“He’d say, ‘So at 17 years old you were being plunged into a bath, taken out and a wet towel put up over your face and then hung out a window, how did that make you feel?’ I said it’s just the way it was.” via IrishTimesSport
learned his Irish in the cages of the H-Blocks in Long Kesh. Ask him and he’ll say the language he has spoken fluently for 45 years is his first love. But Gaelic Games come a close second and in the past decade and a half, the two have woven together.
The Falls is more than a road. It’s a district that begins near the city centre and shoots west from near the Divis flats towards Milltown cemetery and Andersonstown. Still in his teens, he graduated to Long Kesh in 1977, becoming a prominent IRA member and part of the blanket protest, where they rejected wearing prison uniforms, claiming political prisoner status. For that, 10 would die. It took a toll.
“Whatever came your way you took it, and stored it away in a wee box in your head. As you get older that box starts to leak. That happened to me in Springfield Road [police station]. Yep, I went straight into prison after that.”Prison didn’t mean inactivity, although during the intensity of the 1980s hunger strikes, there were restrictions. Outside of those bleak years, sport had a place.
“He was a very keen harrier. He ran for a team that was predominantly unionist and mostly from up around the Lough shore at Rathcoole where he lived.
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