Forces to be reckoned with

By the time Warrenpoint's Sean McNulty was starting to attract the attention of some of the football cognoscenti within Down, he was young - still just 16 - but a place on the county minor team seemed like the next step.

The templates that were set down with that minor team of 1977 were to serve the county well over the next 20 years and McNulty is proud to have been part of it.

"There was great comradeship and camaraderie among the team. When you have players like John Toner, Ned Toner from Castlewellan, big Pat Donnan who was the Down goalkeeper for many years after that, Adrian McCaulfield, Paddy O'Rourke, who was the Down captain and lifted the Sam Maguire in Croke Park."

This team of all the talents ambled through the early part of the season, easily taking the Ulster minor league and then the minor provincial championship. The first day in Croke Park saw the challenge of Mayo calmly brushed aside and, on September 25th, McNulty and the rest of the Down team faced Meath in the AllIreland minor final of 1977. The stage was set.

Down won easily, scoring 2-6 in the process and conceding only four points. But this was a win that was about much more than just an early autumn afternoon in Croke Park.

An All-Ireland title was a badge that could be worn for the rest of their lives by those who had helped win it, and it represented their entry into the great shared football folk history of Down football. McNulty had become part of the proud tradition and that was something which could never be taken away from him. No matter what happened in the future.

In the years since, McNulty has had ample opportunity to ponder the motivation that underpinned his decision to leave behind everything he had known in his life and join the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Even now, Catholics make up less than 10 per cent of the policing force, but, back in 1982 when the Troubles were at their height, the recruitment of Catholics into the RUC had slowed to a barely quantifiable trickle.

McNulty could not have made a career choice more out of tune with the nationalist community into which he had been born and had lived for the previous 20 years. However, as with his life-long affinity with the GAA, the ties had been forged, and the desire to be part of the police force had been there for as long as he could remember.

"The seeds had been sown from a very early age because we lived next door to a policeman and his wife would have looked after us when we were kids.

"I'm talking about from a very early age - five or six. But it wasn't a thing that you discussed openly around Warrenpoint, that you were going to join the police. Especially coming from a very nationalist background and being heavily involved in Gaelic football."

The reasons against joining were stacked up heavily against him. Primarily, there were the security considerations. In 1982, the year Sean became a policeman, 112 people were killed in Northern Ireland, among them 12 RUC officers.

Personal safety became a monotonous feature of the regimentation of daily life; there was a persistent fear of attack. Joining the RUC meant becoming part of a grouping under continuous siege.

Beyond that, there was the extent to which a man from McNulty's background made himself a social pariah in his own community by joining the police force. In the small town of Warrenpoint the decision by the All-Ireland medal winner soon became public knowledge.

"Oh yeah. When you left home to join the police it wasn't something that could be kept quiet. Everybody knew within a month. You just disappeared and people got talking when you weren't down the pub for a pint on a Friday or Saturday night. In a small community like Warrenpoint, it didn't take long for word to get about."

He did try to keep up to date with Warrenpoint's progress back at home, but the gap was already unbridgeable. Despite living less than an hour away, McNulty would not and could not go back. The prospect of his going to see the club play on a regular basis receded with every passing day.

"I would have gone to the very odd one, but maybe only three or four games over the last 10 years. I would be able to follow the club team by reading the reports in the paper. They were relegated and now they're back up again. . . ."

The sentence tails off because what remains unsaid is the hardest part of all to come to terms with - it all happened without him. The 1991 All-Ireland campaign was the toughest.

Down's captain for the year was the half back Paddy O'Rourke, a team-mate from the 1977 minor winning team. It was impossible not to make the connection and, just for a few seconds, wonder about what might have been.

Sean followed Down's progress through the Ulster Championship and even managed to make it to the Ulster final against Donegal. "The 1991 All-Ireland final was a very emotional occasion for me. Paddy O'Rourke, of course, was the captain, and he had played with me in 1977.

"It was great to see him there, but I had work commitments and couldn't get the day off no matter how hard I tried. It was the one day in the year I looked for off. But that was it."

He busied himself through that September afternoon and managed to finish his shift early. The sole aim then was to get to see some of the game. "I got home and then went to a local pub to watch it. The crack was ninety. It was unbelievable and it was a long evening.

"It was a very Gaelic-orientated pub and everybody knew who I was and what I was. But it was like: `Oh, come in, come in, they've just started.' Unfortunately, the licensing laws at the time didn't permit Sunday drinking, but nobody was any the wiser."

That engagement with the game and the whole occasion, even at a distance, was important to McNulty. It was about belonging and experiencing his own little part of that shared cultural event. By the time 1994 and Down's second All-Ireland title of the decade came along, there were no problems with shifts, and he was at both the All-Ireland semi-final and the final.

With their titles, the Down players had cut a swathe through 30 years of perceived wisdom about the inadequacies of Ulster counties when it came to the All-Ireland series.

Neighbours and rivals were emboldened by the team's exploits, and All-Irelands for Donegal and Derry in 1992 and 1993 were examples of their ability to surf that wave of success.

By the time Tyrone took its place in the 1995 All-Ireland final, McNulty was stationed in the town of Coalisland in the eastern part of the county. Change was in the air on so many fronts and he had already begun to dip his toes tentatively into the GAA waters again.

There was something that kept enticing him back. "I had served in Coalisland for six years. And there were Sunday afternoons when I'd be on duty and pull up and watch a match.

"It was the talk of the town for weeks, that Sean McNulty had pulled a police car into the grounds of the GAA club and watched a match. Quite a few people who I'd got to know in Coalisland through the GAA circles said: `Did I see you at the match on Sunday?' I just said they had and that I had just called down to see how it was going."

It is a fantastic image - an unmarked RUC car parked in the grounds of the GAA club in a town like Coalisland, with its well-documented history of republican activity, and inside an All-Ireland medal winner straining out through the window to watch the game unfolding.

Sean McNulty has a young family of his own now, and his enduring desire to immerse himself in the GAA burns as brightly as ever. With change seemingly on the way, that goal is closer now than it ever has been and he is excited at the prospect and even looks forward to introducing his own son to everything he left behind.

"I'd love to see him playing Gaelic football. And hopefully, if things progress, I'll push him on into playing for the school and then for the club.

"A few years ago it would have been very difficult for somebody like me to take kids to the GAA club and then collect them again.

"But now things are going the right way and you can relax a bit more and plan for things like that." Sean McNulty is looking forward to that future. The past is a different country.