholic recruit who had been ostracised by his home GAA club for joining the PSNI. In January 2010, eight years after joining the force, he was the victim of a car-bomb attack. For three weeks Heffron lay in a coma, fighting for his life. In his recovery, his right leg was amputated; the operations continued for years.

Fifteen months later Ronan Kerr was killed in a car-bomb attack, targeted, like Heffron, for being a Catholic in the PSNI. He had joined the PSNI GAA club too, and from Tucker’s memory, had played one match. “He wasn’t a well-known club member,” says Tucker, “because he was very new at the time.

“People don’t know this, but there were more than two attacks,” says Tucker. “There was another lad blown up in an under-car booby trap as well, not very badly injured. He survived and was back in a few months playing sport again. The thing didn’t go off fully. That was the first one.

“For us, as a club, it made us look at security in a much stricter way. There were lads who were happy to play but didn’t want to publicise it and didn’t want to give their names. There was a long time when that went on. That was understandable as well.

“But it didn’t put guys off, I suppose, because they were now in a position where they had joined the PSNI. These people were targeting the PSNI. If that’s having such a big impact on you, you’re going to leave the PSNI, not just the GAA club. And if you’re going to stay in the PSNI, you may as well play GAA as well.”

The attacks on Kerr and Heffron generated cross-community outrage and revulsion. In the week of Kerr’s murder a minute’s silence was observed by a crowd of 8,000 people at Tyrone’s National League game in Dungannon, the first time that the death of a member of the security forces in the north had been acknowledged in this way at a GAA match. “Their silence reverberated around the North,” wrote Joe Brolly in his Gaelic Life column.

At Kerr’s funeral a group of GAA men, led by the Tyrone manager Mickey Harte and the GAA president Christy Cooney, carried the coffin on a leg of its final journey, and handed over to a group of PSNI officers to proceed with their colleague’s remains. The powerful symbolism of that was easily understood too.

Though Heffron left the PSNI he stayed involved with St Michael’s and until last year he was chairman of the club. Heffron and Collie have been friends from the start.

“Peadar is the sort of character that he picked himself up from it, to a certain extent, and has gone on. I’ve been to watch him play wheelchair basketball. He went on to manage St Paul’s Hollywood, and been involved with other football teams. Any time I’m in Peadar’s company, he’s very upbeat. He hasn’t allowed the incident to define him.

“I suppose, if anything, what happened to Peadar galvanised us. As a club, we played more in or around 2010, 2011, because we were of a mind that this has happened to Peadar. He was a pioneer in pushing the club and reaching out to other people. We wanted to show, I suppose, Peadar and other people that we wanted to play football, and be involved in football. So, we continued as we were.”

Their fixtures list is fluid. They have an annual match against the Garda for the Tom Langan Cup, and every second year they take part in an inter-police tournament against teams from the NYPD, the London Met and the Garda. Otherwise, they’re open to offers.

Being part of a county league, like the Garda in Dublin, is not practical for St Michael’s, on a number of levels. For one thing, their players are scattered around the North, working different shift patterns. To be sure of fielding a team on any given day, they would need an active panel of about 40 players. For another thing, they might not be welcome everywhere.

“There’s always challenges,” says Collie. “You’re always going to get some people within teams who aren’t maybe accepting of the police, or have a different experience of the police, or come from different backgrounds and have different views of the police. I’d like to think that we’ve won a lot of people over. We’ve conducted ourselves in the right way and we’ve made a lot of friends in doing it. But, yeah, you’re always going to get people that don’t like the police, don’t like police Gaelic – but we just do our thing, in a positive way.”

They were part of an inter-firms league in Belfast years ago, until that tournament fizzled out, and in those days they might have played 14 or 15 games a year. Now, they rely on invitations, from all corners of the GAA globe. Cill Na Martra GAA club, near Macroom in Cork, invited them to a tournament a few years ago; Seán Kelly, the MEP and former president of the GAA, invited them to Brussels to play against a team from the European Parliament. They’ve played in Croke Park, and Gaelic Park in New York, and in the Tyrone Centre of Excellence and a host of other tour stops.

But not everything works out. During the summer they were invited to play in an over-35s tournament by Clann na Banna, a club in Co Down. St Michael’s agreed at first, but ultimately pulled out. The Belfast Telegraph reported that some members of other participating clubs were unhappy about the presence of the PSNI in the tournament; in a story in the Irish News, Clann na Banna flatly rebutted that claim. Collie says there was an issue with “communication.”

One way or another, things became more complicated than they would have liked and they decided it was best to step away, and play Clann na Banna in a stand-alone fixture at some other time. You’d imagine it should have been straightforward; not always.

The happy, unintended consequence was that a few clubs in Belfast had spotted the story and invited them into a short, autumn league that they were planning. St Michael’s accepted, without reservation. Over the years, those kind of morale-sustaining offers have repeatedly materialised. There have always been people who understood the importance of the GAA in the PSNI and the passion of those who cradled it.

Are they in good shape? Collie says they have about 80 members, all of whom pay a monthly subscription, and when they competed in the inter-police tournament in Dublin last month they had 33 able bodies. The age profile of the team, though, is creeping up.

“You rely on recruitment and new players coming through,” says Collie. “We probably wouldn’t have had as many new players in the last five years as we would have had previously. There’s always that fear that everyone is getting old together. You need new blood, and that depends on recruitment. We’ve a couple of lads in their 20s who joined recently, but a lot of the lads now are in their early to mid-30s. We want to keep it going, that’s the idea of the whole thing.”

Tucker watches from a distance now, still paying attention with a proud, parental eye.

“It was very much about the sport for me,” he says, “but it was also a contribution to the reformation of the police. Young people who played GAA no longer had to give it up – the way I did. The ban was lifted, there was a club they could join. It didn’t change the world, but I was involved in changing something, I suppose.”

Piece by piece. Come what may.

PSNI Timeline

October 2002 The PSNI Gaelic football team, St Michael’s, play their first match, against the Garda at Westmanstown in Dublin.

August 2006 St Michael’s meet a club team from Northern Ireland for the first time when they play St Brigid’s in south Belfast.

February 200: St Michael’s and the Garda GAA team are invited to meet president Mary McAleese in Áras an Uachtaráin.

January 2010 The St Michael’s captain, Peadar Heffron, is seriously injured in a car-bomb attack.

April 2011 Ronan Kerr, a young Catholic member of the PSNI and a member of the St Michael’s club, is killed by a car bomb.

November 2011 St Michael’s make their first appearance in Croke Park, in a match against the Garda.

October 2019 St Michael’s win the inter-police tournament for the first time, in Gaelic Park, New York.

October 2022 The club celebrates its 20th anniversary, with 80 members and a squad of more than 30 players.