They’re burning the tricolour in Tyrone. As the man quoted at the end of Seanín Graham’s report from the Moygashel bonfire on Thursday night trumped, “This is all part of our culture.”
And though the week of The Twelfth comes and goes across the six counties every year, it feels as though there’s something particularly ghoulish about it this time around.
As ever, we are blissfully detached from it all down here. There’s an extreme dissonance, a sense of two planets whipping past each other without noticing. In Dublin this weekend, it’s All-Ireland semi-final time. The tribes are gathering, from Kerry and Meath and Donegal. And from Tyrone.
Moygashel is a small village just outside Dungannon. Four miles to the north is Edendork, home of Niall Morgan, Conn Kilpatrick and Darren McCurry. Drive another five minutes and you’re in Coalisland, where Pádraig Hampsey, Michael McKernan and Niall Devlin grew up. In all, 13 of Tyrone’s match day 26 are from GAA clubs within a 15-mile radius of Moygashel.
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Their bonfire this year has caught wider attention not because of the tricolour – that’s de rigueur – but because of the 12 dark-faced mannequins in a makeshift dinghy on top. Burn the symbol of the taigs, burn the immigrants in effigy. “This is all part of our culture.”
And normally, you’d be inclined to leave them at it. Irish people in the north have, in the main, long since made their own accommodations with this carry-on. Ignore. Go about your week. Head away somewhere and do your own thing.
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For a lot of Tyrone people, Croke Park is this weekend’s somewhere. More of them will come than might otherwise have made the trip. Tyrone have been involved in plenty of games played for high stakes in high summer down the years. But an All-Ireland semi-final in Croke Park on the 12th of July? Never happened before.
Will it matter on the field? Probably not. Certainly, Kerry won’t quail at the sight of a bigger crowd coming down from the north. But if Tyrone are going to pull off an upset, they’re going to need all the stubbornness and persistence they can muster. Living cheek by jowl with people who delight in burning tricolours tends to foster such qualities in abundance.
More tangibly, Michael McKernan’s return to the panel could be significant. Whether Tyrone selector Colm McCullagh was pulling the old switcheroo during the week when he said McKernan was very unlikely to make it will only become clear if and when he appears. But there’s no question Tyrone could do with him.
As it stands, the threats in the Kerry forward line probably outnumber the Tyrone bodies needed for matchups. Hampsey on David Clifford, possibly Peter Teague on Seánie O’Shea. A fully-fit McKernan might be a candidate for Paudie Clifford, as well as posing a threat going the other way. But the shoulder injury that had him walking off against Cavan in wincing pain was only a month ago. How ready can he be?
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Being roundly dismissed will, naturally enough, suit Tyrone. They can reasonably argue that they’re arriving in the last four more battle-hardened than Kerry. They’ve played four Division One teams, Kerry have only played one. They’ve beaten Dublin in Croke Park and Donegal in Ballybofey. It’s only four weeks since Kerry lost to Meath in Tullamore.
We all presume that none of these things amount to a ball of wax once the ball is thrown in but the memory of last year’s semi-finals is still there, nagging away. Jack O’Connor and Jim McGuinness came in afterwards and pondered aloud why their teams had been so flat down the stretch.
Maybe the win over Armagh puts to rest any notion that Kerry are too lightly raced. Or maybe everyone is reading way too much into a 13-minute spell where everything went right. It was a stunning display of power and skill, the best of what the new game has to offer. But it was also the first time all year that Kerry had come with a wet sail. It’s not a given that they’ll repeat it.
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Kerry nailed 11 out of 14 of Ethan Rafferty’s kick-outs in that killer period – what happens if Morgan flips those numbers? What if Tyrone, flinty and grouchy and sick of being ignored, establish some midfield dominance and feed McCurry and Darragh Canavan inside? What if Peter Harte and Mattie Donnelly refuse to let this be their last game in Croke Park? There could be defiance in them yet.
The other game this weekend looks a more straightforward kind of deal. Donegal’s summer has contained everything – Meath on Sunday will be their 10th game of the championship, with extra-time in the Ulster final thrown in for good measure. They’ve played four Division One teams and only lost to Tyrone. The one thing they will not worry about is being road-tested.
Maybe the most ominous thing about Donegal’s second half against Monaghan is that they didn’t change very much to turn a seven-point deficit into a six-point win. They just did Plan A better, faster, more Donegal-ier. It was the same against Louth in the preliminary quarter-final. Combine the second halves of their last two games and they’ve outscored the opposition by 2-31 to 0-10. It’s hard to see that roll stopping here.
But then, it’s precisely that kind of airy dismissal that has made Meath the story of the championship. They are the only unbeaten team in Sam Maguire competition, despite having been the underdogs in each of the four games they’ve played. They’ve played three Division One teams since April and beaten them all.
And still nobody gives them a prayer. Maybe that says more about us than it does about them. Either way, they’ll turn up and give Donegal their bellyful.
On both days, we’ll watch and wonder what’s going to happen. We’ll bake in the sun and we’ll shield our eyes with match programmes. We’ll give out to the ref and roar at the linesman and scream and yap and b***h and moan. We might shake hands when it’s over and we might not. But we’ll head back the road, ready for the next one.
It’s like the man said. This is all part of our culture.
