Football

Sean Stinson's: A marriage of convenience that helped two clubs thrive

For 38 years, Sean Stinson's was the lifeblood of the GAA in Portglenone and Ahoghill. As the clubs prepare to meet in the Antrim SFC this weekend, Cahair O'Kane spoke to Portglenone's Owen Doherty and Ahoghill's Colum Graham about the impact, the joy and the break-up...

The Sean Stinson's that reached their first Antrim minor football final in 1993. They lost that one but the amalgamation went on to win four-in-a-row between 1995 and '98.
The Sean Stinson's that reached their first Antrim minor football final in 1993. They lost that one but the amalgamation went on to win four-in-a-row between 1995 and '98. The Sean Stinson's that reached their first Antrim minor football final in 1993. They lost that one but the amalgamation went on to win four-in-a-row between 1995 and '98.

WHEN Portglenone pitch up in Ahoghill early tomorrow afternoon for their Antrim SFC opener, it will feel like a forced reunion of a warring family.

Deep down, one knows what the other has done for them. But when they look into the whites of other’s eyes, they’ll only feel the pain that’s been inflicted by their break-up.

Portglenone have an eye on the next step after coming so close to reaching last year’s Antrim football final, losing after those three epic semi-final games with Lámh Dhearg.

Ahoghill won’t win the championship but their breed of defiance is special. A tiny cluster of families in a predominantly Unionist town have not only kept a club alive, but pushed it up the mountain.

Portglenone would not be where they are without Ahoghill, and Ahoghill would not be where they are without Portglenone.

For almost 40 years, they were one and same.

While the two clubs retained their singular identities at senior level, they were joined in a marriage of convenience at underage.

With both struggling to find the numbers to survive, club stalwarts on both sides – namely Ahoghill’s Phonsie Agnew and Harry Graham, and Portglenone’s Eamon Graham – came together at county board meetings in the late 1970s and decided to join forces at underage.

Sean Stinson, a stalwart of Antrim GAA, had bought the local Crosskeys Inn and immersed himself in the community before his life was tragically cut short in a car accident in 1979.

The new pairing quickly moved to honour his memory, and they did so in some fashion.

It was slow to get off the ground. There were times right up until the pin was pulled at the end of 2017 that numbers remained a struggle.

But in the 1990s, theirs became the prototype for amalgamated success.

They jumped back and forward between the venues and colours of both clubs until they reached a minor final in 1993, at which point they purchased a green, white and gold strip in the finest of Offaly fashion.

Those colours became synonymous with a remarkable run that saw them reach five minor finals in six years, winning four-in-a-row from 1995 to ’98.

There was still no huge surplus of numbers, but they’d struck upon a crop that was dominated by Portglenone but leant heavily on a few quality operators from Ahoghill.

“That team was backboned by Tony Convery, Kevin Madden, Paul Storey, but Paddy Logan was the young prodigy,” recalls Owen Doherty, the current Portglenone senior coach who played on the first two minor teams and whose father Frankie was one of the great driving forces behind the venture.

Logan hailed from Ahoghill and played on all four minor winning teams, while Madden was the young prolific forward that every team craves.

Stinson’s had started to win a few bits and pieces of South-West Leagues at U12 and then U13.5, but this was a level of success neither club was accustomed to.

Within little over a decade after that success began, Portglenone seniors had gone from Division Three to playing in three Antrim SFC finals in five years.

Ahoghill’s crop came a few years later. They didn’t have the same underage success but they were the dominant partner in the Stinson’s setup for a while in the early 2000s.

For Colum Graham, to see the club hold their own in senior football and hurling, and to be on the verge of a big boom in camogie is as thrilling as it is satisfying.

“When I played, we played junior football. I never dreamed that we would ever play senior football.

“It never crossed my mind when you looked around at Cargin and St John’s and St Gall’s and Rossa and St Paul’s that you would be playing them.

“Everything we achieved, both in Sean Stinson’s and the success we’ve had in Ahoghill winning intermediate titles in football and hurling, playing Division One in both, has been great to be part of.”

Graham, who has a son and a fistful of nephews on the current team, got involved with coaching teams in the late 1980s.

Alongside Frankie Doherty, who was involved in all four minor successes, he coached the first two minor winning teams before his brother Dermot helped take the last two.

It takes very little drilling into Owen Doherty to find the reverence he holds for those men.

“Colum and Dermot Graham would have been big players in all our careers. Still we’d have great respect for them, even you meet them now. You meet them on Sunday, it’ll be the same.

“Those boys gave up a lot of time and energy when you were growing up, taking teams.

“You’re looking at fathers’ sons coming again, and the fathers are putting in the effort like my own father did, the Grahams’ father did.

“They’re putting a huge effort in. Those guys did that for me. It’s tinged with great memories and great success.”

With Portglenone’s own numbers climbing and Ahoghill’s bodies so short that they only had a couple of players at most for any age group, the Roger Casement’s club took the decision at the end of 2017 to go their own way.

It has left Ahoghill with no structure to help bring players through. They’ve a few in Moneyglass, a few in Randalstown, but it lacks the cohesion that the Stinson’s setup had.

They’re one of those clubs whose teamsheet has looked the same for almost a decade-and-a-half.

O’Connell. Graham. Neeson.

To a man they almost all play both football and hurling (as Clooney Gaels), and have taken the club from junior to senior in both, via an All-Ireland hurling final at junior (2007) and an Ulster intermediate title (2013).

Ahoghill feel aggrieved by the break-up of Stinson’s. The swiftness of it left them dazed.

They took satisfaction from fielding their own small-sided teams at underage blitzes recently, and the key now is getting the current senior crop to hang on long enough to bridge a generation gap.

“I’ve a son [Martin] still involved and you still sort of see all those boys as young fellas,” says Colum Graham

“And you just think they’re going to go on forever, but it’s just not going to happen. They’ve come through a lot, let me tell you. And they don’t owe the club anything.”

Portglenone simply felt it was time to forge their own identity, and that they were strong enough on their own two feet to survive the wobbles that would come with it.

And so Sean Stinson’s is no more. For 40 years, it sustained the GAA in two communities. Not only did they survive, but Portglenone and Ahoghill both thrived.

Tomorrow, they go to war as rivals, as they’ve always been at senior level.

Owen Doherty lived it, and his words sum up the respect that will endure any ill-feeling over the marriage ending.

“Football in Portglenone and Ahoghill was the winner.”