'We used to say, ‘We’ve been abandoned! Thank f**k!’ - Eamonn McCann on Derry City
Political activist, author, politician and tireless campaigner, Eamonn McCann’s life has also been wrapped up in the red and white stripes of Derry City.
“YOU DON’T GET songs like that anymore!” shouts Eamonn McCann as he rocks back and juts forward, arms in the air, glasses askew, conducting his own singing from the sofa.
‘We don’t care
‘If Delaney has no hair
‘Damn the hair we care
‘We only know, that there’s gonna be a show
‘And Derry City will be there…’
McCann’s recalling the first Derry City team of heroes he had, the 1954 team that won their second-ever Irish Cup, beating Glentoran 1-0 in the second replay.
It took another replay to beat Linfield in the semi-final. Five games across several weeks that captured the imagination of everyone in the city.
Over 35,000 attended the first final, a record that stands way out on its own.
He fell hard for Jimmy Delaney, the hero of the song who was winding down a stellar career at Derry having captained both Celtic and Manchester United, but still had a lick of pace up the wing, a prototype Attilio Lombardo.
Then there was their goalkeeper, the ex-Linfield man Charlie Heffron; Willie Curran, the centre-half; Harry ‘Digger’ Smith; Arthur ‘Mousey’ Brady, “a tiny little man on the right wing. Brilliant.”
One image sums up the boyhood imagination. Mousey was on the ball and faced with Jackie Milburn – yes, ‘Wor Jackie’ himself, uncle of Jack Charlton — who was player-manager for Linfield for a few years.
With nowhere to turn, he pushed the ball through the towering Milburn’s legs, and followed it through the gap. “What a nutmeg!” McCann exclaims, as if he just watched it on the television.
He grew up in Rossville Street, a five-minute walk to the Brandywell Stadium. His father, from the New Lodge in Belfast, wasn’t a football man, so the young McCann went along with all his buddies in a gang every second Saturday.
It was tuppence in, and on the days they didn’t have it, someone would lift them in or a gate man might have turned a blind eye. On the days they had nothing and little charity from the staff, they would go up the mounds of clay on Lone Moore Road, where Derry’s Celtic Park is now, and roar along even though they could only see four-fifths of the pitch.
He was there for the 1971 Irish Cup final, the one where Martin O’Neill scored two goals. He can’t remember a thing about it only for O’Neill.
Fifty-three years on, Derry are back in the FAI Cup final, against Drogheda on Sunday. A cup final; the same, but oh so different.
It’s a good time to reminisce. There sure has been a lot of water under the bridge since.
And nobody has lived the Derry experience quite like McCann.
***
Eamonn McCann speaking at a meeting in 1984. Eamonn Farrell / Photocall Ireland
Eamonn Farrell / Photocall Ireland / Photocall Ireland
Derry is defined as a city. But let’s be more accurate; it’s a sprawling village.
Eamonn McCann has been many things. Tree pruner. Political activist. Author. Journalist. Member of the Legislative Assembly of Stormont. Councillor. Patron of the arts (“Even though I know fuck all about arts”). Music columnist. Protestor. Marcher. Megaphone bellower. Tireless campaigner. Trade Unionist.
He’s as Derry as it gets. He’s soaked in it, rolled in it, baked in it.
Clever enough to attend St Columb’s College, he went to school alongside John Hume, Seamus Deane and Seamus Heaney.
“I once spent two hours kissing Seamus Heaney,” he says.
“It was a play in St Columb’s called Tons of Money. It was a West End farce from the 1920s. This guy had loads of money and he had lost his wife.
“So whoever would get to marry this man would suddenly become very rich. Seamus played the widower and I played the dame. I had to kiss Seamus. Father Flaherty was the producer of the play and he was going, ‘For God’s sake, for God’s sake, that’s not the way people kiss!’
“Tons of Money. Jesus. We had to practise it and we were terribly embarrassed. Everybody was laughing at us.”
He’s also a season ticket holder at the Ryan McBride Brandywell Stadium. This season he didn’t miss a single home game.
Living two minutes away from his childhood home but now not great on his feet, the former Derry City goalkeeper Eddie Mahon comes to collect him and links his arm for the short walk to their seat in the Mark Farren Stand.
When he first started going, Derry City was a mixed environment.
The earliest chairman he can recall was a Protestant, Bobby Ferris, and one of the directors was the chief warden in Derry Gaol.
“When I was a child growing up there wasn’t the same sharp edge of sectarian attitudes in the north,” he says.
“There would have been a feeling in Derry that we weren’t wanted in the south either, so we felt a bit unwanted. Footballing orphans!
“The other thing was that there were never flags in the Brandywell. Just red and white. There was no ban on it as far as I know, but people just felt that… ‘we don’t do that.’
“It’s not the place for flags or sectarianism. And that’s true to this day and it’s announced before every match.”
The Bogside area of Derry, looking from the city walls towards Creggan. Alamy
Alamy
Away from the low-slung Bogside area, Derry was a merchant city that grew rich on the backs of the wealthy. Shirt-making was introduced to the city in 1829 by William Scott. A century on in 1926, there were 44 factories producing shirts, employing over 8,000 directly.
Then, cheaper materials and labour bit the city and so began a long slide into economic uncertainty, partition closing the door to their natural hinterland of the Inishowen Peninsula.
The Bogside had deteriorated into a series of tenement slums. Water ran down the walls of houses. Windows were left without glass. Whenever the Corporation were contacted and asked about repairs, they were in no hurry to get out.
The population was overwhelmingly Catholic and Nationalist. Yet careful gerrymandering of the voting wards led to the local council being overwhelmingly dominated by Unionism. Unemployment and poor housing prevailed, but the sense was one of frustration towards political leaders rather than a naked hostility towards Protestants.
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When McCann was a teenager, he and his buddies would go along to the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall to see acts such as The Dave Glover Showband. While that would be unthinkable now, Derry still retains a healthy relationship with the Apprentice Boys who, while part of the loyal orders, is independent of the Orange Order.
“You have to remember they are what they say: apprentices. They were started by 13 apprentices in 1689 and they were not the elite or nobility of the plantation. They shut the gates for the Siege of Derry and held out.”
Their annual marches in August were full of blood and thunder and cries of ‘No surrender!’ along with burning effigies of their great betrayer, Robert Lundy.
It sounds fearsome, but Derry is a small place. The McCann’s breadman was George Reynolds from a townland that McCann’s mother hailed from, Warbleshinny.
McCann and his buddies would take advantage of the generosity.
“We used to go for walks on 12 August because there was free lemonade and buns and all laid out on big tables. And you’d go up, feeling very daring, eating everything they had and drinking your fill. But I was standing there one year and saw George Reynolds coming my way with his Apprentice Boys collar and I thought, ‘Oh fuck, we’re done now.’
“And he goes, ‘Evening, young McCann. How’s your mam? Tell her I was asking for her.’”
A civil rights mural in Derry. Alamy
Alamy
The widespread discrimination got into their bones. Eventually, the young people organised themselves. With 30,000 Catholics in the one area, there was both the injustice, but also a confidence that McCann can explain.
“That’s the combination, that innate ‘Derry,’ that created the Civil Rights Movement, that gave rise to John Hume, to Ivan Cooper, Mickey Canavan and myself. I could name them all, Cathy Harkin, Nell McCafferty. Loads of people would have that background that I wouldn’t exaggerate but is very distinctly ‘Derry’.
“It’s very different to Belfast. My father’s people come from the New Lodge Road in Belfast. It’s very different.
“Derry never had that feeling, not even when I was eight, nine, 10 years old. There was a relaxation about the place.
“Now again, from where we sit now, three miles north, east and west and you are in Donegal. We were very used to being in Donegal. Pubs were open later, so there used to be a big scramble late at night to get over there for the extra pints. All drunk too, heading over to ‘The State’.
“My mother would send us out to go over the border to a wee hut just over the border, for a pound of butter and 40 cigarettes.
“Now we could walk there in the summer, it was great.”
***
Her name was Olivia. He still thinks about her now and the nominative determinism of her olive skin.
He met her when he was living in London and the world was a big adventure. But his sister Bridie was coming home to Derry for a holiday from Canada and he was warned to be home to see her.
One day he found himself walking around Rossville when a friend Dermie McCleneghan asked him for a hand. A few heads wanted to pull a caravan across the road to block in a protest about housing conditions.
So he did. Sure enough, the Royal Ulster Constabulary came along and arrested everyone. His court appearance would be in a fortnight.
“And, well… from that on, I could not not be involved.”
He was sorry to leave London, and Olivia, behind.
He had a job as a tree pruner, cutting trees out by the root in Epping Forest and transplanting them for planting around the post-war estates pushing the suburbs further out.
“The guys I worked with, half of them were Tea Leaves (Cockney rhyming for ‘thieves’) and they would spend a bit of time inside. I remember one lad, he was sent to prison and for six months we used to clock in for him, get his wages, and get it to his wife while he was in Pentonville.”
They drove around in a van, a squad of 13 men as the sun was coming up, singing cornball songs from Norman Wisdom.
On Friday nights, he would march down the Old Kent Road with his pals, stopping at famous pubs such as the Thomas à Becket, with the gym above where Henry Cooper trained. Down below, the entire pub would be rocking with East Enders singing traditional Cockney songs, Rolling Out The Barrel, having a right old knees-up, not a care in the world.
He came home to something else. Before long, they organised a Civil Rights Movement and as an articulate young man, he became one of the faces and his articulate mind expressed their concerns.
Then Bloody Sunday happened. A peaceful walk by the protestors that, by the end, had 13 men dead with another dying later.
The Bloody Sunday monument in the Bogside of Derry. Sam Boal
Sam Boal
“I just don’t accept the common narrative that this place was so oppressed that in 1968 it exploded in frustration. There’s more to it than that. It’s not the whole story,” McCann says.
“The thing that I got from working in London was that it cleansed me of anti-English bigotry. I was surrounded by English people. I spent seven years there and I could never say that I faced anti-Irish racism. Now, I don’t doubt other people were, but maybe I was lucky to have chanced upon this job.
“I felt these people were decent, working-class people. And I had a nephew joined the British Army years later. All that used to leave me in the slightly awkward position in the Bogside when people would say, ‘Fuck them, kill them all!’ And I would say, ‘Hold on, you’ve got that wrong…’”
He would hold that things started in Derry and ended in Derry.
“It’s not an accident that the IRA war ended in Derry before anywhere. For 18 months before anywhere else, nothing was happening in Derry,” he says.
“There were no IRA attacks, because the Civil Rights Movement had roused the people. But it wasn’t around partition. It was a sense of unfairness. And if the Unionists had been able to give fairly, it would have been enormously in their favour. It would have drained the thing.
“It was the past of Northern Ireland that was best known, where discrimination was most felt among Catholics, if that was the area it could have been… and it could have been because of the co-operation and relaxed attitudes.
“But they fucked it up. They fucked it up.
“Other people might disagree, but I think that everything we have now was available in the early 1970s. Instead it left things open for those that wanted to fight for a United Ireland.
“And I can understand that. The problem was that the British Army came in and started shooting people. So that settled that argument.”
***
The famous gable wall at Free Derry Corner. Alamy
Alamy
At the age of 39, Dr Neil Farren was appointed Bishop of Derry. He wasn’t a fan of the GAA and would lecture from the altar and in his St Columb’s classrooms to his pupils to play and watch soccer instead.
The GAA had a very low-level influence on the city. The only Gaelic footballer McCann knew when he was growing up was the county midfielder Tom McGuinness, a brother of Martin.
There were other reasons for soccer gripping the city.
“I think it was sort of how the Civil Rights Movement started here.
“Now, this is an odd-ball interpretation of it. But my interpretation is that people were comfortable with where they are. The accessibility. There never was the ferocious Nationalism that existed in many other places.”
Nevertheless, sectarianism was up and running. Derry City would be affected. When Ballymena came to town in 1971, a group of youths burned the spectators’ bus.
The Irish League and RUC decided they would have to play their home games in Coleraine, a Unionist-dominated town 30 miles away.
McCann went a couple of times, but could see it all seeping away.
Not having the Brandywell was like cutting their heart out. They tried to get back but were outvoted by other Irish League members.
They slunk into Junior football for 13 years and kept applying to rejoin the Irish League. Eventually the solution came: join the League of Ireland instead.
Their wish was granted in time for the 1985/86 season and they filled supporters buses to travel all over Ireland, taking Derry people to corners they thought they would never see.
“Serious craic. Oh Jesus. That sense of you were rampaging across the south, who didn’t really want us. So fuck them. That was part of the atmosphere of those matches against Shamrock Rovers, and away to Turner’s Cross in Cork. There was a sense of ‘Here we are,’” recalls McCann.
“Quite a number of people used to go down. You could have had 2,000 people travelling in buses and motors. Just phenomenal and never been equalled since.
“And there was an uprising of enthusiasm in the early years.
There was a resentment, a real sour resentment of the Free State, in Derry among Catholic Nationalists. We used to say, ‘We’ve been abandoned! Thank fuck!’”
***
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Wind the tape on 70 years later and Eamonn McCann is still beguiled by the world around him.
There’s not many 81-year-olds who want to spend their weekends at marches and protests, but that’s where he found himself the previous weekend in Belfast, fighting the good fight.
While at that march, he happened upon Stuart Bailie, the one-time assistant editor of the NME in the 90s, and current bossman of literary supplement Dig With It.
Given he spent decades writing a fortnightly column for Hot Press himself, the two musos had a quick nerd-off. McCann passed on his recommendations of an all-female rock group from Los Angeles, The Linda Lindas, who “can really hit those guitars!”
Bailie emailed him back a brief message to say he “loved them”, and McCann felt a little bit cheated, that the line “was a bit pro forma”.
Basically, he wanted enthusiasm. He’s burned off it for 81 years now.
What you soon notice is this is a man of utter consistency. You struggle to squeeze into the vestibule of his house for all the placards, Pride flags and the photographs blue-tacked to the walls. Every single surface has a hillock of newspapers, books and pamphlets.
He owns 40 t-shirts, every one of them black. He wears all-black trousers, jackets, and cardigans and slippers at home. The only splash of colour is on his socks.
“I still go to all the home games,” he says with pride.
“I haven’t missed a home game all season.”
Derry City are hoping to end their season on a winning note in this weekend's FAI Cup final. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
He’s had 10 scans on his brain and some of the brain cells in his frontal lobe are perishing. It affects his balance and it’s not something that can be corrected by doing calisthenics, as he explains.
Recently, the wife of a recently-deceased friend brought around a wheelchair to give to McCann, something that provoked gales of laughter.
“‘We won’t be needing this anymore!’ she said.
“What a world! What a country!”
He was there for Shelbourne clinching the league title and he didn’t begrudge them a second of their happiness. He feels this might be slightly disloyal and he says he is less than fanatical. Perhaps he’s just a grown-up.
Sadou Diallo with manager Ruaidhrí Higgins. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
“I like Sadou Diallo. I think he is a top-class player. Elegant. He doesn’t look as if he is running when he is moving, but he is so lithe and rhythmical almost.
“I love him. I like Mickey Duffy playing up that left wing. [Well, he would, wouldn’t he?]
“I like the whole team really, very nice young fellas. Nothing about them arrogant. They are quite together.
“Now, they are maybe too nice sometimes. You would like them to grind the teeth a bit more.”
On Sunday, he will not get along to the Aviva. But he will tune into RTÉ and will wear his FC St Pauli scarf on the sofa, as he does to the Derry City matches.
And when the action gets a little stale, he’ll find himself humming along to an old ditty, remembering things as they were 70 years ago.
Another Cup final. Another country. Another world.
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'We used to say, ‘We’ve been abandoned! Thank f**k!’ - Eamonn McCann on Derry City
“YOU DON’T GET songs like that anymore!” shouts Eamonn McCann as he rocks back and juts forward, arms in the air, glasses askew, conducting his own singing from the sofa.
‘We don’t care
‘If Delaney has no hair
‘Damn the hair we care
‘We only know, that there’s gonna be a show
‘And Derry City will be there…’
McCann’s recalling the first Derry City team of heroes he had, the 1954 team that won their second-ever Irish Cup, beating Glentoran 1-0 in the second replay.
It took another replay to beat Linfield in the semi-final. Five games across several weeks that captured the imagination of everyone in the city.
Over 35,000 attended the first final, a record that stands way out on its own.
He fell hard for Jimmy Delaney, the hero of the song who was winding down a stellar career at Derry having captained both Celtic and Manchester United, but still had a lick of pace up the wing, a prototype Attilio Lombardo.
Then there was their goalkeeper, the ex-Linfield man Charlie Heffron; Willie Curran, the centre-half; Harry ‘Digger’ Smith; Arthur ‘Mousey’ Brady, “a tiny little man on the right wing. Brilliant.”
One image sums up the boyhood imagination. Mousey was on the ball and faced with Jackie Milburn – yes, ‘Wor Jackie’ himself, uncle of Jack Charlton — who was player-manager for Linfield for a few years.
With nowhere to turn, he pushed the ball through the towering Milburn’s legs, and followed it through the gap. “What a nutmeg!” McCann exclaims, as if he just watched it on the television.
He grew up in Rossville Street, a five-minute walk to the Brandywell Stadium. His father, from the New Lodge in Belfast, wasn’t a football man, so the young McCann went along with all his buddies in a gang every second Saturday.
It was tuppence in, and on the days they didn’t have it, someone would lift them in or a gate man might have turned a blind eye. On the days they had nothing and little charity from the staff, they would go up the mounds of clay on Lone Moore Road, where Derry’s Celtic Park is now, and roar along even though they could only see four-fifths of the pitch.
He was there for the 1971 Irish Cup final, the one where Martin O’Neill scored two goals. He can’t remember a thing about it only for O’Neill.
Fifty-three years on, Derry are back in the FAI Cup final, against Drogheda on Sunday. A cup final; the same, but oh so different.
It’s a good time to reminisce. There sure has been a lot of water under the bridge since.
And nobody has lived the Derry experience quite like McCann.
***
Derry is defined as a city. But let’s be more accurate; it’s a sprawling village.
Eamonn McCann has been many things. Tree pruner. Political activist. Author. Journalist. Member of the Legislative Assembly of Stormont. Councillor. Patron of the arts (“Even though I know fuck all about arts”). Music columnist. Protestor. Marcher. Megaphone bellower. Tireless campaigner. Trade Unionist.
He’s as Derry as it gets. He’s soaked in it, rolled in it, baked in it.
Clever enough to attend St Columb’s College, he went to school alongside John Hume, Seamus Deane and Seamus Heaney.
“I once spent two hours kissing Seamus Heaney,” he says.
“It was a play in St Columb’s called Tons of Money. It was a West End farce from the 1920s. This guy had loads of money and he had lost his wife.
“So whoever would get to marry this man would suddenly become very rich. Seamus played the widower and I played the dame. I had to kiss Seamus. Father Flaherty was the producer of the play and he was going, ‘For God’s sake, for God’s sake, that’s not the way people kiss!’
“Tons of Money. Jesus. We had to practise it and we were terribly embarrassed. Everybody was laughing at us.”
He’s also a season ticket holder at the Ryan McBride Brandywell Stadium. This season he didn’t miss a single home game.
Living two minutes away from his childhood home but now not great on his feet, the former Derry City goalkeeper Eddie Mahon comes to collect him and links his arm for the short walk to their seat in the Mark Farren Stand.
When he first started going, Derry City was a mixed environment.
The earliest chairman he can recall was a Protestant, Bobby Ferris, and one of the directors was the chief warden in Derry Gaol.
“When I was a child growing up there wasn’t the same sharp edge of sectarian attitudes in the north,” he says.
“There would have been a feeling in Derry that we weren’t wanted in the south either, so we felt a bit unwanted. Footballing orphans!
“The other thing was that there were never flags in the Brandywell. Just red and white. There was no ban on it as far as I know, but people just felt that… ‘we don’t do that.’
“It’s not the place for flags or sectarianism. And that’s true to this day and it’s announced before every match.”
Away from the low-slung Bogside area, Derry was a merchant city that grew rich on the backs of the wealthy. Shirt-making was introduced to the city in 1829 by William Scott. A century on in 1926, there were 44 factories producing shirts, employing over 8,000 directly.
Then, cheaper materials and labour bit the city and so began a long slide into economic uncertainty, partition closing the door to their natural hinterland of the Inishowen Peninsula.
The Bogside had deteriorated into a series of tenement slums. Water ran down the walls of houses. Windows were left without glass. Whenever the Corporation were contacted and asked about repairs, they were in no hurry to get out.
The population was overwhelmingly Catholic and Nationalist. Yet careful gerrymandering of the voting wards led to the local council being overwhelmingly dominated by Unionism. Unemployment and poor housing prevailed, but the sense was one of frustration towards political leaders rather than a naked hostility towards Protestants.
When McCann was a teenager, he and his buddies would go along to the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall to see acts such as The Dave Glover Showband. While that would be unthinkable now, Derry still retains a healthy relationship with the Apprentice Boys who, while part of the loyal orders, is independent of the Orange Order.
“You have to remember they are what they say: apprentices. They were started by 13 apprentices in 1689 and they were not the elite or nobility of the plantation. They shut the gates for the Siege of Derry and held out.”
Their annual marches in August were full of blood and thunder and cries of ‘No surrender!’ along with burning effigies of their great betrayer, Robert Lundy.
It sounds fearsome, but Derry is a small place. The McCann’s breadman was George Reynolds from a townland that McCann’s mother hailed from, Warbleshinny.
McCann and his buddies would take advantage of the generosity.
“We used to go for walks on 12 August because there was free lemonade and buns and all laid out on big tables. And you’d go up, feeling very daring, eating everything they had and drinking your fill. But I was standing there one year and saw George Reynolds coming my way with his Apprentice Boys collar and I thought, ‘Oh fuck, we’re done now.’
“And he goes, ‘Evening, young McCann. How’s your mam? Tell her I was asking for her.’”
The widespread discrimination got into their bones. Eventually, the young people organised themselves. With 30,000 Catholics in the one area, there was both the injustice, but also a confidence that McCann can explain.
“That’s the combination, that innate ‘Derry,’ that created the Civil Rights Movement, that gave rise to John Hume, to Ivan Cooper, Mickey Canavan and myself. I could name them all, Cathy Harkin, Nell McCafferty. Loads of people would have that background that I wouldn’t exaggerate but is very distinctly ‘Derry’.
“It’s very different to Belfast. My father’s people come from the New Lodge Road in Belfast. It’s very different.
“Derry never had that feeling, not even when I was eight, nine, 10 years old. There was a relaxation about the place.
“Now again, from where we sit now, three miles north, east and west and you are in Donegal. We were very used to being in Donegal. Pubs were open later, so there used to be a big scramble late at night to get over there for the extra pints. All drunk too, heading over to ‘The State’.
“My mother would send us out to go over the border to a wee hut just over the border, for a pound of butter and 40 cigarettes.
“Now we could walk there in the summer, it was great.”
***
Her name was Olivia. He still thinks about her now and the nominative determinism of her olive skin.
He met her when he was living in London and the world was a big adventure. But his sister Bridie was coming home to Derry for a holiday from Canada and he was warned to be home to see her.
One day he found himself walking around Rossville when a friend Dermie McCleneghan asked him for a hand. A few heads wanted to pull a caravan across the road to block in a protest about housing conditions.
So he did. Sure enough, the Royal Ulster Constabulary came along and arrested everyone. His court appearance would be in a fortnight.
“And, well… from that on, I could not not be involved.”
He was sorry to leave London, and Olivia, behind.
He had a job as a tree pruner, cutting trees out by the root in Epping Forest and transplanting them for planting around the post-war estates pushing the suburbs further out.
“The guys I worked with, half of them were Tea Leaves (Cockney rhyming for ‘thieves’) and they would spend a bit of time inside. I remember one lad, he was sent to prison and for six months we used to clock in for him, get his wages, and get it to his wife while he was in Pentonville.”
They drove around in a van, a squad of 13 men as the sun was coming up, singing cornball songs from Norman Wisdom.
On Friday nights, he would march down the Old Kent Road with his pals, stopping at famous pubs such as the Thomas à Becket, with the gym above where Henry Cooper trained. Down below, the entire pub would be rocking with East Enders singing traditional Cockney songs, Rolling Out The Barrel, having a right old knees-up, not a care in the world.
He came home to something else. Before long, they organised a Civil Rights Movement and as an articulate young man, he became one of the faces and his articulate mind expressed their concerns.
Then Bloody Sunday happened. A peaceful walk by the protestors that, by the end, had 13 men dead with another dying later.
“I just don’t accept the common narrative that this place was so oppressed that in 1968 it exploded in frustration. There’s more to it than that. It’s not the whole story,” McCann says.
“The thing that I got from working in London was that it cleansed me of anti-English bigotry. I was surrounded by English people. I spent seven years there and I could never say that I faced anti-Irish racism. Now, I don’t doubt other people were, but maybe I was lucky to have chanced upon this job.
“I felt these people were decent, working-class people. And I had a nephew joined the British Army years later. All that used to leave me in the slightly awkward position in the Bogside when people would say, ‘Fuck them, kill them all!’ And I would say, ‘Hold on, you’ve got that wrong…’”
He would hold that things started in Derry and ended in Derry.
“It’s not an accident that the IRA war ended in Derry before anywhere. For 18 months before anywhere else, nothing was happening in Derry,” he says.
“There were no IRA attacks, because the Civil Rights Movement had roused the people. But it wasn’t around partition. It was a sense of unfairness. And if the Unionists had been able to give fairly, it would have been enormously in their favour. It would have drained the thing.
“It was the past of Northern Ireland that was best known, where discrimination was most felt among Catholics, if that was the area it could have been… and it could have been because of the co-operation and relaxed attitudes.
“But they fucked it up. They fucked it up.
“Other people might disagree, but I think that everything we have now was available in the early 1970s. Instead it left things open for those that wanted to fight for a United Ireland.
“And I can understand that. The problem was that the British Army came in and started shooting people. So that settled that argument.”
***
At the age of 39, Dr Neil Farren was appointed Bishop of Derry. He wasn’t a fan of the GAA and would lecture from the altar and in his St Columb’s classrooms to his pupils to play and watch soccer instead.
The GAA had a very low-level influence on the city. The only Gaelic footballer McCann knew when he was growing up was the county midfielder Tom McGuinness, a brother of Martin.
There were other reasons for soccer gripping the city.
“I think it was sort of how the Civil Rights Movement started here.
“Now, this is an odd-ball interpretation of it. But my interpretation is that people were comfortable with where they are. The accessibility. There never was the ferocious Nationalism that existed in many other places.”
Nevertheless, sectarianism was up and running. Derry City would be affected. When Ballymena came to town in 1971, a group of youths burned the spectators’ bus.
The Irish League and RUC decided they would have to play their home games in Coleraine, a Unionist-dominated town 30 miles away.
McCann went a couple of times, but could see it all seeping away.
Not having the Brandywell was like cutting their heart out. They tried to get back but were outvoted by other Irish League members.
They slunk into Junior football for 13 years and kept applying to rejoin the Irish League. Eventually the solution came: join the League of Ireland instead.
Their wish was granted in time for the 1985/86 season and they filled supporters buses to travel all over Ireland, taking Derry people to corners they thought they would never see.
“Serious craic. Oh Jesus. That sense of you were rampaging across the south, who didn’t really want us. So fuck them. That was part of the atmosphere of those matches against Shamrock Rovers, and away to Turner’s Cross in Cork. There was a sense of ‘Here we are,’” recalls McCann.
“And there was an uprising of enthusiasm in the early years.
There was a resentment, a real sour resentment of the Free State, in Derry among Catholic Nationalists. We used to say, ‘We’ve been abandoned! Thank fuck!’”
***
Wind the tape on 70 years later and Eamonn McCann is still beguiled by the world around him.
There’s not many 81-year-olds who want to spend their weekends at marches and protests, but that’s where he found himself the previous weekend in Belfast, fighting the good fight.
While at that march, he happened upon Stuart Bailie, the one-time assistant editor of the NME in the 90s, and current bossman of literary supplement Dig With It.
Given he spent decades writing a fortnightly column for Hot Press himself, the two musos had a quick nerd-off. McCann passed on his recommendations of an all-female rock group from Los Angeles, The Linda Lindas, who “can really hit those guitars!”
Bailie emailed him back a brief message to say he “loved them”, and McCann felt a little bit cheated, that the line “was a bit pro forma”.
Basically, he wanted enthusiasm. He’s burned off it for 81 years now.
What you soon notice is this is a man of utter consistency. You struggle to squeeze into the vestibule of his house for all the placards, Pride flags and the photographs blue-tacked to the walls. Every single surface has a hillock of newspapers, books and pamphlets.
He owns 40 t-shirts, every one of them black. He wears all-black trousers, jackets, and cardigans and slippers at home. The only splash of colour is on his socks.
“I still go to all the home games,” he says with pride.
“I haven’t missed a home game all season.”
He’s had 10 scans on his brain and some of the brain cells in his frontal lobe are perishing. It affects his balance and it’s not something that can be corrected by doing calisthenics, as he explains.
Recently, the wife of a recently-deceased friend brought around a wheelchair to give to McCann, something that provoked gales of laughter.
“‘We won’t be needing this anymore!’ she said.
“What a world! What a country!”
He was there for Shelbourne clinching the league title and he didn’t begrudge them a second of their happiness. He feels this might be slightly disloyal and he says he is less than fanatical. Perhaps he’s just a grown-up.
“I like Sadou Diallo. I think he is a top-class player. Elegant. He doesn’t look as if he is running when he is moving, but he is so lithe and rhythmical almost.
“I love him. I like Mickey Duffy playing up that left wing. [Well, he would, wouldn’t he?]
“I like the whole team really, very nice young fellas. Nothing about them arrogant. They are quite together.
“Now, they are maybe too nice sometimes. You would like them to grind the teeth a bit more.”
On Sunday, he will not get along to the Aviva. But he will tune into RTÉ and will wear his FC St Pauli scarf on the sofa, as he does to the Derry City matches.
And when the action gets a little stale, he’ll find himself humming along to an old ditty, remembering things as they were 70 years ago.
Another Cup final. Another country. Another world.
‘We don’t care
‘If Delaney has no hair
‘Damn the hair we care
‘We only know that there’s gonna be a match
‘And Derry City will be there…’
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Candystripes Derry City Eamonn McCann FAI Cup final Interview Soccer