"You could organise anything and they wouldn’t care because they’re so glad to be together, they just love coming out.”
THE Golden Eagles of St John’s may be grounded at the moment but the fun is still flying around.
Mobile phones are the medium of communication now for what was once the postcard generation.
Maria Gough has used that latter method for most of the five years since setting up the group for older and past members of the west Belfast GAA club.
Yet she took a timely decision at the beginning of this year to set up a WhatsApp group including Golden Eagles themselves and/or family members and it’s proving invaluable in these testing times of the COVID-19 crisis.
“There is some craic on it,” says Maria. “Some of them might make mistakes in their reply and get asked: ‘What language is that? Are you learning Japanese?’”
Normally this would be the time of year for the club outings to start but over-70s, especially those with certain health problems, must stay at home as much as is practical.
The WhatsApp group helps with those more serious matters too, of course: “People in the club are contacting me to offer help with shopping or post or whatever for any of our Golden Eagles.”
Although she’s a Roslea, Fermanagh native, Maria Gough has long been a ‘Johnnie’ through and through; married to former player Kevin, youngest brother of well-known referee John.
John and Maria are both heavily involved in writing the history of the club, an arduous exercise: “John Gough has been researching it for about 10 years – you want to see the amount of stuff that man has gathered…He has sent me about 1,000 pages on a pen drive, so I’m working my way through it in decades.
“I’m trying to put stories around it… Trying to get people to write for me, or give me information and I’ll write the story around it.
“Someone asked ‘Will I be dead before it’s out?’”
Along with writing the club’s history, Maria is also helping to re-live and extend it.
The Golden Eagles keep memories alive in more ways than one.
After 22 years teaching at St Mark’s in Twinbrook – “that’s where I got my grounding, decent people up there” – Maria finished up as principal of St Joseph’s PS, Lisburn, retiring around five years ago.
“Someone said to me ‘It would be lovely to be able to bring back some of the older folk – this was their lives.’ It was – and they’re the ones with all the stories.
“I was a P1 teacher and I’ve told them many times that my experience of working with P1 is fantastic for dealing with them. ‘Get into twos…’
“It took a while to come up with this name. At first I called them ‘the veterans’ and Seamus O’Hare was not amused, he wouldn’t answer to it.
“Then I came up with the Golden Eagles because the St John’s badge has an eagle – from the biblical end – and it’s a yellow colour. They love it, there are plenty of references to eagles taking flight and so on on the WhatsApp group.”
Memories, of course, aren’t always what they were. “The club meets every month, the first Friday of the month – I thought with their good Catholic upbringing they’d remember the first Friday.
“I still had to send wee postcards out about two weeks beforehand because some of them would forget, although now they’re more in the habit of it.”
The popularity of the Golden Eagles has soared, improving minds and bodies.
“There was only a small number until word got out. I’ll do them a lunch and then get some sort of activity going for them – armchair yoga or armchair aerobics." Assistance comes from Sharon Hughes, Eleanor Kelly, and Anne McCann.
“The likes of Jim McDermott would have come down and done what I called ‘the St Patrick’s Day Lecture’, but he focussed it on those wee streets around Beechmount. People would shout out ‘I used to go into that shop’ or ‘I remember so-and-so’ and tell him about somebody else.
“You could organise anything and they wouldn’t care because they’re so glad to be together, they just love coming out.”
Memories of previous outings will no doubt be recounted until the world returns to normality. “One of the first was taking them to a Viking ship down in Dublin – see trying to get them up onto it!,” says Maria, chuckling.
Another incident was captured for posterity by perplexed photographers.
“We had Charlie Gavin, who was totally immobile – but Charlie came everywhere. No matter what you were doing. Towards the end he started saying ‘I’m more of a burden’ but I told him wasn’t, we had more fun out of him.
“We pulled on our contacts to get into Aras an Uachtarain [the official residence of the President of Ireland] and Leinster House.
“There was a protest going on outside Leinster House but we pulled into a bus lane and a Garda came flying across the road: ‘Ah, you can’t stop here! You can’t stop here!’ Then he looked in at them all and said, ‘Ok, you can stop here’.
“We got them lined up against the wall but Charlie had a motorised scooter, and we had to get that out of the back of the bus.
“The Garda was shouting to get some of them across the road, so I got the women across.
“I’ve a younger group, the likes of [husband] Kevin, Paddy Hannigan, Gerry McCann, Jim Donnelly, whom I call the Silver Eagles, they’re the helpers.
“They hadn’t a clue how put the scooter up, no matter how many times they’ve done it. Next thing the cameras swung round from the protest – they had Charlie up against the wall.
“Eventually they got it together, moved out across the road, and the thing started to fold up, poor Charlie was half-in and half-out of it! They got across the road at last…
“God rest Charlie, he died a number of months ago, and that story was re-told so many times at the wake.”
The club’s own photographs play their part in re-awakening memories. One of Maria’s former teaching colleagues is an artist and she came in to lead a project on ‘Reminiscence’.
“John Gough would come down with a box of old photographs and they talked about who was in them. We ended up with eight pieces of work which we have up in the club, recalling different times in their lives.
“The finished product is great, but all the talk, the social end of it, was the best part of it. They started bringing in photographs themselves.”
History can be oral as well as visual. Maria remembers when the late Patsy Donnelly, father of Jim and former Antrim chairman Collie, asked if he could speak to everyone.
“Patsy was a very quiet man; he did a huge amount of work in the club, but quietly – there are people who like the limelight but Patsy wasn’t one of them.
“He stood up and talked about Tommy Best, who died many years ago. Patsy talked about what a brilliant sportsman Tommy was, the matches he played, and how amazing he was.
“That stands out for me as a poignant moment for me, not talking about himself or his family but someone that people may have forgotten about. The group is a forum for them to reminisce and talk and laugh and all the rest of it.”
The Golden Eagles lift people up in many ways. One man, after his wife died, “it took four-and-a-half years to get him to come in. I got fed up sending out letters, but I kept sending. He came on a trip to the Connolly Centre, then to Croke Park, we’re all free on the train.
“Afterwards he said: ‘I can’t believe that for four years I sat looking at walls and I was so lonely. This is just like a new life to me, it is just fantastic.’
“That’s the sort of feedback you’re getting, why it is so important to them.”
Given that Maria helped revive camogie at St John’s in the Nineties, it’s fitting that the Golden Eagles include females in their ranks:
“There are good strong women in there too. I thought this might just be men because the GAA was a man’s club for a long, long time but the women started coming.
“Some whose husbands are dead, but women who themselves would have been so involved in the club in the Forties and the Fifties. They get so much out of coming back, seeing and talking to everybody.”
Still, while meeting up is on hold at present, the Golden Eagles were ahead of their time in terms of social distancing, at least of a certain sort.
“It’s a laugh – no matter how I organise that room, the men are all at one end and the women are all at the other. Every month I try everything and they say ‘What have you done with the tables today?’
“You’ve strong people like Isobel Gallagher who say ‘See the next time I come in, I’m going over and sitting there, it’ll not be all men over there’.
“She’ll do that – and then after about 20 minutes ‘Ach, I can’t be bothered listening to them’, and away she goes, because they’re only talking about football or hurling.”
It’s not all GAA talk, though, and even non-Johnnies are welcome, insists Maria: “Anybody who’s out there that wants to come, we are more than happy to have them.”
In terms of taking people back in time, there’s little better than music, and the Golden Eagles are blessed to have Eoin McMahon of ‘Barnbrack’ fame among them:
“He is such an addition because he’ll bring his accordion, like to the Christmas dinner. They love the Christmas dinner - I tried for selfish reasons to have it in one of the local hotels but they weren’t having any of that so we ended up back in the club.
“I’d turned a junk room into a coffee shop, which I run on a Saturday morning, and that’s where I meet them [the Golden Eagles]. At Christmas we go across into the snug, Eoin brings his accordion and Martin Crummy brings his guitar and we have a great session.”
Even now, the musical links bind the Golden Eagles together, as Maria explains: “On St Patrick’s Day Donal Gallagher put the video of Eoin doing ‘When I Was A Lad’ on the WhatsApp group and different ones were replying ‘I’m doing my yoga to this’, ‘I love it’.
“Next I asked Eileen the yoga teacher and she gladly put on some videos of her doing the moves. Then there were a lot of St Patrick’s Day greetings going on. It’s a great way of communicating.”
Even without the current Coronavirus concerns, there’s a heightened awareness of mortality the older you get. Running the Golden Eagles is a joy, but Maria sounds one downbeat note:
“The sad part of it is that I’ve lost a number of them along the way, obviously age is a factor.”
The threat of the virus to the elderly and those with health issues increases the usual fear levels:
“People are worried, there’s no question about it, that’s why they are staying indoors. We’re the same, Kevin is asthmatic… More of them [the Golden Eagles] are much more vulnerable.
“I think everyone is just sensible, they know this [social distancing and self-isolation] has to happen to stay alive, that’s the bottom line.”
The contact, the memories, the chat provided by the Golden Eagles, even only online for now, is a solace and a source of comfort:
“People are still upbeat and jolly about it. Someone gave Kevin a photo of the old cooler [the outdoor swimming pool] in the Falls Park – well, that was backwards and forwards for half an evening of people telling their stories when they went to the cooler. That is helping them to connect.
“They are thinking, remembering, and then sharing their stories. We picked up Isobel Gallagher, who hadn’t been communicating about anything else on [WhatsApp], but that photograph sparked her.
“We put on lots of photographs [on WhatsApp] and let them talk and reminisce about their experiences.”
The Golden Eagles are currently caged, but their voices will still sing out strongly, echoing the past into the present.
