Our daughter’s at an age where her natural inclinations and abilities are starting to show. She threw a ball to me the other day that nearly took my head off. She has similar power and precision in her feet. I could kick a ball from a young age too. Playing football – soccer – was one of my early interests. Enjoyment turned to obsession when I discovered Gaelic football.
My family was not football mad, hurling mad, or any sport mad at all really. But when I was 9 my path crossed with a woman called Brid Kelly-McElroy. She was a maverick, a trailblazer, and my teacher for the final 2 years at primary school.
The school was in the process of introducing co-ed classes when she took over the Gaelic football team. The guy who coached the team before was a soccer fan and my sense was Mrs McElroy didn’t think he understood what Gaelic was all about.
She had us recite the Hail Mary in Irish every day – the first teacher to teach me a word of Irish. And in between covering the curriculum, she made us, a classroom full of girls, co-conspirators in her plans to take the world of under-12’s Gaelic football by storm.
As well as leading the school team, now co-ed for the first time, from bottom of the pile to top of the league, she was also helping to establish a local club team. I’d spend Monday to Friday with her in school and then see her again on Saturdays for the club training and matches. And on occasion I’d see her on a Sunday when she’d take us to watch a county Gaelic match in Celtic Park, Derry’s Gaelic football stadium.
Gaelic football is an amateur sport. Playing at the highest level means representing your county. And the ultimate accolade is the county winning the All-Ireland Championship and being awarded the Sam Maguire cup. Derry won the Sam – the only time we’ve ever won it – in 1993, shortly after I entered Mrs McElroy’s classroom.
One of the standout players on the team was Tony Scullion. My grandfather always had a soft spot for defenders and Scullion was one of his favourite players. “That boy has a heart like a lion,” he would say. There were no greater sporting heroes in my mind than the 1993 Derry players. Not only did Mrs McElroy get Tony Scullion to bring the Sam Maguire into our classroom, she also had him come and train us over the summer.
When I moved to London at the age of 18 I knew not a soul. I tried going to mass, I guess as a way to stay connected to something. To stay rooted in my culture even as I immersed myself in another. But it didn’t stick. These English priests – their manner, their rhetoric, their sermons – were unrecognisable to me. Catholicism in England seemed a different religion to Catholicism in Ireland. Like two cover versions that were poles apart. The lyrics and melody were the same, but the songs came out very different.
After 4 or 5 years in London I was walking along the river one day when I cut through a park. There in front of me were two young men playing Gaelic football. I sat down on a bench to watch. My head began to tingle. And on my pew in the west London open air I felt at home, connected, rooted, for a short while.
Brid Kelly-McElroy connected me with more than just a sport and a sense of agency. She rooted me in a tradition and gifted me a profound sense of culture. Steelstown GAC, the local club she worked so hard to develop until her untimely death in 1998, finally got a brand new dedicated pitch complete with clubhouse facilities in 2003. They named the ground Páirc (Park) Brid.
