The Rice Cup was the sporting highlight of our last year at primary school. For months beforehand it was the main topic of break-time conversation as we chased a football up and down the sloping playground behind St Colmcille's Primary School in Omagh like so many excitable calves. Even then there were 10-year-olds who stood out and were certainties for the school team right from the beginning of September. For the rest of us it was a crash course in survival of the fittest as we jockeyed for position, all the time looking anxiously over one shoulder for the guy just one place behind in the pecking order. It was a terrible, anxious time. You might have started off dreaming of midfield but when that first team sheet went up on the notice board you would have been ecstatic with corner back.
The football that followed was not pretty but it mattered little as we tentatively began a journey into GAA culture that will last a lifetime. All the while there was one constant as the Christian Brothers and other lay teachers in the school organised challenge matches, took training sessions, picked teams and drove minibuses to exotic, faraway places like Belfast and Newry. Then, as now, there was little or no reward for going beyond their teaching remit but it was a commitment to the games that had a significance even for immature and awkward young Gaelic footballers like us.
Two or three years later many of us were still together a mile or so away at the town's Christian Brothers' Grammar School. A few inches taller but precious little wiser, we stood shivering on the all-weather pitch a couple of afternoons a week after school. Realising that intercounty football honours were probably a pleasure reserved for the next life, we had decided to throw our lot in with hurling and see if that could be our way into the GAA's promised land.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Tyrone will know that it is not one of the country's great hurling nurseries so it fell on one of the brothers in the school to take charge of those bitterly cold winter training sessions. We were never quite sure where he came from, although somebody thought Waterford and that seemed far enough away to be convincing. But the important thing was that he spoke with a commanding, deep Southern growl and we listened in awe as he spoke of this strange new world of hooking, pulling and ground strokes.
These were the days when some bright spark had the idea of making sticks out of fibre glass on the basis that they were unbreakable and therefore made sound economic sense for cash-strapped schools and clubs. Our hurling brother was clearly taken in by this marketing man's spin and duly ordered in a job lot for his young innocents. There was, however, one fatal design flaw. The white, three-quarter sized sticks may have been hard-wearing and durable but they also delivered the most jarring shudder when struck against the ground or one another.
One or two shoulder-numbing experiences were enough to test your resolve for this new sporting diversion but the brother persisted and somehow fashioned a team out of a motley crew to make the journey back to Newry and Belfast to face the same boys from a few years before. That brother devoted himself to setting hurling roots down in the school for no other reason than his own deep-seated love of the game.
It certainly would not have been for the thrill of watching us play. If anything these games of what passed for hurling were even worse spectacles than the primary school football which predated them, but we ploughed on regardless. We won nothing of course - it is actually hard to remember us even winning a match - but 15 years later it matters little.
It was hard not to think of those brothers over the past few weeks as the debate continues about the legacy of the Order and its future in a time of declining vocations. Amid all the negativity, some positives have been lost. Every sporting body here, but most pertinently the GAA, owes it a tremendous debt for the contributions of countless brothers over the last century. The patterns they helped to lay down and the habits they worked hard to ingrain have had a fundamental effect in shaping today's association.
Without the Christian Brothers and the other religious, Ulster's GAA fabric would be seriously diminished. Omagh CBS, the Abbey and St Colman's in Newry, St Mary's CBS Belfast and Armagh's St Patrick's College have all been productive nurseries for generations of footballers and hurlers. The McRory Cup, Ulster's premier football competition for second-level colleges, has, under the stewardship and leadership of men like Brother Lawrence Ennis, nurtured a succession of intercounty players and All-Ireland winners.
None of this is meant to be cloyingly sentimental or doused in sepia-tinted nostalgia. Of course there were problems. Discipline was tough to the point of being draconian and some of the brothers were so detached from normal life that they had real problems with even the basics of communication. There was always a barrier which separated the brothers from us and many of them found it an impossible one to overcome.
But those inadequacies and weaknesses should not be allowed to hide all the good and positive things that they did. The educational and sporting environment which they created in their schools may well have been nationalist but it was also avowedly non-political. The importance of that in a society which threatened to implode on more than one occasion over the last 30 years cannot be overestimated. The GAA was presented and nurtured as an acceptable, non-violent expression of identity and that template was then replicated in life outside the confines of the schools.
The irony is that as we edge out the other side of all that towards some new political settlement here, the influence of the brothers here is on the wane. There are none left teaching at primary level and very few at secondary. But even though the Christian Brothers are all but gone the ethos in the schools they have left behind endures.
There may not be brothers in the future but the work they did in providing a space for nationalist Gaelic culture to develop at a time when others were unwilling or unable to do so remains something of true value. That is something to be proud of and no one should be afraid to stand up and say it.
