A century of history behind Anglo-Celt Cup

It was at a meeting of the Ulster GAA Council 100 years ago this November that the Anglo-Celt Cup was first presented. Interestingly, while its eponymous title is very well-established now and was used at the time, a trawl through the newspaper archives shows that it wasn’t until decades later that the name, the Anglo-Celt Cup, passed into common usage.

The original was handed over in November of 1925 in Conlon’s Gaelic Hotel, Clones. A piece about its inception, carried on the front page of this newspaper, naturally, quoted at length from officials, including the secretary of the Ulster Council, BC Fay from Belturbet, who was close friends with John F. O’Hanlon, Managing Editor of the newspaper.

“The Secretary said that in accordance with his promise, the Editor of the Anglo-Celt had presented the Council with a beautiful silver cup, which he had had specially manufactured, for competition in senior football in the Ulster Council fixtures,” the article noted.

“The gift was very generous and was of most handsome design, and it was a trophy which should be highly prized by the Gaels of Ulster. That was the first cup of the kind presented to that Council, but it was not the first presentation that had been made by The Anglo-Celt, who in the early stages of the GAA, 20 years ago, presented another silver cup (finally won out by the Drumlane Sons of O’Connell), and a few years ago presented that Council with a valuable set of medals.”

(I wonder, by the by, what ever became of that cup won by the Sons of O’Connell.)

The delegates at the meeting, to a man, praised The Anglo-Celt for their contribution to the promotion and development of the association, with the secretary commenting that “with regard to what the Celt had done and was doing amongst the Gaels of Cavan, it only required to be in touch with the office of that paper to be fully aware of the work”.

It was added that “he might say that the success of the Gaelic movement in Cavan was largely due to the great influence spread and maintained by the Celt.”

Fittingly given its links to the newspaper, a motion was passed at the meeting to belatedly present the cup to the Cavan senior team, who were champions of Ulster earlier that year.

The original trophy was in usage up until 1962, with Cavan’s own Jim McDonnell the last captain to receive it. The following year, Down’s George Lavery became the first captain to be presented with the new cup – which is still in existence – and, in 1964, McDonnell was again the Cavan captain when the county claimed it for the first time.

That beautiful trophy is still in existence and, if it could talk, what stories it would tell.

For my generation, 1997 will never be forgotten, with Stephen King, Cavan’s winning captain, uttering the immortal lines, “The Anglo-Celt Cup is coming home” as he concluded his speech. I clearly remember, on returning to school in St Pat’s that September, writing an essay in Irish which began with the line, “Tá an Corn Anglo-Celt ag teacht abhaile!”.

By then, Cavan had been beaten in the All-Ireland semi-final by champions-in-waiting Kerry. The day before the game, an interview with King, penned by renowned wordsmith Vincent Hogan, appeared in the Irish Independent, with Stephen touching on the history of the famous hunk of silver.

“Across the town this week, all bunting and slogans have been directed at one hero,” wrote Hogan, who visited Killeshandra and noted the presence of a giant poster outside the Shamrock Bar, emblazoned with the question ‘Where’s Brolly when King reigns?’!

“Daily life,” wrote Hogan, “is now energised by pride in a neighbour’s climb.” Cavan had done something notable and the trophy was the material signifier of that.

“A few of us were chatting about this the other day. About how lads who were 12-year-olds when we last won Ulster in ’69 are 40-year-olds today,” King was quoted.

“There would be a huge percentage of our people who had never seen the Anglo-Celt Cup brought home. All you could hear before we won it was of the great players of the past. And, no question, they were history-makers. Great people.

“But you have to evolve from that. They can’t go out and win anything for you now.”

Each county has their own tales related to the famous cup. When Tyrone won it for the first time in 1957, their 19-year-old captain Jody O’Neill carried it down the town to the Creighton Hotel, at the bottom of Fermanagh Street.

There he met his father and the old man’s friends.

“There was an archway underneath the hotel and there were hay bales,” O’Neill recalled in an interview for the GAA’s Oral History project some years ago.

“My father was there with a group of Coalisland people and I brought the cup down and of course they wanted to take a drink out of it.

“And one of the boys said to me ‘come on, Jody, you have to take a drink’. I looked over at my father and he said ‘whatever you like son’. I didn’t take it...”

Another tale I like was recounted by Declan Coyle, full-forward on the winning Cavan team in 1969.

“Paddy Maguire had a taxi. He took me home from Casement along with Tom Lynch,” wrote Coyle.

“We pulled up outside the Farnham Hotel on the main street. I opened the boot of the car to take out the bags with the boots and the togs. I lifted out the famous Anglo-Celt Cup. Paddy said: “Leave it back in the boot and I’ll drop it up to Ray Carolan’s during the week.”

“The street was empty. Not a sinner out. After all, it was only the Ulster final, and you were expected to win that. What did you expect? A welcome home? Crowds? They tell me it was different in 1997 but then this was 1969.

“A man had walked on the moon. We had Woodstock. And we had the Anglo-Celt Cup back home where it belonged. I sat into Tom’s Volkswagen Beetle and we headed up through Kilnaleck and Mountnugent, then up to Dungimmon.”

Unfortunately, given the year that’s in it, it won’t be Padraig Faulkner or Ciaran Brady who get their hands on the cup this year; Ray Galligan won’t be re-acquainted with a friend he met for the first time in a deserted stadium in the winter of 2020.

Instead, it will be Paddy McBrearty or Aidan Forker who will be presented with the greatest prize in Ulster football on Saturday week – and good luck to them. Who, though, could have imagined back in the distant past that a generous donation from a diehard GAA man would resonate, as the Anglo-Celt Cup has, into its second century?