“As I stand beside the starboard bow and watch the ocean foam,
As I view each new horizon, I grow further than my home,
I’m sailing on a foreign ship that’s bound for Montreal,
I’ll view the world and make my destination Donegal.”
Lyrics from the song ‘Destination Donegal’
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
DOWN the back of the team bus on the way home from wherever they’d been, Anthony Molloy always took centre-stage.
He’d run through a playlist that, at some point, would include Destination Donegal.
In the foreword to Molloy’s autobiography, Jim McGuinness told of the night he saw the Donegal captain speeding in a car coming the other way, rushing out to training at Townawilly before the 1989 Ulster final.
“I was sixteen years old and completely starstruck.”
In that passage, McGuinness wrote about the aura and stature of Molloy in the changing room they shared in the early ‘90s.
He learned from the way Molloy was, how he led, how he spoke, how he played.
And he learned the words of Destination Donegal.
Jim acquired it as his own party piece.
When Daniel O’Donnell was introduced to the crowd at the All-Ireland homecoming in 2012, he pulled McGuinness, handed him a microphone and the pair of them duetted it.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Oh, Donegal, I’ll miss you and I’ll never understand,
Why I left you for your foreign lands against my heart’s command,
Whatever fortune comes my way, whatever may befall,
I know I’ll make my final destination Donegal.”
* * *
IN time, whether it be to retirement or soccer or fatigue, they will lose him again.
When he was in China and when he was in America, they assumed they already had.
McGuinness talked after the game on Sunday of how the players, led by Patrick McBrearty, had persuaded him to take Donegal again.
China, America, Derry City, Celtic, he did it all because he wanted to, because he thought he could, because it engaged him.
But when he bleeds it’s green and gold, always has been.
The trick is not for him to bleed the colours. It’s to get the rest of them to do it.
From the stage last night, Jamie Brennan signed off on a day where he made his 100th appearance by leading the crowd in singing The Hills of Donegal.
The lyrics talk about building a wall around it to keep them all out, and by God I’d build it tall.
There’s a sense of isolation that generates both resentment and pride in equal measure.
A letter published in The Irish Times in 2012 told of a father’s amazement when informed by his daughter, Deirdre Keane, that his local Donegal parish was on a map painted on a wall in the Doges palace centuries ago.
The father replied: “Imagine, the Venetians knew about us in the 1700s and Dublin only discovered us in the 1960s!”
Donegal people have always felt as though they’ve been left their own devices, but that created the ability to fend for themselves; to create something out of nothing.
Out of that has grown a deep sense of thranness.
In almost every referendum in the history of the Irish state, Donegal has done the opposite of what the government has wanted it to.
That hasn’t always been a good look. In the abortion referendum in 2018, Donegal was the only one of 40 constituencies in the whole country to vote against it.
In the recent family and care referendums, it recorded the highest percentage of No votes of any county at just over 80 per cent.
In 1997, the Donegal Tourism Board came up with a new slogan.
‘Up here, it’s different’.
Everything about Donegal is different. The minute you cross the border in Killea, the roads turn fringeless, the tarmac fired into the grass anyroad.
They even play the fiddle different in Donegal. Faster, more aggressively.
But the thing with it all is that they know what they are and they love what they are and they’re proud of what they are.
Jim McGuinness has weaponised all of that, from the very first day he took charge in 2010.
The first meeting of the Donegal panel took place in the Rosapenna Hotel, with the Atlantic Ocean lapping at the bay window, out of which he pointed and told the players: This is where we are from. Rugged. Breathtaking. A place that lived within them, if they could just find it.
‘Them people are waiting for a team for a long, long time. They are waiting for a team to be proud of and we are going to be that fucking team,’ he told them.
During the week his close friend, fellow Glenties man, Bradas O’Donnell posted an updated version of a short montage he’d first pulled together ahead of the 2019 Ulster final, entitled This Is Us.
Images of the land and sea and people were overlayed by the words voiced by Sean McGinley, the Ballyshannon actor of Braveheart and Gangs of New York fame.
The words talk about how the team belongs to the whole county, that it’s theirs to enjoy and be proud of and sing songs about.
“All of this is about place. Who we are. Where we’re from. Deep down in us all, buried sometimes so deep you don’t even know if you can find it. The boys tapped into that, all feeling the same about Donegal, the Irish language, the music, the coast, the beauty of it… Look, that’s where I’m from. That is my county. Look at that team, look at how far they’re willing to go, for us. For Donegal.”
The words are paraphrased from McGuinness himself.
Instilling that pride of place in his players is not a gimmick. It’s not some bus trip to Barnesmore Gap with a history lesson, back on the bus and remember that now lads. It’s every night at every training session, Donegal this, people that, place the other. A constant mantra, a reminder of what it is they do and why it is they do it.
And in the era of the outside manager, it is something that only a Donegal man could deliver with authenticity.
You cannot bring people to that place of belonging if you’ve never belonged there yourself, never known the struggle and strife, the good times and the bad.
Never heard Anthony Molloy down the back of the bus, never wrapped your arms around Daniel O’Donnell’s neck with a microphone in your hand, swapping Dungloe out of the song for his own Glenties.
Donegal’s destination could be anywhere from here.