It Occurs To Me: The Donegal commonwealth and Dooey clay!

Paul Fitzpatrick, in his RTÉ sports report wrote: “Donegal pile pain on Cavan with second-half shellacking”. 

As someone with a fondness for good rhyme, I thought it fitted perfectly with ‘bollocking’, which is precisely what Raymond Galligan got from Jim McGuinness. 

I was sitting behind the Donegal dugout and there was alarm and panic writ large in one wee high-vissed Breffni official’s face as our bench rose to a man after the encounter. 

I rose myself, and around me the DL crowd were going buck mad. Cavan never recovered. In 1595, West Breifne was part of what was known as “O’Donnell's Commonwealth” (Red Hugh), which, along with Tír Chonaill itself, then included present-day counties Leitrim, Sligo, Mayo and Northern Roscommon. 

East Breifne was mainly latter day Cavan and it took 430 years for Shane and Conor O’Donnell along with their allies to re-establish the Commonwealth in the park named after the kingdom. 

Let’s pray that Mayo is once again included in our next incursion.

 It was a super performance but imagine a game of that magnitude not being shown on any TV or stream outlet? Thank God for Highland Radio who at least captured the excitement for many who couldn't make it to Breffni Park. Also, well done to Jim McGuinness for stressing the cost of travel to faraway venues for Donegal supporters.

Conor O'Donnell scored 1-4 against Cavan

In April there was a BBC statement which read: “Gaelic football’s new clock and hooter system will only feature in championship games this year that are being televised or live streamed”. So how come we had hooters in Breffni Park? 

I was intrigued by referee Fergal Kelly’s inability to keep up with play in many instances, and overall he was poor. I know he hails from Ballymahon in Longford which derives its name from Mathúna, a chieftain who fought a famous battle in the vicinity of the town, at Shrule (in Irish, Sruaith Fhuil, literally River of Blood). I don’t know if any of Fergal’s ancestors fought with Mathúna who defeated O’Rourke of Breifne in that clash in 960 AD, but they must have acquitted themselves well…there are no reports of yellow cards!

Five minutes before the end of the match, John Argue came over to greet me graciously. “Frank, I’ve decided to shake your hand and go before we’re humiliated any further!” 

I had met John and Margaret a few days before at Downings man Jimmy McBride’s funeral in Cootehill, which I had attended with fellow Downings man John Cronin, recently retired President of Athletics Ireland. One of the most poignant moments was when John brought Dooey sand to the altar and the choir sang Dooey Grá mó Chroí as well as The Homes of Donegal. The priest said Jimmy went to heaven with Donegal socks, a Downings jersey and a Cootehill blazer! A wonderful send-off for a lovely man...teacher, Gaeilgoir and GAA stalwart. I also met Louise Gallagher, whose father Charlie was a Cavan legend and a dentist in Derry and Inishowen for many years. Although Jimmy spent some 70 of his 90 years in Cavan, he would have been a proud man in Breffni last Sunday had God spared him another while. 

                                      Disappointment for Termon 

As I write, I’m watching Termon’s sad demise in the Gaeltacht Final in Meath and reminded of the same fate for Naomh Conaill in 2023 against the same opposition. 

Donegal names like Gallagher, Ward and McGlynn litter the Wolfe Tones club, who hail from the Gibbstown area of Meath, and it goes back to the decision of Fianna Fáil in the 1930s to allocate land to people from the western Congested Districts. 

With the implementation of the first colony in Rath Cairn completed in 1936 (all from Connemara), in 1937, the Land Commission report indicated that a further experiment had been carried out in Gibbstown, about fifteen miles from Rath Cairn, comprised fifty migrant families brought from various parts of the Gaeltacht and it was anticipated that with nine additional holdings being prepared this figure would rise to fifty-nine families. The migrants were described as; “a good type of intelligent and industrious people; sixteen from Kerry, two from West Cork, six from South Mayo, twelve from North Mayo and fourteen from Donegal”. 

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One of the main sceptics in the Dáil was Donegal Fine Gael TD, Dan McMenamin. He said: “I have seen pictures of other migrants who have been brought from Connemara. These men were fifty to sixty years of age. Now, there is an old saying that after a certain age the oak should not be transplanted and cannot be transplanted. These are men [from congested areas] who never stood behind a plough or a pair of horses in their lives ...... never handled a plough or harrow or grubber or cultivator and never harnessed a horse in their lives. These men cannot do that work. It is not feasible.These men are expected, the morning after they are migrated to Meath, to start off behind a pair of horses and plough or harrow.”

He concluded that in his opinion: “It is quite wrong to transplant men of fifty years of age from a congested district and expect them to work agricultural implements, plough, grubbers and cultivators and so on. The thing is going to be a failure. These men cannot farm their land by horse power.” 

Well, he was wrong in the main, and anyway, Dev was more interested in the preservation of the Irish language in places other than the Gaeltacht. My uncle, Michael Byrne from Kilcar, was a school principal in Slane for many years and told me stories of knowing and befriending the second generation ‘Donegals’ in the Meath Gaeltacht.         

                                   God spare us from the differs!

Here are a few random headlines of late: “Two teenagers arrested after car was observed driving on the wrong side of Derry dual carriageway.”

“Gardaí in Milford say a speeding detection made this morning is almost beggars belief. The driver has been caught travelling at 192km/h in a 100km/h speed zone. The motorist was arrested and is charged to appear in court.” 

I could go on but as one lad who lives on the Donegal/Derry border wrote in despair last week: “Delightful that Rally weekend has kicked off about 3 weeks early.” 

I know how he feels. One of the most savage indictments of boy racers and differs here was written by Kilian Doyle,  an assistant news editor at The Irish Times back in 2009. It was entitled “Is Donegal Ireland's Never Never Land for boy racers?”

“They’re mad for cars in Donegal. Unfortunately, not always in a good way. For, as I recently witnessed first-hand, the whole joint is riddled with that most contemptible of creatures – the boy racer. Their footprints are everywhere. There are so many doughnut marks between Creeslough and Kilmacrennan that they can be seen from space; Downings is so swathed in black streaks it looks like it has been attacked by Jackson Pollock wielding a tar brush; and every second ditch in Inishowen contains the rotting corpse of a 1994 Honda Civic.

Maybe it’s my age, or the fact that my IQ is above 14, but I fail to see the attraction in doing handbrake turns and doughnuts on a public road. Why not simply scrawl some male genitalia on your forehead with an indelible marker and go at your tyres with a belt sander? Same effect – far less effort.

“All this raises the question: Why is it that Donegal is such a hotbed of these idiots? Is it because road racing has become a teenage rite of passage in Donegal like passing out drunk at the local disco has in the rest of the country? Or do Donegal’s youths drive everywhere like they are being chased by the Taliban because their employment and entertainment prospects are so bleak that it’s the only release from the existentialist dread that haunts them? Or maybe, living as they do in a land of twisting boreens, the mere sight of 20 yards of straight road gives them temporary psychosis and they put the boot down involuntarily?

“Possibly a mixture of all of the above. But more likely, as a friend of mine from that direction suspects, they do it because they know they’ll probably get away with it. I’m inclined to believe him. One suspects the average Donegal garda has given up trying to stem the seemingly endless supply of adrenalised numpties willing to risk everything for teenage kicks.

“Of course, the Garda top brass deny having thrown in the towel, even claiming to have had great success in tackling boy racers after last month’s Donegal International Rally, which sees rabid flocks of these amoeba-brained morons crawl out from under every slimy rock for miles around. They proudly announced that they’d made several arrests for dangerous driving, particularly on the N13 out of Letterkenny, where what the county’s senior traffic cop described as ‘a bit of nonsense’ left the road surface covered with more rubber than a blue whale at an S&M party.” 

Killian went on to say that if he was a judge he’d “have used the opportunity to send a warning to the rest of Donegal’s speed-addled galoots and given him a lobotomy. But that’s just me.”