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Eamonn McCann on his lifelong love affair with Derry City
Eamonn McCann remembers the first time. “The team that won the Cup in 1954: Heffron, Wilson, Houston, Brolly, Curran, Smyth, Brady, Delaney, Forsythe, Toner and O’Neill,” he says.
McCann has lived many lives and had many labels. Journalist, socialist, activist, trade unionist, writer, broadcaster, protestor and politician. He has campaigned for decades against injustice and fought for civil rights.
His writing has provoked, entertained and engaged in equal measure. Derry City is the other great passion in his life. The eternal flame.
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“I was 10 years old when Derry won the IFA Cup in 1954, a good time for losing your head over a football match,” he says.
“It’s a funny thing about football.
“There’s no record of anyone ever changing allegiance to a different team after the age of 10. Nobody.
“It’s stronger than religion, it’s stronger than politics. It’s a fact.”
McCann was at the Brandywell last Friday for Derry’s league game against Shelbourne.
He hasn’t missed a match there all season.
The love affair goes back at least 70 years to 1954 when Derry were still in the Irish League in the North and competing in the IFA Cup.
They played Glentoran in the final that year and after drawing the first game and a replay, the two sides met for a third time on a Monday night.
“What I remember most about it was the third match took place on the first day of the men’s retreat,” he says.
“I don’t know how important the men’s retreat is where you come from, but it was very important in Derry!
“If you were not at the retreat, people would talk about
you.”
The religious event, usually a time of prayer, reflection and reconnection with the almighty, was suddenly in competition with the Candystripes and the Cup.
“For people publicly not to go to the men’s retreat… it was a shock to many people. Particularly the bishop,” says McCann.
“This to my mind was a significant plot point in the decline and influence of religion in Derry.”
McCann starts laughing.
He is 81 years old now, but still full of divilment.
Derry won the second replay 1-0 with a goal from Con O’Neill after what the Irish Press described as a defence-splitting pass from Jimmy Delaney.
McCann can still recall every detail.
“Jimmy Delaney had won the Scottish Cup with Celtic and the FA Cup with Manchester United. He was like a god when he came to Derry,” says McCann.
“The front five: Brady, Delaney, Forsythe, Toner and O’Neill. They were something else.
“Clifford Forsythe was known as Flossy. One of the interesting things about Flossy is that he went on to become a Unionist MP for South Antrim. Not the normal path for a Derry City player.
“I was with Bernadette Devlin in Westminster when she was elected an MP, standing in the lobby and along came Flossy Forsythe.
“I shouted, ‘Hey Flossy.’ He turned around and you never have seen as broad a smile.
“All those memories are just lovely.”
McCann’s first visit to the Brandywell was to see Derry play Distillery in some long-forgotten league match.
But many of his formative years were spent following the Candystripes from a field above the ground.
“There was a Gaelic pitch at St Columb’s College up above the Brandywell on a hill,” he says.
“If you stood up there at a certain point you could see over the wall.
“You would miss everything from the 18-yard line to the goal on one side, which is obviously a big handicap watching a football match, nevertheless it was free.
“There was this added sense of daring, the fact it was a Gaelic ground.
“The GAA would ban people automatically in those days if they were caught playing soccer — so we were on dangerous ground, as it were.
“It made the matches even more exciting.”
His lifelong friend Eddie Mahon was one of those risking GAA membership by playing soccer.
Mahon would go on to star in goals for the Candystripes and is a regular with McCann at games these days.
“I still go to the Brandywell every home match with Eddie,” says McCann.
“I’m not able to walk all that far these days, so Eddie comes around in the car and picks me up in the car.
“Eddie was one of the ‘Gang of Four’. Eddie Mahon, Tony O’Doherty Terry Harkin and Eamonn McLaughlin. The four of them fought to get Derry into the League of Ireland in the 1980s.”
In the late 1960s McCann became heavily involved in the civil rights movement in Derry.
It was a time when Catholic families in the city were being denied housing and jobs and were subjected to an unfair electoral system.
It was McCann who came up with the words: ‘You Are Now Entering Free Derry’ which became a slogan of defiance on a famous mural in the Bogside.
He was present on the day of Bloody Sunday, an event that had a profound impact on his life, and he would spend decades campaigning for justice for the victims.
Derry City were forced to leave the Irish League in 1972 over safety concerns as violence raged and the club was left in limbo for 13 years.
“Derry City fans felt unfairly treated from the start,” says McCann.
“It wasn’t paranoia. Derry city the place was systematically discriminated against.
“And since the team was representing the fortunes and feelings and aspirations of the surrounding area of Derry city, that sort of… it locked Derry City Football Club into the fate of Derry city as a whole.
“It became symbolic.”
McCann spoke at a highly-charged meeting in Dublin organised by the Gang of Four which helped tip the scales towards Derry City joining
the League of Ireland in the mid-1980s.
Another of the speakers that day was his old friend and fellow firebrand, Nell McCafferty.
“I remember her saying, ‘The League of Ireland better let us in otherwise there’d be hell to pay’,” says McCann.
“How we were going to create this hell we were never sure. We were great ones for violence of the tongue.”
McCann had known McCafferty since they were kids playing football together on the streets.
“Some of my earliest memories, from about 10, playing football with Nell. Used to be 20-a-side girls and boys. She was a dirty player,” he says, laughing.
“If you kicked her, she would shout, ‘You’re kicking a wee girl!’ And this might be after she kicked you three times. So there was no equality of the sexes there!”
McCann grew up on Rossville Street with McCafferty just down the road on Beechwood Street.
They shared many of the same values and fought many of the same battles and McCann read a eulogy at McCafferty’s funeral last August.
“Nell and me had a very rocky relationship for many years,” he says.
“At times she wouldn’t talk to me and at times I wouldn’t talk to her… because she was giving me such grief.
“In the last period of her life I think we were fully reconciled then. Because of that, I was very upset when she died.
“I regret the fact that we spent so many years as… strangers or almost as strangers.
“But then in the last couple of years of her life when she got very ill and then, of course, had to go into a nursing home, we got back together, as it were, and were close friends until her death.
“And I’m very pleased we were friends.”
McCann and McCafferty were two of the most potent and influential voices in journalism on this island for decades.
Both were renowned for their wit and wisdom and the strength of their convictions. Both could be abrasive and uncompromising.
But McCann saw the other side of McCafferty away from the barricades and battlegrounds.
“A lot of people were afraid of Nell. Big strong people would be afraid of Nell McCafferty, who was five foot tall,” he says, laughing.
“She gave herself a reputation of being prickly. I wrote an obituary to her and said she was as prickly as a bag of porcupines.
“And she was. She absolutely was.
“But Nell was a very soft person. She really was. Nell was the most generous person I ever met. She kept giving things away.
“She’d give her last penny to a beggar, generous to a fault and very soft.”
McCann made regular trips to the nursing home in Fahan, County Donegal where McCafferty spent her final months and he was deeply upset when she died.
“Looking back on it, I remember with great fondness the young friends that I ran around with… Almost all of them are dead now.
“When I look back on it all, and who were your best friends? Nell would certainly figure in any list of my best friends.”
His own health has been affected by a neurological condition called ataxia.
He won’t make the trip to Dublin for tomorrow’s FAI Cup final, but he will be kicking every ball from his home near the Brandywell.
“My health is not great to be honest. I have this thing called ataxia, which nobody, including me, knew anything about until I got it and the doctor explained,” he says.
“I find it very difficult to walk. It is what is.”
Music is another great passion for McCann and over the span of his life he has gone from listening to Elvis to Kneecap.
“They seem like nice young men, they mean no harm,” he says of Kneecap.
He’s still passionate about social issues, culture and politics.
Still full of mischief and fire.
Derry City FC is the flame that has burned longest and 70 years after his first taste of Cup glory, McCann’s hoping for more tomorrow.
“We’re living a fantasy when we watch a football match,” he says.
“If you look at when the team came back in 1985, it was a heavy time and Derry people felt quite isolated.
“I think when the team came back from the dead, it was felt by many people in Derry to be a harbinger of better times to come. Lead us into a bit of light again.
“What’s going to happen on Sunday?
“I hope fate won’t be so bad to Derry, we’ve suffered enough, we’ve suffered enough.
“So I would think it’s written in the stars that Derry City are going to win. The heavens await.”
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