A remarkable new film tells the story of Star of the Sea, the Belfast team that counted the future hunger striker among its players — and the teammates whose lives were changed forever by the conflict

We begin with a newsreel. Rosaleen Sands is sitting for an interview, three days before her son, Bobby Sands, the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, will die on hunger strike.

She is asked what they talked about. You might expect politics. The British government. Prison. The injustices that had come to define his life and would soon define his death. Instead, she talks about football.

About the happiest days of his life. About a team called Star of the Sea.

Most people know who Bobby Sands was. A Republican icon. A man who sacrificed his life for a cause, whose name became a permanent part of Northern Ireland’s history. Fewer know that he was a left-back.

That before he became a symbol, he was a boy playing football in north Belfast, part of a team that brought Catholics and Protestants together in a place that would eventually become synonymous with their separation.

A remarkable film (Réalt na Mara - An Pheil, Na Trioblóidí agus An Iarmhairt) has been made about the story of that team. Of what happened to the boys who played for it. And of the distance between the world they briefly inhabited and the one that came to destroy it.

It is a story without a happy ending. But there was happiness, once. And that matters.

In the beginning, there was a football team. The clearance of slum districts in Belfast city centre led to the creation of a new housing estate at Rathcoole, in north Belfast. It was a mixed community, with Protestants outnumbering Catholics by roughly four to one. In the middle of it was Star of the Sea.

The team became a force. They went unbeaten for two years, won the prestigious Junior Cup and regularly appeared in the sports pages.

It reminds you of that line uttered by Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, as he reflected on American society in the 1960s.

“I turn to the back pages first because there they tell stories of man’s achievements; the front pages are full of stories of men’s failures.”

For a time, Star of the Sea belonged on the back pages. Bobby Sands played left-back. Michael Acheson and Terry Nicholl played alongside him. They were teammates, young men sharing a dressing room. The religious identities that would later define them seemed, for a while, to matter very little. Then history intervened.

Sands would become a Republican martyr. Acheson and Nicholl got involved in the Ulster Volunteer Force. Men who had once shared the same football team found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. In the 1970s, a wire fence inside the Maze prison separated Sands from Nicholl.

Think about that for a moment. The same boys who had once stood shoulder to shoulder on a football pitch, divided by a few feet of wire in a prison built to contain the consequences of their country's collapse.

The team that won so much on the pitch would lose so much beyond it. Sands, Acheson and Nicholl lost their freedom. Sands and another teammate, Tommy O’Neill, lost their lives before they reached middle age.

And Raymond McCord, one of the team's finest players, would eventually lose his son. But that comes later. First, there was the football.

McCord was talented enough to earn a trial with Manchester United and to represent Northern Ireland schoolboys. He had reached the foothills of a sporting mountain, close enough to glimpse what might be possible. The summit remained distant, but he had made it further than most boys ever would.

Yet when McCord looks back, it is not Old Trafford that holds him. It is Star of the Sea.

“We went from two communities to one community the moment we walked through that door,” he says. “There was no religion or politics in the club because it would not have been tolerated.”

The team had discipline. But it also had laughter.

“They were the best days of my life,” says Dessie Black, the goalkeeper. “It was laugh a minute. We were a brilliant team but aside from winning, we had fun. Enormous fun.

“The Catholic and Protestant thing didn’t matter. It took a long time to figure out who was Catholic, who was Protestant.”

They were just boys who had a game to play. Their identities existed, but they did not have to be the most important things about them because they had found, in a small football club, a way of living that the country around them could not sustain. Then the Troubles began.

Rioting in central Belfast led to homes being burned and families being driven out. People were moved to new housing estates, carrying what they could salvage from the lives they had known. Rathcoole, once a place where families had arrived to begin again, became another front in the spreading conflict.

“It was like a cancer spreading,” McCord says.

Tommy O’Neill, a close friend of Sands, described the reality in a 1983 interview: “You got hit because you were a Catholic. You got targeted.”

The boys who had once shared a dressing room were now being sorted by religion. Families - including the O’Neills and the Sands’ - were intimidated out of their homes by loyalist vigilantes. Star of the Sea was decimated. Players scattered. The promise of the team, and of the lives its members might have lived, began to disappear. McCord stayed.

He could have pursued football elsewhere. After all United had taken him on a six-week trial. Other clubs offered different possibilities. But his heart belonged to Star of the Sea, not to a team with a stronger Protestant identity.

His father may have been an Orangeman. A loyalist gang broke his nose because he played for Star of the Sea. He stayed anyway.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about McCord is not that he endured the violence. It is what he refused to let the violence take from him afterwards.

He did not turn his former teammates into strangers, or into simple villains. He could not reconcile the boys he had known with the organisations three of them eventually joined. But he understood that something had happened to them, too.

“The three guys I knew at Star of the Sea, I could never see them killing people but they joined organisations that did that.”

He blames the Troubles for what happened to those team mates of his.

A friend of Sands, Seanna Walsh, who was imprisoned alongside him, makes a similar distinction. Sands, he says, was not sectarian. He did not believe in sectarianism. His quarrel was with the British government, not the Unionist community.

It is a distinction that can become difficult to hold in the unionist community who, like their nationalist neighbours, suffered enormously.

But the truth is that Sands' quarrel was with the British community not his Protestant neighbours.

That distinction matters because of how Sands was reared by his parents but also because of the influence of Star of the Sea. That football club had given these boys a glimpse of how a team - and by extension - a society could win.

Then came the losses. Sands and O’Neill were dead. Players left Northern Ireland, four of them emigrating because of the Troubles. The team broke apart. The back pages gave way to the front.

And still the tragedy was not finished with them. In 1997, McCord's son, Raymond McCord junior, was murdered by the UVF. His body was found in a quarry. He had been beaten to death. No one has ever been convicted of his murder.

The film, Réalt na Mara (Star of the Sea), takes us into the terrible intimacy of what followed: a father identifying his son's body, confronting the fact that the boy he had raised was gone.

There are losses that language can describe but cannot contain. Watching McCord recount that moment, you see the heartache of a father who has outlived his son, and who must now find a way to keep living.

McCord could have allowed that pain to become hatred. Instead, he began campaigning for victims of the Troubles, Catholic and Protestant alike. He has received numerous death threats for doing so.

The director, James Wynne, sees in him a kind of courage that rarely makes the front pages.

“Raymond’s humanity and resilience is incredible,” Wynne says. “No matter who knocks on his door, if they need help, he will campaign for them.”

It is difficult to imagine a more extraordinary response to loss. McCord has every reason to draw a line around his grief, to insist that his suffering belongs to one side and that justice must be reserved for one community. Instead, he refuses the terms on which the conflict was fought.

He remembers what football taught him that a person is always more than the category into which somebody else wants to place him.

The boys of Star of the Sea were not naïve. They lived in a divided society and knew the divisions were there. Yet when they walked through the club door, those divisions were not allowed to decide who they were to one another.

They remember a time when the back pages told their story.

Sadly, Star of the Sea could not save them. A football team was no match for history, and a dressing room could not hold back the violence gathering outside its door.

But it showed what was possible.

That is the measure of what was lost. Not just the lives, the homes and the years. The possibility itself.

On a football pitch in north Belfast, a group of boys once found a way to become one community. Then the world taught them to become two.

And the front pages filled with the consequences.

• Réalt na Mara - An Pheil, Na Trioblóidí agus An Iarmhairt will be broadcast on TG4 tonight at 9:30pm.