The feeling, the heart, the soul: Clones and Croke Park get us in the guts

The 42

12-05-2025

THERE'S A PICTURE of an Ulster final day of the 1960s. As Fermanagh Street tumbles down from Matt Fitzpatrick Square and ramps heavenwards towards St Tiernach's Park, the scene demands your attention.
Advertising hoarding juts out from the street façade, advising that Guinness is good for you, the famous Harp lager sign and ladies hairdressing saloons. You could smoke your lungs to a standstill if you followed the advice of Sweet Afton and Gold Flake.
Clones in the 1960s. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo
Bunting tethered across the street. Beneath them, groups of young men in suits and women in pencil skirts stand around, taking in the day or else journeying up or down.
Some 30 years later, the Cavan newspaper The Anglo Celt commissioned the poet and playwright Tom MacIntyre to write a colour piece on the 1995 Ulster final between Cavan and Tyrone.
'Clones, two hours before the match, the streets packed and rich with colour, sun shining, hamburgers and hot-dogs hopping up and down like eggs in a ponger.
'It's a Fair, I thought. The Ulster final has become a Fair, a Festival, a Fleadh. Are we starting to learn to enjoy ourselves, I wondered?'
30 years on from that day and I retraced MacIntyre's steps on Saturday. I parked out the Roslea Road end and walked around the long way to Matt Fitzpatrick Square in an act of self-sacrifice only matched by war correspondents.
The square was resplendent as a technicolour dream; tangerine dreams and the green and gold of the most forlorn counties of them all. My hand went into my pocket to retrieve my phone in a futile attempt to capture it all. It's impossible to capture a feeling.
On down through the hot, steaming mass of skin browning, baking or burning. Struck by the mix of all ages, the good humour and the obvious and gauche flirting of the rural Ulsterfolk; charming a potential partner by slagging them about something, anything at all.
We are now at that age when we truly can say without irony that 'it is nice to, see the young people enjoying themselves.'
100 'scuse mes' later and the crowd opens up as you stretch the calves on the climb to the ground. Banjos are being plucked by a street side beat combo. A tinny tannoy broadcasts something a bit country and wobbly. Off in the distance behind us, the techno thump endures.
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The Clones hill in full voice. Ben Brady / INPHO Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
Images of children starved, bombed, burned and drowned from Gaza over the past year are fixed to the high fences. You cannot ignore them. They compel you to look and study and think how you can be in this unreality and confronted by the reality with banners imploring you not to support Israeli goods.
Into the quirky concrete bowl and the day out properly unfolds. A line of people pouring into the hill remains right up until ten minutes after the game has thrown in. The day is alive and raw.
None of this could have happened without the £700 handed over to local Methodist called Samuel Keary for some land that was turned into a ground and opened in time for the 1944 Ulster final. What a legacy.
Questions have been raised about the provincial system. Is it now 'fit for purpose?' Has it outlived it's initial aim?
How much of that debate was generated by Dublin's unrestricted authority in Leinster? And where that argument tails off, it is taken up again by the current situation whereby the provincial championships are almost entirely a clean divorce from the All-Ireland championships, only, well, there's kids involved.
The former Derry captain, Chrissy McKaigue, is the ultimate bottom-line man.
An example: In talking to this website over the winter following his retirement, we asked how he felt about entering the knockout stage of last year's All-Ireland series having already lost three games, he pointed out that everyone knew the rules before the competition started.
Soon after he lifted the Anglo-Celt Cup in 2022, he was in the cool of the tunnel leading to the dressing room. We passed a remark about the significance of the Ulster championship. Instantly, he replied that as of the following year, it had little relevance beyond as a seeding mechanism for the All-Ireland series.
McKaigue was right. Factually, you cannot dispute what he said. And yet how wrong he is too once you strip away the logical part of the mind.
What has been logical about the Ulster and Leinster championships this year?
What we have had instead is an succumbing to our emotions. Gaelic football had lost that for many years. The crowds shrank and kept their distance. Twitter became an important tool to lift the sense of ennui, ostensibly to check on scores around the grounds, but truly to offer some topics of discussion and debate while that in front of you faltered and drifted along.
The new rules of Gaelic football are not perfect. The rules of Gaelic football have never been perfect ever since Cusack and his accomplices codified them.
But the games are more arresting now. The romance of Meath beating Dublin was only trumped by Louth coming up the rails and making good on their third consecutive Leinster final appearance. The crowd in Croke Park of 65,786 shows us that the drug of identity and belonging gives a heck of a kick.
We are at our best when silliness and frippery takes over.
For all the Trust The Process chat, the sight of Louth's Dermot Campbell throwing the Delaney Cup over the goalline at the Canal End shows that the 2010 Leinster final Grand Larceny burned a hole in the soul of all Louth GAA people that was partly repaired on Sunday.
Thomas O'Reilly performs with Grace Agnew ahead of the Leinster final. Tom Maher / INPHO Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO
As a sporting body, the GAA are blessed to have such incredible talent working in photography as the scenes captured in Croke Park and Clones show.
There's something about the blending of colour, with the heat of Clones. Light dying, the shadow of the Gerry Arthurs Stand. The windows at the back offering pin pricks of light.
It was as its most radiant when an Armagh player clipped a Donegal player just after the final whistle when he was having what we might charitably term, 'a moment to himself.'
Carnage: Armagh and Donegal get stuck into each other. Ben Brady / INPHO Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
Most people would fall into two camps; feeling that perhaps the Donegal player 'fucked around and found out', or that it was a disgrace that an Armagh figure pucked the head off another, before an accomplice lost all self-control and barrelled at his opponent.
Jim McGuinness and Aidan Forker clash. Ben Brady / INPHO Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
There is something insanely compelling about the photography of that moment. Of Jim McGuinness displaying the body language of a man trying to de-escalate tensions but at the same time getting a bit ragged all the same, of a deeply-aggrieved Aidan Forker remonstrating with McGuinness, of a veteran Donegal supporter, his 2004 Abbey Hotel jersey stretched tight over his midriff while he ill-advisedly appears to be either getting stuck in or is the only man to settle everything.
And in the middle, a flare that offers a texture, haze and contrast. These pictures might be some of the most dramatic images ever captured around a game of Gaelic Games.
Or maybe, maybe, maybe that's just me.
Clones holds secrets. Clones holds truths.
Think of the day when Tyrone won their very first Ulster title in 1956. They were captained by 19-year-old Jody O'Neill of Coalisland. After the game he washed himself and made his way down the hill towards the Creighton Hotel, on the corner of the Newtownbutler Road.
Underneath the arches of the old stables, there were haybales left out that people sat on, smoking, drinking, chatting. He met his father with some Coalisland people who were eager to take a sup out of the Anglo-Celt Cup.
Once they had one, they urged the county captain to do the same. He looked nervously at his father, who said, 'Whatever you like, son.'
He didn't take the drink.
There's a million stories like that. Of the Eoin O'Duffy Terrace, named after an Ulster Council Treasurer, IRA man, the second Commissioner of An Garda Síochána and later Fascist sympathiser who raised an army to go fighting for General Franco. Of James McCartan's boot flying into the stand, propelled by Tyrone's Paul Donnelly acting the maggot. Of the multiple Armagh pitch invasions in 1999 before the final whistle. Of the Frank McGuigan masterclass of 1984.
Is there anyone out there who is insane enough to believe that a British Government – who would rather see Bridie Brown, the widow of murdered GAA official Sean Brown, pass away without ordering a Public Enquiry as ordered up by the Court of Appeal – will ever make up the shortfall of funding for a redeveloped Casement Park?
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If so, they need to be cared for.
But let's say the money is found from wherever. And a brand new stadium that surpasses the capacity of Clones is built in Belfast.
There would be a wow factor for a time. But the links back through history would be severed.
No more silage fields stripped bare in the heat of summer for car parking.
No more pitch celebrations, with the St Tiernach's bell tolling in the background.
No more of a town becoming an Ulster final theme park for the day.
No more on-street drinking, haybales, long strolls out the capillary roads leading out of an Irish country town, glowing in victory, muttering cursewords in defeat.
It's been this way for 30, 60, 90 years. It traces all the way back to 'The Creamery Manager' short story by John McGahern, when Garda Casey is reluctant to arrest a local businessman for financial impropriety. Because he once commandeered a vehicle to bring a few of them to an Ulster final.
'You gave us a great day out,' said Garda Casey.
'A day out of all of our lives.'
You lose Clones, you lose that.