In McGuinness’s turbulent life sport was always a retreat

He was often a face in the crowd on the broiling summer days of the Ulster championship, in Clones or in Celtic Park. He had this staggering ability to fade into the local given that his was a distinctive face and one which everybody knew.

Among the many sides of Martin McGuinness was the Derry GAA man and the Derry City lifer and he loved the games. He made the list for a trial for the Derry Gaelic football minor team but he never showed. He had other things on his mind.

So who could not to be struck by what Bill Clinton rightly described as the “amazing unfolding” of Martin McGuinness’s life at his funeral oration in St Columb’s Church on Thursday?

Clinton’s very presence at the pulpit was the most visible reflection of the magnitude of that; a 1950s Bogside kid commanding the presence of a former US president – and, as it happened, one of the great orators of the last century– at his funeral mass.

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It framed the intensely local and international worlds which he navigated. And through that, sport was always a retreat. That Derry buried its football captain, Ryan McBride, and its political figurehead on the same day made Thursday one of the city’s truly unforgettable days.

In a short, revealing interview with Chris Campbell of The Observer back in 2001, when he was minister for education, McGuinness spoke of the way sport captivated his boyhood mind.

It was remarkable precisely because it was so ordinary. Mass at 6.30; baps at the local bakery and street games for an hour at seven in the morning, always with a plastic football. Leather balls were a luxury and it would have been a crime to destroy a ‘tube and cover’ by using it on the street.

The Busby Babes; the Brandywell; a train trip with his father to Belfast in 1964 to see the Irish Cup final: these were the days that stuck before he threw himself into darkest exchanges of carnage and death which dominated society in the North for three decades.

The Troubles, of course, interrupted league football in the Brandywell. In the 1970s, ordered to play their home games in Coleraine because of fears of violence at the Derry ground, the club felt it had no option but to withdraw from the Irish League.

A rope

Derry city fans wouldn’t have made that 30-mile journey in the same numbers. They wouldn’t have felt safe. For 13 years, the famous ground hosted just a handful of games until local supporters and businessmen reimagined it as the League of Ireland club it is today.

The dramatic and near-instant sweep of success led to a glamour home draw against Benfica in the European Cup of 1989/90. Just before the game, a few committee members from the club paid McGuiness a visit. Explosives had been found in the cemetery near the ground.

They were worried that if they alerted the RUC or the Army, it would lead to a highly publicised song-and-dance, an understandably terrified team of Portuguese stars and the cancellation of the game.

McGuinness headed up to the graveyard with a few club directors. They took refuge behind some headstones while he tied a rope around the device and dragged it to a nearby manhole, where it was flushed away into the city sewer system. Derry lost 2-1. The North raged on.

McGuinness’s brother Paul had held the right-back position for the team for a spell while his oldest brother Tom was a sports hero in the Creggan, one of the revered figures of Derry’s 1975/’76 Ulster championship-winning teams.

More important than the football talent of that team was its presence as a force of positive escapism for young Catholics growing up in a bleak and fearful and murderous climate.

Last year, Chris McCann and Dermot McPeake commemorated the team with a fine essay which recalled what Henry Downey, Derry’s All-Ireland winning captain of 1993, said of Tom McGuinness’s crowd.

“There was a romance and flamboyance about those teams of the Seventies. They caught our imaginations.”

Of course they did. Following the team to Clones and then to Croke Park – where they were duly steamrolled by first Dublin (’75), then Kerry (’76) – was an opportunity to pretend that life was normal when it was anything but.

Vivid carnival

In the 1970s and 1980s, the GAA seemed like a vivid carnival revealing why the two communities in Northern Ireland would never reach any common ground.

To follow the GAA or to play its games was to reveal your nationalism and to make yourself a target. Playing Gaelic games; carrying a hurl in the boot of your car, could, in the wrong circumstances, get you killed.

And to Unionists, the GAA and its games –which were often coloured with an exuberantly violent streak – must have seemed like a staging of everything they found strange and alien about Catholic nationalism and culture: a coda and language of a world they could never comprehend even if they wanted – or were permitted – to.

That’s why, in portraying just how far both sides had travelled in their efforts to established a peaceful North, it was convenient to show Peter Robinson, then first minister, sitting with McGuinness at a McKenna Cup final (Derry v Tyrone) in 2012. In the bombed-out decades of the 1970s and 1980s, that scenario could only have been the punch line of a joke. Yet there they were.

Over the past few days, much has understandably been made of Martin McGuinness’s extraordinary move from the heart of the IRA to the heart to the North’s sincere if faltering leap towards establishing a normal, sane society.

The unlikely friendship between McGuinness and the late Rev Ian Paisley has been the subject of much Ulster-tinted mirth. Both had made radical departures from their unblinking absolutism to reach that point.

But then, both were in the privileged position of being alive and well to do so. Thousands of others weren’t so lucky.

It is fully understandable that many of the victims and the families of those murdered and maimed during the Troubles would have felt sickened and forgotten about during the romantic interpretation of McGuinness’s life and influence which filled the sky and airwaves on Thursday.

Life force

McGuinness’s shift towards peace was comparatively simple and it rewarded him with garlands of appreciation and the acknowledgement that his legacy, as a saviour of peace, was secure.

It was his power to persuade others from both communities and in Westminster that he meant it – that peace was the only road worth travelling – that was the true marvel. It was, for example, the message, via Twitter from Jo Berry, whose father was killed in the Brighton bombing of 1984, to dedicate a line that McGuinness was to her “an inspiring example of peace and reconciliation” which best gave a sense of his exceptional life force.

It was the starkest example of the fact that when it came to McGuinness’s life – and the life experience of being a young Catholic Derry man in the 1970s – there were never any straight lines or beacons; that he was born into a bizarre, unfair environment and responded to it as he saw fit.

Sport was one of the few arenas of clear rules and fair play and glamour in the Derry of McGuinness’s youth so little wonder that the fascination never left him.

Little wonder he tweeted his support for Chrissy McCaigue and Slaughtneil just last month. And little wonder that his big sporting dream was to some day see Derry City as champions of a football league in a united Ireland. Like so much about the North of his life span, it was a dream that was at once childishly simple and impossibly complex.