Dunloy eye All-Ireland glory after decades of slipping and climbing

More than 20 years ago, the Dunloy team that lost four All-Ireland finals were annihilated by Athenry in Parnell Park: the counting stopped at 16 points, mercifully. Looking in from the outside, it seemed like one of those defeats for which there was no cure. By then, they had spent a decade climbing and slipping and climbing again, chasing a summit in the clouds. Then this: down to the bottom, lying in a heap.

It made no difference. What else were they going to do? What better thing was there to do? There was no deadline. They operated on a continuum of beginnings.

“When you’re in a team environment, you never think you’re gone, if that makes sense,” says Gregory O’Kane, manager of Dunloy now and a player back then. “It’s nearly like a boxer. You always think, ‘Jesus, aye, I can do this – and this’. Then, the next thing, you’re lying on the canvas. Teams are like that. You never see it coming. Who really ever sees it coming? We never thought we were gone.”

Renewal came naturally. It wasn’t a process that needed to be seeded or fertilised. Hurling was part of every day, like the weather: good and bad. “We just saw it as normal. Family is precious and hurling is our life. That’s just what it is. You’re involved in hurling – you go and play. They were the best days of our lives, shooting for the moon.”

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The dimensions of Dunloy have scarcely changed since O’Kane was a boy. There are about 1,200 people in the parish now and enough local employment to provide for every young person that wishes to stay. It is a mostly Catholic village within hailing distance of Ballymena, Ballymoney and Coleraine, big towns and unionist strongholds. A Paisley has been their local MP for more than 50 years, father and son. Within those boundaries, they staked their ground.

“We’re 100 per cent a village community. Isolated. We’re not in the glens – we’re on the edge of the glens. It’s a nationalist village in unionist-dominated north Antrim.”

In O’Kane’s childhood Dunloy wasn’t in the eye of the Troubles. In 1984, three people were killed in a fire fight in the village, two IRA men and a British solider, but that incident was an outlier. For many years, though, the main street formed part of the route for an Orange Order march. Tensions simmered until the summer of 1998 when the lid flew off the pot.

“Orangemen laid siege to the village for nearly three hours,” according to a report in The Irish Times. “About 1,000 of them blocked three roads into the village, say residents. In a statement the Co Antrim Grand Lodge said its members had ‘taken up positions’ and ‘held’ the village. During the three-hour blockade, the Orangemen sang loyalist songs and cheered.

“Many of the men in the village stood at their front doors armed with hurleys, ready for action if necessary.”

O’Kane’s late father, Paddy, was chairman of the residents’ association at the time and was heavily involved in brokering a solution. The Belfast Agreement was only a couple of months old; nobody expected instant harmony. It was a little more than a year since Sean Brown had been killed, and no more than six months since Gerry Devlin had met the same fate, both of them prominent members of their local GAA clubs. That winter, the pub in Dunloy where GAA people congregated spent £5,000 on security cameras. Their anxiety reflected the mood of the time.

“In the mid-90s there were still a lot of sectarian killings going on. The GAA was always a target, there’s no getting away from it. It was more luck than anything if you weren’t affected by it. As kids there were places we couldn’t go. Not in the village – you were always safe in the village – but there were places you wouldn’t be going in a GAA capacity, put it like that. It wasn’t safe. I’m not saying it’s totally eradicated now, but it’s a lot better than what it was.

“For people like my father it was more a case of getting the kids, the young people, away from strife. Things like that are in the past. It’s better for everybody and it’s better for the club. Everybody wants to move on in life, and that’s everybody – both sections of the community. There’s a Presbyterian church in the middle of the village and people from that community go there every Sunday, and there’s nobody that bothers anybody. This is what we want.

“The saddest part still is that my kids can play any sport. If you’re from a Protestant background, you’re shoehorned into two or three sports. My kids play a bit of soccer and you would meet people from the other tradition – lovely people. You just feel that their children don’t get the same opportunity to play Gaelic games. Society at the minute doesn’t allow that. That’s totally not from our side – but it’s just the way it is.”

Inspiration

In one sense the GAA club in Dunloy was oblivious to climate change. Their ambition and their resourcefulness didn’t need a political context, or a fair wind. They had a firm mind to go places. At the height of the economic boom they made plans for a stunning new complex: two grass pitches, an indoor arena, a 4G pitch, a clubhouse. People from the club went around Ireland, scouting other facilities for inspiration and snags.

The project was costed at about £1.4 million (€1.6 million). Significant grants were available, but ultimately they would be depending on their supporters to foot the bill. Undaunted, they ploughed on. Building costs fell when the recession hit, but they would have done it regardless.

On the pitch, they were imbued with sky-blue thinking. Losing didn’t exert any limits. They lost their first All-Ireland semi-final, and won the next. They lost their first All-Ireland final in a replay, and bounced back to the final the following year. In a golden era for club hurling, Dunloy were a menace to all-comers.

“Like, Birr won four All-Irelands. They were an exceptional team. We played Birr three times. Portumna won four, Athenry won three, Sarsfields won two. Between them all they won a ridiculous amount. If you didn’t get them in a semi-final, you got them in a final. The level was crazy.”

Dunloy’s resilience, though, was extraordinary. In a 10-year period from 1995 they contested four All-Ireland finals, the same number as Birr, and more than anybody else. Scan the line-ups and the same names keep cropping up. “There was a network of families,” says O’Kane, “so everybody would have had a connection with somebody”.

In total, 28 players appeared for Dunloy in those All-Ireland finals, but only four players started and finished those games: Gregory O’Kane, his uncle Gary, Gregory’s childhood friend Alistair Elliott and Frankie McMullan.

Looking back now, the first final against Birr was the one that got away. On a beastly day they led by four points at half-time, having faced the wind and sleet. In the second half, though, they could only muster a point and Birr forced a draw: in the replay, Dunloy failed to score in the first half.

They were the first team to lose back-to-back club hurling finals; and then, cruelly, they were the first team to do it twice. In the last two finals, against Birr in 2003 and Newtownshandrum a year later, they didn’t raise a gallop. Ger O’Neill was their manager in those years and he was certain the players had lost the run of themselves after they won the 2003 semi-final. A year later, there was no such mitigation.

O’Kane kept going. He was 39 when he played in his last county final. By the time he finished he had amassed 11 Antrim medals and 10 Ulster medals. “Did I feel fulfilled? Sure, you never are. You always want more. But you look back and say, ‘I couldn’t have done any more’.

“In the All-Irelands we probably didn’t learn from our semi-finals. The final is a completely different game. If there was a lesson learned, that was it. Semi-finals mean f**k-all. This group of players are young. They’re their own men. They’re playing in a final that is totally irrelevant to anything that happened before. There’s no substitute for doing it. You’ll never study it unless you live it.”

In O’Kane’s time as a player Dunloy were not afraid to look outside for help. One year they approached Justin McCarthy from Cork and he staged an all-day clinic in Gormanstown; another year they spent a weekend in Wexford under the spell of Liam Griffin. Mickey Moran, the football coach, spent a season providing one session of physical training every week. O’Neill travelled up from Tipperary to be their manager on the intervention of Dinny Cahill.

O’Kane, though, hasn’t gone down that route. When he took over, nine years ago, Dunloy had hit a flat spot. He believed it would take five years to win another Antrim title and they did it in year four. That was 2017. They had only reached base camp.

“If you can create a pathway, where players can go on a journey, like the one we had – to me, it’s about that as much as anything.”

Tomorrow, they shoot for the moon.