FROM the small Corsican village of Rogliano there arrived a small group of amateur actors in Donegal last week.
For the last decade, these people have turned their lives upside down to perform an annual stage show. Annie is a housekeeper, Osvaldo a sailor, Laetitia a postwoman, Sandrine the bartender.
On Wednesday night, in front of an Irish audience, they performed Danser À Lughnasa – the French-language adaptation of Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa – in front of three film crews at An Grianan Theatre.
It is 25 years since Meryl Streep swept into Carrickfinn airport aboard a small aircraft that housed a film crew of 22 making their way up from Dublin Castle, where they’d drank until 4am that morning.
She stepped out of the chauffeured car opposite the Highlands Hotel in the middle of the Glenties sporting the black sunglasses favoured by Hollywood stars and hangover hiders the world over.
A line of Kevin Kenney’s ewes were tethered outside McLoone’s Bar, giving their back to the celebrity visitor.
Ballybeg, the fictional home of Friel’s famous plays, is based on the Glenties.
This was the patch of his mother, Mary McLoone, where Friel would spend summers and Christmases, learning about the people and the place.
The Mundy sisters in Lughnasa were based on his mother’s sisters, and it was at their front door that he returned with Streep to unveil a plaque before the film premiere.
For the screening, the gym at St Columba’s Comprehensive School was turned into a theatre.
The minute the lights went down, Streep skipped out quietly for dinner, returning for the party later on where she apologised for butchering the local dialect across two hours.
Had the party gone until morning, she might have ended up in McLoone’s and met the Naomh Conaill team of the time.
Leo McLoone sr might not have been a direct connection of the Lughnasa sisters but he was built for the stage.
A member of their 1965 team that played in a rare county final when the club was known as Glenties, he’s now club president.
When the Maguire Cup comes back to the town now, he gets up and sings his own song, We’re Coming In Through Fintown With The Cup.
Days like these weren’t even to be dreamed about prior to 2005.
The Sunday morning routine for away games never changed.
Mass in the futuristic St Connell’s was at 11 and no sooner was the communion host swallowed than the players were out through the door to congregate across the street.
“Nobody in Glenties ever thought we would get to live this day. Full decades had passed when you would only talk about Glenties as county champions if you were telling a joke,” Jim McGuinness wrote in his memoir, Until Victory Always, of their first success that year, when he coached the team while he was injured.
It’s hard to ever see a return to the men leaving mass and going in skulling pints at 11.45am before getting on a bus to go and get eaten alive by Ardara or Aodh Ruadh.
You can’t see them unlearning the good habits of the last 20 years.
The Glenties and Fintown, the rural end of the Inniskeel parish, are at their furthest points almost 14 miles apart.
Top to bottom the population is around 1,600.
It comes in waves. They’ve had a great run of it lately but this year there were just four Naomh Conaill boys starting in the Comp, as they call the school.
Of 22 children born in the parish this year, there’s been just one boy.
The names have always been the names. Until 1992, Columba McDyer was the only Donegal man ever to have won an All-Ireland, playing with Cavan in the famous 1947 Polo Grounds final.
He’s a far-out connection of Brendan, an ageless servant of this team that keeps finding new ways to do the same thing.
McDyer gifted his old blue whistle to McGuinness when he was starting out coaching and that goes with the Donegal manager to this day.
He would manage alongside Corey in 2010 and then return quietly to play a big hand in the club’s 2022 success, laying the groundwork for his return to the Donegal job.
This is Martin Regan’s ninth season as Naomh Conaill manager.
The Comp has been his second home for years.
He and his wife Orla are both teachers in the school and both help coach the GAP basketball club that operates out of the gym.
Orla was a former Donegal footballer in her own right and has never known anything other than to be immersed in it. She’s still kicking ball with her native Kilcar, where her father John is a club legend.
If Martin is not at home, school or out on the bike, he’s at the club.
You suspect he could live his entire life within a mile-and-a-half of his front door, surrounded by the three pillars of rural Irish society.
The chapel is yards away at the head of the road. It’s a mile to the club, another half mile the other direction to the school.
He wasn’t supposed to take on the job when he did. Cathal Corey had been there alongside Jim McGuinness in 2010 when they won their second-ever county title, for which Regan was at midfield.
Regan had been coaching teams under his father’s wing from he was no age. Martin sr, a Mayo native, was in charge of the club’s first ever minor A championship winning team in 2003 and then their second in 2004.
His daughter Crona was Donegal county secretary by the age of 22. Martin jr was coaching at an age grade pretty much from the minute he was overage to play in it. He had won two minor titles and four U21s when Corey asked him to join up for the 2015 season.
Then Corey had to pull out and, although Regan brought him back in for that year’s championship, the Glenties man was the manager.
At just 31, his back problems were not insignificant but wouldn’t have stopped him either if it wasn’t for stepping straight into the Bainisteoir bib.
He tried to get away at the end of 2021, stepping down then, but was coaxed back and has remained coaxed.
In his nine years, Naomh Conaill have played in eight Donegal finals, winning five of them. Through his teaching colleague Shay Murrin, Derry city native Michael McLaughlin, former Donegal star Barry Dunnion and Jim McGuinness himself, Regan has never been shy of surrounding himself with coaching talent.
But Regan’s arm of influence extends far beyond two hours on the field a couple of nights a week.
His house is a community hub, the door open to all-comers.
When Covid hit, the clubhouse consisted of a gym the entire length of the upstairs. Regan pulled the players and local tradesmen together and drove them to partition half of it off for a function room, while replacing the old gym with state-of-the-art equipment.
A year after that, he spearheaded their fundraising draw, organising 100-odd ticket sellers into teams, planning their routes and arranging with contacts in every club the breadth of Ulster that would show them which houses to hit.
In the era of outside managers, three of the last four standing in the province are managed by insiders.
Martin Regan is not yet 40. Five county titles, three final defeats, two minors, four U21s.
Maybe the next plaque they put up in the Glenties ought to be to him.
