‘Fun. Friendship. Football’ flyers. ‘Blow-ins’ and natives. A rugby amalgamation and Sainsbury’s rivalry with Asda. SDLP veterans and a quote off ‘Question Time’. The story of St Brigid’s early years.

“I walked through the freezing fog - and suddenly I spotted John Cahill running with a whistle: one whistle, one football, and no cones.

“John was running, and I looked behind him, and there was over 100 children running after him.

“And I thought, ‘F*** me, we’re onto something here’.”

Conor McSherry

ONE ball, one whistle, no cones.

Culchies and city slickers, oul’ boys and youngsters.

The nomads of south Belfast are heading west, aiming to become the football kings of Antrim.

When the first St Brigid’s players ran onto a pitch you couldn’t even see your finger in front of your face.

Now they have the promised land in their sights.

From a freezing foggy day at Strangford Park, via Shane Park and their current rented home of Musgrave Park, the south Belfast club is aiming to collect its first ever Antrim SFC title at Corrigan Park this Sunday.

Their opponents are the venerable O’Donovan Rossa, from the west of the city, celebrating their 110^th anniversary this year.

The process of forming St Brigid’s began at the very end of 1998. Its first senior outing only took place in 2004.

Yet Conor McSherry is actually surprised that this day hasn’t come sooner.

The Coalisland man is one of the club’s founding fathers, along with Killeavy native Dermot Dowling, father of current captain Jack.

The combination of culchies and city slickers has worked wonders.

The club actually had a false start in the mid-90s, though, remembers McSherry:

“What happened was, we were building a new chapel. We were doing all these fundraising things for the parish council and they organised a football match involving a ‘St Brigid’s Select’ team.

“I was asked to play and there was boys like Greg Blaney and Dermot Dowling, former county men living around the area.”

In the Wellington Park Hotel following that fundraising match, Conor floated the idea of setting up a south Belfast club:

“But they were all still involved in their own clubs and nobody really had an appetite for it. So that was that.”

The idea kept nagging at him, however.

His eldest son was at St Bride’s Primary School, playing Gaelic football there

With typical McSherry bluntness, he recalls: “They were rubbish. Like, there were four school leagues in Antrim and they were bottom of the division four. Nobody really was interested in it at all.

“But I was at a few matches and there was a couple of clinkers, including Mark Sweeney.

“Basically, what happened in the Malone area was every year when the boys would pass P7, they would go to different schools.

“One or two, if their dad was from Belfast, would have gone up the west and joined a club. If their dad was a Down man, one or two would have gone to Bredagh or Caryduff.

“And the rest never kicked a ball. Simple as that.

“A lot of them would go to Aquinas to play soccer. Some of them might have gone to Methody and played rugby.”

A new job for Conor at Allied Dunbar brought him into the orbit of Dermot Dowling, the former Armagh player from Killeavy, whose son Jack skippers St Brigid’s now.

Between them they “brainstormed” setting up a new club

Conor met Gerry McClorey of the Antrim Board, who explained it would be in South Antrim, Division Four,

The principal of St Bride’s allowed the use of the school hall for a meeting, at which around 30 people turned up.

McSherry was elected chairman, Greg Blaney vice-chair, Frank Cassidy secretary, and Eamon Doherty treasurer.

The aforementioned John Cahill, who sadly passed away in 2014 and is honoured by a club memorial tournament named after him, played a key role too.

“He printed off all these flyers, and across the top it said, ‘Fun, Friendship, Football.’ and then pictures of wee boys and girls playing football.

“We printed out hundreds of them and took them to every teacher in St Bride’s primary school, I took another batch into Stranmillis primary school, and the integrated primary school [Cranmore].”

Belfast City Council allowed the use of Strangford playing fields, off the Boucher Road, with four soccer pitches on it.

Midday, “It’s freezing cold - you couldn’t see your finger in front of you.

“My ex-Mrs said to me, ‘You’re nuts, you’ll be lucky to get 10 people up there.’”

Tom Walsh set up a desk with registration forms, but then McSherry was told of another entrance to the park and raced off to it.

Half a dozen kids came through there, and when he returned, asked Walsh: “‘Well, many about? He says, ‘Ah, there’s a few…’

“I walked through the freezing fog, and suddenly I spotted John Cahill running with a whistle: one whistle, one football, and no cones.

“John was running, and I looked behind him, and there was over 100 children running after him.

“And I thought, ‘F*** me, we’re onto something here’.”

The following Sunday came another boost, with McSherry at the desk.

“Two wee red-haired boys appeared up with their friend. It was Rory and Francis O’Neill - and their friend was a certain James Loughrey.”

They were first years, which led McSherry to campaign for an U14 team too: “I won the argument, but the punishment was I had to manage them.”

Due to their tender years, everybody in that group was U13, so played two years of U14, then two years of U16, then two years of minor – and got to the semi-final of the Antrim minor championship.

‘Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh siad’.

An episode of ‘Question Time’ held in Belfast cemented what would be the St Brigid’s approach.

McSherry came home to see former unionist MP Bob McCartney respond to a topic about corporal punishment:

“He was the second-last to answer, and he said, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’…

“Brid Rodgers [the former SDLP MLA] replied: ‘Well, where I’m from in Donegal, we have a saying: ‘Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh siad’, which basically translates as “Praise our youth and they will come through’.”

McSherry went to his club’s 2002 AGM and they adopted an abbreviation of that, ‘Mol an óige’: “And that’s been the motto since, it’s under the badge on our jerseys.”

With that youth of Loughrey and the O’Neills vintage coming of age, St Brigid’s were ready to field an adult team and join Antrim GAA properly.

“I started trying to recruit, which we still do to this day. We’re very keen to welcome everybody and anybody across all four codes in south Belfast, no matter what their background is.”

To augment the youngsters, though, Conor also brought in “a few older boys”, including Hugh Martin McGurk of the famous Lavey clan, Frankie Devlin, Eunan Conway (now club chairman), Paddy McDonald, and John Mackle.

Mackle, who has also been the club’s unofficial photographer for years,recalls: “At the second time of Conor’s asking (he is as persuasive as he is persistent), I came out of 14 years of retirement at age 42 to “help out for a couple of matches” - and stayed for eight seasons.

“They were some of the best years of my footballing life and that was in no small part down to Conor. They were the best of times.”

Castledawson native Mackle points out that there were plenty of youngsters involved too:

“On the 2004 JFC team there were only four players aside from me who were older than my boots.”

His own family illustrates how the St Brigid’s blend of youth and experience actually operated:

“I had the enormous privilege of playing alongside each of my four boys at St Brigid’s, senior, reserve, and thirds.

“A couple of senior seasons with me in goals and Ciaran at right back; a couple of senior games with the addition of Conor and Ronan in the forwards; and a few reserve/thirds matches with Ryan added in, with all five of us playing outfield together!”

St Brigid’s won the Antrim Junior Football Championship and continued to blossom under the management of McSherry.

The man himself is too modest to take credit, so Mackle gives it to him:

“The founding of the club and the enormous effort that Dermot, Conor, and the early committee put in to establish a new club in south Belfast is well documented in the club’s annals.

“But where Conor excelled in my view – and this is maybe underappreciated, even within the wider club – was in building a footballing ethos.

“He expertly balanced the need to blend in ‘old hands’ so the native ‘cubs’ could develop and progress with the sort of incremental challenge that only comes with success.

“Five trophies (championship and/or league titles) in five years under his management is testament to that.

“The footballing ethos, discipline, and application that were instilled in those early teams by Conor, have been in turn passed down to the teams that many of these young players subsequently coached, and so on, and is still evident in this team of today.”

St Brigid’s also earned promotion out of Division Four in 2004, then won Division Three the following season.

Their rapid rise continued with an Intermediate FC triumph in 2006 and they won Division Two the next year to get into Antrim’s Division One.

They kept bringing players through too.

“A few years ago we had a ‘dream team’ that won under-16 and Minor and I think they got to the final at the Paul McGirr [memorial tournament] in Dromore. [Joe] Brolly’s boys were playing, Greg Finnegan’s boys too…

“I used to count off at every match and we would have had seven starters who were what I call ‘blow-ins’ and seven starters who were natives; seven or eight either way.

“Now you’d have 12 starters who are natives.”

The growing numbers increased the need for more playing space. The council offered pitches at Boucher Road, but wily Gerry McClorey knew they were already in use by St Paul’s and advised McSherry to look elsewhere.

“So I went back to the council, had a couple more meetings, but there was no real progress.

“Then two things happened sort of in tandem.”

Instonians’ rugby, amalgamated with North of Ireland to become Belfast Harlequins, so the former were selling their ground, Shane Park.

“Frank Cassidy on our committee was a commercial estate agent…If you were letting out units it was going through Frank.

“He knew Sainsbury’s were buying Shane Park, which is now Shane Retail Park, for one reason: to stop ASDA from buying it.

“Frank was going to a meeting about it in London and I said to him: ‘Why don’t you tell him we’ll cut the grass and look after it for them until they’re developing it. We’ll only charge him a thousand pound a year.’

He laughed at me.

He went to the meeting. Came back and he says ‘I didn’t get that deal, but I got a deal. They’ll let us have it - and we’ll pay them £1,000 a year.’

“So we had Shane Park for four years for a thousand pound a year. It’s a full-size pitch, a half-size pitch and a two-thirds pitch.”

The move to Musgrave Park came about partly because of Conor’s mother, Nuala.

On the off-chance he called into the Elmwood Avenue office of Carmel Hanna, the MLA (mother of Claire Hanna MP)

She recognised him, because Nuala McSherry had been on the SDLP Executive with Carmel.

Her influence helped St Brigid’s get the lease on Musgrave Park in 2008.

Since then, St Brigid’s have been building, both infrastructure and even better teams.

McSherry remembers asking bookie Michael McGranaghan “for odds on a team that didn’t exist winning the senior championship”.

“He just laughed at me, he says, ‘I wouldn’t trust you, I wouldn’t give you any odds.’

“Within five years we were Junior Champions; three more years playing Division 1 - so I thought this would have come a lot sooner, to be honest with you.

“But we never got close to St Gall’s, and since their demise Cargin’s been a bogey team.

“That would have been about our sixth semi-final. Cargin’s been our bogey team - and Rossa has taken that away.”

McSherry is taking nothing for granted, fully aware of the challenge posed by the west Belfast men.

Yet he’s very confident about the future, whatever the outcome on Sunday:

“You know when you get your all-Ireland ticket allocation? We get more tickets than any club in Ireland because it’s the number of paying club members. So it’s phenomenal…

“I was saying to the boys on Sunday, when I finally caught up our Ronan in 2003, after we [Tyrone] won our first All-Ireland, I said to him: ‘We will not win two in a row, or three in a row. But from now on, we’ll be here every two or three years in semi-finals and finals. And that’s what’s happened.

“And from now on, St Brigid’s will be in finals every two, three, four years.

“And once we win one, we’ll be winning one every three, four, five years, maximum. That’s the way I see it.”

The fog has cleared. The St Brigid’s vision is close to becoming reality.