REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF QUEENS’ UNIVERSITY GAA CLUB ARMAGH CITY HOTEL
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE 75TH ANNIVERSARY OF QUEENS’ UNIVERSITY GAA CLUB ARMAGH CITY HOTEL Friday, 10 NOVEMBER, 2006
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Tá an áthas orm bheith i bhur measc tráthnóna agus muid ag ceiluiradh breithla speisialta i saol an cumann seo agus an Ollscoil. Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil libh as ucht an cuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom.
Good evening everybody,
75 years of Queen’s GAA Club – that is certainly worth celebrating – and I thank John Devaney for his kind invitation to Martin and to me to be part of this historic night.
Martin and I have been associated with this club for exactly half of those seventy‑five years and I know that where two or more of us are gathered who spent those delicious days of our youth at Queen’s at the same time, we are infinitely more likely to recount stories drawn from our sporting memories than from our lectures or tutorials, and the friendships we made through Queens GAA have flooded the rest of our lives with the best of memories and the best of friends.
We were fortunate to arrive in Queen’s at the end of the 1960s, that magical era for Northern football, when Down had twice carried Sam triumphant across the border, bringing a ringing pride and confidence to a new generation which was about to set a new agenda for themselves and their homeland.
In his great poem “From the Canton of Expectation” Seamus Heaney describes the grim psychological hinterland inhabited by the generations before us.
“We lived deep in a land of optative moods,
under high, banked clouds of resignation.
A rustle of loss in the phrase Not in our lifetime,
the broken nerve when we prayed Vouchsafe or Deign,
Were creditable, sufficient to the day.”
“And next thing, suddenly, this change of mood.
Books open in the newly wired kitchens.
Young heads that might have dozed a life away
Against the flanks of milking cows were busy
. . .
They would banish the conditional forever,
this generation . . . intelligences
brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.”
Many of this new heady generation met here in Queen’s, and at football pitches, in all sorts of Godforsaken weathers and places as they carved new lives and new futures against a turbulent and violent political backdrop. At Queen’s the homogeneity of school and parish gave way to a broader and more challenging heterogeneity. We introduced our new friends from across the North’s legendary divide to Gaelic football and hurling and they introduced us to rugby and cricket. Transcending history’s baleful legacy of division we began a process of simple, respectful curiosity about one another that university life and its unique camaraderie helped to nurture and to sustain. I think of the legendary Dr Robin Harland whose colourful, sartorial elegance graced the sideline of many a Queen’s Gaelic and rugby match.
And there is a roll-call of pride too long to do even the remotest justice to, but still I have to mention Millennium GAA legend Sean O’Neill, the hero of my teenage years who lifted our hearts, aspirations and self-belief with every kick of the ball. I remember Anthony McGonnell, not for his sporting prowess, or his great Chairmanship of QUB GAA during my years here, but for the indelicate and robust way in which he carried me off the pitch during a dismal McKenna Cup match in UCD, which is only memorable because of a midfield conversation I had with the referee and my subsequent nomination as man of the match. So many of the modern Gaelic greats have been associated with this club, a list that is endless but needs to include Tyrone’s heroic and tragic Cormac Mc Anallen.
But tonight our memories rightly go back beyond our own times to those days seventy-five years ago when, in another era, and in much less fortunate times, a bunch of people thought it would be a good idea to found this club. They have surely been vindicated many times over by the people who came after them and who took on the stewardship of this great sporting contributor to the life and times of Queen’s.
To each of them we say ‘Míle buíochas’ and to those who carry the ball into the next generation we say ‘Adh mór’. We know that you bring respect and pride to Queen’s as well as to Gaelic games. There is a world of difference between the world of seventy‑five years ago and today, and I’ll let Seamus Heaney sum up again – from Station Island:
“As little flowers that were all bowed and shut
By the night chills rise on their stems and open
As soon as they have felt the touch of sunlight
So I revived my own wilting powers
And my heart flushed, like somebody set free”
The night chills are long gone. Gaelic games and Gaelic culture now feel the touch of sunlight and they are indeed confident, joyful, adventurous, jubilant because they flourish in a hard-earned freedom.
Happy 75th birthday and gura fada, fada buan sibh.