East Belfast GAA will keep thriving, regardless of the bomb threats and the hate

For East Belfast GAA, this is a crunch weekend. The men’s footballers can qualify for the quarterfinals of the Down junior championship if they get a result against Dromara this evening. The women are heavy underdogs against Clonduff, but never say never. And even though the camogie team who were junior champions in 2022 have found the road rockier at intermediate, they know that if they beat Atticall at home on Sunday, there’s life in the season yet.

That’s their club this weekend. Same as it’s your club this weekend. Same as it’s everyone’s club in early September. The championship funnel is narrowing everywhere you look and East Belfast’s various teams want to whoosh through it just as badly as everyone else. But try as they might, they can’t just face into the weekend like they’re other people. Not when this keeps happening:

A suspicious object found near playing fields on the outskirts of east Belfast was an elaborate hoax, police have said. Two schools and two nurseries on the Church Road were closed on Tuesday morning for security reasons.

BBC News NI understands the object was found at Henry Jones playing fields. East Belfast Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is among clubs which use the council-run sports facilities. It is the second time this year there has been a security alert there. – News report, BBC Northern Ireland, Tuesday

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Dave McGreevy is officially the club’s co-founder and unofficially whatever else you want to call him. He’s not the club spokesman but he’s not not that either. He is – as he has found, to his annoyance – the owner of the phone everybody rings when East Belfast are mentioned in the news.

Take earlier this year as an example. In the run-up to the local elections in May, a Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) candidate named Anne Smyth made a name for herself by unloading a scattergun blast of various nonsenses about the GAA in general and the east Belfast club in particular. They were trying to persuade people in the area to learn Irish, apparently. Or Gaelic, as she called it. She branded the club and the GAA as sectarian and criticised the association for what she called its “fixation with violent republicanism, both historically and currently”.

“For three days after that,” McGreevy says, “my phone didn’t stop ringing with journalists looking to talk about it. And I was going, ‘Why are you ringing me? Ring her!’ None of them rang the candidate to ask her why she was making up stuff about the club. Instead they rang me and I was going, ‘This is nothing to do with me!’

“Then there was a radio show and the item they ran after the bomb threat was basically asking, ‘Is it okay to play Gaelic games in east Belfast?’ Stuff like that is dangerous. When stuff like that happens, that’s where the threats come from.

Since we’ve been going there have been so many friendships formed, a good few relationships. There have been babies born to people who met in the club, there have been weddings

—  Dave McGreevy

“We got our nets burnt last week, we had a bomb threat this week – that’s where that stuff stems from. It’s not okay to talk about violence during the Troubles and mention us in the same breath. That’s nothing to do with us. That’s where that hate comes from. It’s normalised hate. That’s what’s going on.”

Let’s rewind, just for a moment. East Belfast GAA was a figary McGreevy dreamed up one Sunday morning during lockdown. He’d lived away in London in his 20s – his claim to GAA fame is that he was cornerback on the London side who made the 2013 Connacht final – but now that he was back home he wondered was there any way to set up a GAA club in east Belfast. A predominantly Protestant, certainly unionist and in some cases loyalist hotbed, it hadn’t been home to a GAA club in half a century.

That was in May 2020. McGreevy and his friend Richard Maguire were thinking they might get a few under-12 teams going to begin with and take it from there. Three years later, they’re one of the biggest GAA clubs in Ulster with just short of 450 adult members and up to 200 kids. They’re affiliated to the Down county board and though they have to fight and scrap for everything they get, the one thing they’re not short on is goodwill in their local area.

“It’s a very welcoming community,” McGreevy says of East Belfast. “It’s a really progressive place. The vast majority of people you come across are 100 per cent. We’re all the same. We’ve always been authentic. From the inception of the club, we’ve known what we’re about and nothing will change there. We’re about bringing people together, being inclusive and being together.”

The club was set up with one non-negotiable – everything was inclusive and everyone was welcome. Nobody’s background mattered, nobody’s playing history or ability mattered. If you wanted to come along and try your hand, the door was open. The club motto is written in three languages – English, Irish and Scots-Irish. Together, Le Chéile, Thegither.

“Since we’ve been going there have been so many friendships formed, a good few relationships. There have been babies born to people who met in the club, there have been weddings. I always say if the marriage doesn’t work out, it’s not the club’s fault! Don’t blame me! But that’s humans. You bring people together and it actually turns out they have a lot in common.”

We’ve always chatted away to the police ever since we got the pipe bomb in our first season. That’s a crazy sentence to come out with, isn’t it?

—  Dave McGreevy

Over the past year, they’ve done some outreach with asylum seekers, starting off with half a dozen kids and seeing that number swell to about 40 now. The kids’ mothers, mostly of Somalian and Sudanese background, had this habit in the beginning of bringing food along with them to the Saturday morning training sessions for everyone to share.

“We told them they didn’t have to do this,” McGreevy says, “But they wanted to. And it was delicious – baklava and stuff like that. They kept coming with it anyway. So there’s a social enterprise programme in Belfast called YALLAA. We partner with them over various things and we got food hygiene certificates for the mothers who were bringing this food and got them English language courses.

[ ‘Even putting GAA and east Belfast together in the same sentence - what it spoke to me was a future of hope and change’ ]

“So whenever they are allowed to work after their asylum has been processed, they will already have these food hygiene certificates and some of the language to get them going. That’s just through them coming along to bring their kids to a sport that they’ve never heard of. That’s the big picture stuff that we try to do. That’s what a GAA club is.”

But, as he points out, no GAA club anywhere, North or South, has to put up with the sort of thing that happened to them this week. The bomb threat on Tuesday turned out to be a hoax but that’s neither here nor there. Two schools and a nursery had to be shut down for the day, hundreds of parents in the area had to take the day off work. More than that, the existential dread that goes along with this stuff is just so pointless and wearing.

“If this was a club in any other part of the country, in the South, there’d be uproar over it,” McGreevey says. “And rightly so. No other GAA club has to worry about this stuff.

“We were sitting there on Tuesday waiting around at lunchtime for the police to call us so we could ask is it okay for our kids to train in the evening? Is it okay for our ladies to have their training session on the pitch? It’s a joke, some of that kind of stuff. No one else has to worry about that kind of nonsense.

“The very annoying [thing] when something happens here is that every time we’re talked about, we’re mentioned in the context of violence and the Troubles. I’m 37 and I’d say I’m nearly the oldest member of the club, if not the oldest. There’s certainly not many people older than me.

“And yet I was only barely a teenager when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. All that stuff is nothing to do with me. I wasn’t even alive when all the stuff involving violence and everything else happened. But even so, we’re talked about as if it has anything to do with us.

“For whatever reason, it’s always this time of year too. And that’s championship time for us! This stuff happens and a lot of people don’t understand. This isn’t going to put points over the bar for us, you know? You have to shut it out.

“It’s not going to help put players on the pitch and it’s not going to help book pitches for the underage kids and it’s going to get transfers done. It’s kind of irrelevant to us. We need to run a GAA club here and we can’t really get involved in nonsense.”

What can the club do only keep on keeping on? The people who phone in the bomb threats and burn the nets might not number more than a dozen altogether. It’s hard for anyone to argue that they have a constituency either. The threats against East Belfast GAA have been roundly condemned across the political spectrum. Anne Smyth, the TUV councillor who rattled her sabre in their direction back in May, got trounced in those local elections. The arc of GAA history is long and it bends towards community.

[ Security alert affecting East Belfast GAA is act of ‘small minority who want to return to the Northern Ireland of the 1970s’ ]

“We’ve always chatted away to the police ever since we got the pipe bomb in our first season. That’s a crazy sentence to come out with, isn’t it? But no, ever since then, we’ve kept in touch with them,” McGreevy says.

“We have a meeting coming up now and they’re going to talk about heightened security around the pitch and everything. It’s depressing to have to do it.”

McGreevy’s wife is expecting their second child next month. When the bomb threat came in on Tuesday and they were waiting to hear back from the police, she asked him – for the first time since this all began – if it wasn’t all getting a bit dangerous. Imagine having to think about that just because you set up a sports club.

But today in Drumaness at 5pm, the ball will go in the air and they’ll try to make the junior quarterfinals.

And for 70 minutes, none of it will matter a damn.