Tighthead with open heart

Ireland v France: As Irish rugby enters new territory Keith Duggantalks to three Ulster rugby men about what the journey has meant to them.

It will come as no surprise to the political adversaries or the would-be assassins who eyeballed Ken Maginnis down the years to learn that, in the language of rugby, the Dungannon man delighted in the darker possibilities of playing at tighthead.

"My first game in the front row I hated. In the second match, I found there were ways I could hurt the fellow opposite me. And let's just say I made up for my lack of mobility in other ways."

And then Baron Maginnis or Big Ken - he is comfortable with any nomenclature - issues that booming familiar laugh that belongs somewhere between hearty and blood-curdling. In his political heyday, Maginnis was a ubiquitous and energetic figure on the Ulster political landscape, the bright, twinkling schoolmaster with the disposition of steel who educated by day and patrolled the treacherous back roads of his countryside through the nights of fear.

Since Maginnis ascended to the House of Lords, Northern Irish domestic politics has lost one of its most distinctive voices but although pushing 70, he has lost none of his vigour or the ex-front row man's comfort with his own girth. He responded enthusiastically to the invitation to discuss his lifelong passion for rugby. Peerage and retirement age have been unable to slow him and he literally lives life in the fast lane, still ironing out an interview location through mobile phone as we tear up the Westlink dual carriageway past the derelict Maze prison, 20 minutes apart on the edge of Belfast with the appointed hour fast approaching.

"I learned to drive fast," he chuckles when we eventually sat down in the Ulster Unionist Party headquarters, a comfortable, modern building enclosed with stark black fencing, just off the busy road where cars race towards the plush satellite town of Holywood in Co Down.

"I had a philosophy that if someone missed me with the first shot, I wouldn't be there for the second." He is remembering the days when his attendance at Ireland rugby internationals in Lansdowne Road would involve security escorts that became such a regular occurrence he eventually ended up friends with some of the gardaí assigned to drive with him.

"I drove my own car to Dublin but they escorted me. I always tell the Garda that they never had a decent car until they had to keep up with me in a Sierra or an Audi Quattro. I'd always say, 'Remember, ye were driving Ladas until I arrived'. And the people in the Garda, I must say, were very attentive. They even came to my rescue once when I left a batch of tickets sitting at home in Dungannon."

Depending on your politics, the all-island Ireland rugby team was either a glory or an abomination at the height of the Troubles in the North. Either way, it was something of a miracle that the island managed to produce a sporting entity which was a cause for celebration on both sides of Border, supported by Northern unionists and Southern nationalists with equal passion.

"Because I grew up within a rugby ethos that predated the Troubles, I never felt disloyal to Northern Ireland to go down and stand in Lansdowne Road when they were playing The Soldier's Song," Maginnis says now.

"I never felt it was disloyal to talk to Charlie Haughey, or whoever the Taoiseach might be. I saw those weekends in Dublin as a sort of an escape. And it meant that you talked with people - the Garda, politicians and business people and you got a sense of what they were. That sort of contact was great when you were surviving in a very difficult political world. Rugby provided that."

Maginnis makes no apologies for saying that he was, to a large extent, shaped by the gentleman's game. He was schooled in Dungannon Royal, earning a coveted place on the first XV and his colours, a permanent honour even if his fledgling career was plagued with a back injury that tormented him until he got corrective surgery at the age of 41.

After school he formed the front row for Stranmillis College and finished by captaining Dungannon Fourths at the age of 28. A partially crushed windpipe was his worst sporting injury. "Many people said it was the finest three days of my life because I couldn't speak."

He is still besotted with the Ireland team of Noel Henderson and Jack Kyle and reverts to schoolboy awe when he recalls the day Big Jimmy Nelson stepped on to the stage in the auditorium at the Royal, fresh off a jet plane and the Lions tour.

There were rugby genes in the Maginnis bloodline. George Maginnis captained Junior Ulster shortly before second World War. Maginnis retains a vivid and haunting childhood memory of "Ginger" playing in the front garden of the family house in Aughnacloy on what would prove to be his last furlough, punting a rugby ball into the glassy, untroubled Ulster skies, watched by his star-struck nephew.

"He was in the Royal Ulster Rifles and the Sixth Airborne and he got killed going into Normandy in 1944. He was 33 then. He had played outhalf and centre for Ulster."

When Maginnis talks about the Northern Ireland of his childhood, it is with wistfulness that seems at odds with a politician versed in the hard-boiled tautology of Stormont and Westminster. His grandfather Edward was a bespoke tailor and another glimmering, intrinsically Ulster image that has filtered down from childhood is of "all the men hand-sewing the suits at the huge tables in the shed."

He talks with unabashed romance of that simple era of a childhood dominated by scouting, rugby and the open countryside, the flashpoint sectarianism and violence of the coming decades not even a cloud on the horizon then.

"Northern Ireland was a wonderful place," he declares with feeling. "And it will never again be the place it was just after the second World War. Even with the unemployment and the hardship then, it was a decent place. Nobody would have got offended with a poster that said: Decent People. I lived with Catholics and Protestants and we gathered potatoes and threshed the corn. We did it together. We whispered about each other and went to different churches and played different games. And we were not integrated in the way we might be today but there was an understanding. There was a common morality."

Such longing for that disappeared Ulster, the Northern Ireland before the fall into irreversible violence, brings to mind some of the more recent poems by Séamus Heaney. Asked if he read the great Derry Nobel poet, Maginnis says he knew some of his work but not a great deal and declared himself more of a FW Marshall, Goldsmith and, in particular, a Robert Service man.

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun," he said, quoting easily from the first verse of The Cremation of Sam Mageebefore breezily correcting himself with: "My problem is that 20 years in politics have made me a philistine."

In any event, if Maginnis's Northern Irish childhood had been idyllic his later experiences would bring him into direct contact with the most extreme forces in a fractured society. There is no conceit in his observation: "For 12 years, I slept for four and a half hours a night. Ran my school, ran my business and ran my company in the Ulster Defence Regiment."

It is simply an affirmation of the fabled Ulster Protestant work ethic. His entry into politics in 1981 made him an obvious target for terrorists and he estimates there were 10 attempts on his life. The first came when a youngster pointed and fired a .45 revolver at him. Another close shave was when terrorists staked out his house with guns and a rocket launcher but eventually left in frustration. On a whim, Maginnis decided to enjoy "the lovely moonlit night by visiting my police stations down in Fermanagh." He didn't return home until after four.

In London, when police picked up two men on suspicion of perpetrating a bombing of Harrod's store, they found in the raided flat the blueprint of a plan to assassinate Maginnis outside Westminster. In retrospect, it seems as though he lived a charmed and perilous political life but he claims he never thought of it that way. And for illustration, conversation turns to the monochrome Northern Ireland of the 1950s and a raw Boxing Day rugby match playing for Dungannon in the Jack Kyle Cup. They were young and it was the height of the festive season, a night of dancing the promised treat at the end of an hour in the mud and cold. Maginnis saw a young man he knew, Eric Allen, buckle in a scrum that afternoon and not get up again.

"He died. He died a week later. It was desperately sad, just one of those terrible, unforgettable sporting accidents. But it never made me think twice about wanting to play the game. In that sense, it is like saying that when a comrade got shot or blown up, you thought twice about being a soldier. You just had a sense and a belief that it won't be you. Rugby is akin to soldiering in that way."

Maginnis is firmly wedded to the magnificence of the amateur ethos that prevailed in rugby until 10 years ago. He admits there is a kind of perversity to his preference for second team rugby over first because "that's where it really gets down and dirty."

His first allegiance is to the Dungannon club, where he made the time-honoured journey from redoubtable frontrow enforcer to club president. He has great affection for the memories of interminable bus journeys to Garryowen or Sunday's Well, or wherever, and regrets the decline of the All-Ireland League. The flash, new brutalism of the professional game impresses and bothers him.

"I am horrified by the extent to which it has become so physical. I considered myself a tough enough individual but I wouldn't last two minutes today. I have great admiration for those elite players. But to me, rugby is also about men like Davy Wisherd or big Jeremy Davidson, who will be off training the fourth team or first in Dungannon, week in, week out. Moving to professionalism left clubs hugely in debt and the IRFU have cut funding to the point where they are literally killing the small clubs. And that is a shame. Because rugby is character forming.

"It taught me how to rough it, to be part of a team and to believe in a cause. It was a game where what you saw you got. I watched the football World Cup and I could not believe that these skilful players were so egocentric, with their diving and squealing and preening and kissing. You don't get that in rugby. It is not that I am suggesting that rugby men are harder than in other sports. But they are more acclimatised to life."

If he has a rugby regret, it is that he quit playing when he did. His brothers-in-law played competitively until they reached their 60s. It was hard for Maginnis to contain his envy. But rugby continued to give him rich moments. He laughs hard as he remembers his first meeting with Pat Byrne, the former Garda commissioner, before an international at a hotel near Dublin airport. It was arranged through Mick Egan, a Special Branch man with whom Maginnis had become friendly. Maginnis knew Egan had been involved in a dangerous operation down in Kildare but was surprised when the mission came up in conversation again.

"Don't tell me you were there too?" Maginnis asked Byrne. "Was he there?" interrupted Egan. "Listen, Ken, put it this way. I was half way up the ladder. Pat here was at the fuckin' bottom holding the ladder. That's why he is chief superintendent today and I'm still a sergeant."

And Maginnis leans back into that booming laugh again before noting that Mick Egan was the very first person to send his congratulations after the 1998 Easter Agreement.

Talk turns to the forthcoming season and Croke Park. He believes he will attend some of the home matches there.

"I know Peter Quinn and he wouldn't have been my favourite person down the years but it is a real credit to him how they put that package together."

And he admits he would never allow it be said that Ken Maginnis wouldn't have the gumption to show a face on the Jones Road, the nationalist citadel where the Union Jacks and the flags of St George will fly in a few weeks' time. A gentle tapping begins on the door as Maginnis warms to the theme of beating England at rugby, always as sweet an elixir as a nip of brandy.

"Oh Lord, aye. I don't think that is a North-South thing. Anyone who is Irish wants to beat England. There is not much pleasure in it now because everyone does it. See, the pleasure is in beating them when they expect to win," he says with a knowing tap in the forehead. And for a second, it is unclear whether he is talking about rugby or politics. But there is no time for explanations. David Campbell, his party colleague, has appeared to usher them to the next in the interminable series of meetings and conferences that keep this complicated little patch of Ireland stable and halfway happy. He squeezes in just one more observation as he offers a vigorous handshake. "Aye, it's not as much fun now that we always expect Ireland to win.

"The only pleasure left now for an Ulster man," declares Ken Maginnis, Baron of Drumglass and Dungannon tighthead of yesteryear, "is to swear at the Munster Mafia."

It is based on creating a relationship of understanding between the communities. A few weekends ago, we organised a cycle which went up through the Shankill and down the Falls Road. It's a modest enough pursuit but would not have been possible a few years back.

Coming from a rugby background probably helped me to form friendships throughout Ireland. My upbringing was traditionally Ulster. My father was a policeman and prior to 1969 we regularly went to Arklow in the summer so we had a broad knowledge and appreciation of Ireland. My father served in the RUC until 1983, through some of the worst of the Troubles.

Sport was affected by sectarianism in the same way as almost every other aspect of life and society. That is one of the reasons the Irish rugby team was so important.

When I was playing, we didn't really discuss the Troubles very much. It was just a team. These were our team-mates and our friends. We went to play rugby. But I don't think people realised at the time there was a gesture involved in us standing for The Soldier's Songin those years.

When my Ulster and Ireland team-mates David Irwin, Nigel Carr and Philip Rainey got caught in the bomb blast that killed Lord Justice Maurice Gibson and his wife, Cecily, it received a lot of attention - 20 years ago this April. I knew Lord Gibson, a man I had a lot of respect for. But the boys were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and Nigel's rugby career was ended. I often thought whoever pressed that button simply didn't care about who was in proximity.

Things have improved considerably. Ulster winning the European Cup in 1999 was a very emotional day. I will never forget the "good luck" signs through Drogheda and Dundalk. For me, that was really strong evidence people were moving on.

There are examples of co-operation between sports across the North now. In Belfast, St Bridget's GAA club share their ground with rugby. The same is happening in Ballymena, and Jarlath Burns introduced rugby to his school, which would have been traditionally Gaelic.

Rugby was probably regarded as the unionist or Protestant sport but I think all clubs would give a kid from any background an equal welcome now.

I will be going to Croke Park. I was always curious but didn't feel it was right to go until there was an indication the ban . . . would be removed. So a friend got me a ticket for the 2002 All-Ireland football final when Armagh played Kerry. It was a great day out in an absolutely fantastic stadium. I think this weekend is going to be very special for everyone.

Trevor Ringland is a solicitor in Belfast. As UUP spokesperson on sport, he famously called on all Ulster people to support Tyrone in the 2005 All-Ireland final with the words, "Stand up for Ulstermen and stand up for Tyrone." He made his Ireland debut in 1981 and retired in 1988, having won 34 caps and scored nine tries.