Mark Conway speaks in Orange Hall

[Norf Tyrone]

I can't say I know the man personally, but would see myself very much among the people who'd consider themselves grassroot.

I got the admit that anything I read from the fella, or when I listen to him he'd resonate opinions that I would share (In the main). He's also one of them fellas that when he speaks, people listen.

[ONeill]

Whilst I'd have reservations about his stance on the grants issue, he does seem to be a man with vision beyond the norm. But there'll never be a Kildress man as President!

[orangeman]

And he represents grass roots thinking.

He most certainly DOES NOT.Maybe in the land of the dreary steeples but not around here anyway.

Why do you say that ?.

[Franko]

Is anybody else totally fed up hearing the word 'grassroots'

[ardmhachaabu]

bc1, I agree with every single word you said.  If his speaking with them brings us another small step along the way of reconciliation after all the hurt that has been wrought on each side of the divide then it can only be a good thing

[Beir Bua]

It is my understanding after talking to an employee of the RCN that Mark Conway was asked to attend the event in his professional capacity as a Consultant on rural issues and the media focused on his GAA background, while the event was held in an orange hall it was not organised by the Orange order, it was coordinated by the Rural Community Network as part of an EU funding programme. I heard him speak on Radio Ulster and I think his comments were very good, I was particularly pleased to hear him highlight that the GAA has the confidence and the foresight to talk to anyone about anything. I also know that Conway is very close to Ulster GAA, however he was not at this event as their representative or talking to anyone on behalf of the Association.

The Ulster Council has been involved in meeting Loyalist Community Groups, Unionist Representatives and other "non traditional" GAA people for years now, they employ someone full time to undertake this work and are rightly praised for it. I think we are all starting to move beyond issues like this.

[antoinse]

And he represents grass roots thinking.

He most certainly DOES NOT.Maybe in the land of the dreary steeples but not around here anyway.

Why do you say that ?.

Mark Conway seems to be a man of tremendous vision, unfortunately for Roscommon his vision would not be appreciated in a land where everyone thinks they are God  - how sad. Maybe one day they will take the wool from their eyes but I don't expect it will be anyday soon.

It is not often a man gives so much of himself for the cause of the GAA and expects nothing in return. He offers his opinion in a fair and balance manner. He may be old school but God help with those of the new school that are so egotistigal. I watch with interest his comments and although I may not agree with them all I see the merits when one considers the direction he is coming from.

[Rossfan]

unfortunately for Roscommon his vision would not be appreciated in a land where everyone thinks they are God  - how sad.

Where did this outrageous statement come from
We all now we are better than most but we still bow to God around here.
Mr Conway is entitled to his opinion but to say he represents "gassroots thinking" is claiming a bit too much.
Not all the "grassroots" think the GAA President/Ard Stiúrthóir and everybody in HQ is out of step or that Inter County players are some sort of disease that has to be put down.
There are loads of people all over the Country who give time to GAA activities for little or no return but we dont hear them  constantly whining and giving out about the whole rest of the GAA world.
Good luck to Mr Conway in his talking to Orangemen but I'm afraid the progressive Gaels of this fair and great County will agree to differ with most of his viewson the GAA and its varios activities etc.

[Rois]

Good luck to Mr Conway in his talking to Orangemen but I'm afraid the progressive Gaels of this fair and great County will agree to differ with most of his viewson the GAA and its varios activities etc.

I have a feeling that you haven't a clue what you're talking about with regard to Mark Conway if you think he isn't progressive. 

Have a wee read at this article.  It was in the Sunday Independent before the Tyrone/Antrim match this year.  There's a lot of Tyrone stuff in it that you have to wade through first though. 
I just don't think you're giving the man justice.

Fields of Dreams

By John O'Brien
Sunday May 23 2010
IT'S late in the evening when Mickey Harte ascends the podium and faces his audience. He has come to Kelly's Inn, a few miles from his native town of Ballygawley, as he does every summer, to dispense wisdom and mark the beginning of another championship summer. He remembers the first time he performed this task. It was in Cookstown in 2003. "Seven years," he muses. Where has all the time gone?"
The ritual goes like this. He names his team to play Antrim on Sunday and then faces a grilling from the crowded room. Except Harte would expect a tougher interrogation from a class of junior infants. He is among disciples here. They cheer him onto the stage, applaud every answer he gives and cheer him off when he is finished. Images of Tyrone footballers stare down from the walls. "Buy into the feeling," the message goes. The winning feeling.
So he tells them what they need to hear. If the team to play Antrim doesn't feature any of the squad's rising starlets, that is simply a measure of the depth of talent available. He tells them that it will be a long season, that there will be days down the road when the likes of Peter Harte and Kyle Coney might well be in the first 15 and the warmth of their applause indicates they are happy with that.
There is concern about Brian Dooher, who hasn't played since last August, but Harte assuages their fears. If you'd been around Dooher as long as the Tyrone manager, you'd have the same faith in him too. At training the veteran warrior has been unassailable. The same old Brian Dooher they have always known and cherished. "If he stays injury-free," Harte says, "you'll still see the best of him. You couldn't not have him on."
He talks about more things. About the mood in the camp. About their collective will to drive forward for another summer. The ease with which they've coped with the setback of relegation. Sometimes it takes a setback to bring the best out of people. In Tyrone, they know that better than most. He'd rather have been relegated and faced stern questions than to have survived and resisted asking them. He invites them to think about next year's challenge "when we enter Division 2 as All-Ireland champions." He has them in the palm of his hand now.
And you see his impish side too. He teases them to ask him about the controversial new handpass rule and they duly oblige. "People have said it's a joke but that's too simplistic," he says. "It isn't a joke. It's too serious to be a joke." He is off on a Mickey rant now, blowing steam off as the summer heat begins to rise. Five minutes and counting. And whatever else, it is fabulously entertaining.
He is utterly perplexed by the new rule and wonders why it is being foisted upon players and managers. He sees it as a ploy by unnamed faces in Croke Park to do away with the handpass entirely. He suspects a conspiracy from "headquarters or somewhere else" to infiltrate the national press and create the impression that the handpass is destroying the game. He believes this view needs to be challenged.
"I don't think that is the case at all," he says. "Some people like to live in the past. We kind of feel better in the present."
* * * * *
HARTE is wrong, though. Tyrone football has been surfing the crest of a wave for the past decade but that isn't what has drawn hundreds of supporters to tonight's gathering. Instead they have come for an update on the centre of excellence which is unfolding tidily a couple of hundred yards up the road in Garvaghey and due for completion in 2013. They are here to catch a glimpse of a bright future.
It is a future as much informed by the harshness of the past as by the wealth of the glorious present. If you know the troubled history of the GAA and Ulster's complex role within it, you'll understand that it could be no other way. "The past shapes us and makes us what we are," says Mark Conway. "It's hugely important. That's why we delve heavily into it."
A couple of years ago, Conway came to national prominence through his opposition to the GPA grants scheme but he is better known around these parts as the articulate voice behind Club Tyrone, the visionary wing of the county board that is driving the Garvaghey Project and consolidating the future of Tyrone football. Because of the vehemence of his protests, it was fashionable to portray Conway as a typical, backward-looking Ulster Gael, a depiction at odds with the esteem in which he is held in his native county.
"It's about having a balance between the past and present," he says. "Looking back to look ahead. Lots of people think the Tyrones of this world are consumed by the past. We're the backwoods people. We're the Taliban. The dinosaurs and all of that. But in terms of being innovative we like to think Tyrone and other Ulster counties lead the line in so many ways."
He remembers a day in August, 1997. The Tyrone minors, led by Harte, played Kerry in an All-Ireland semi-final replay at Parnell Park. It was the day of Diana Spencer's funeral. A good day, he thought, to be getting out of the north. Tyrone won an epic encounter 0-23 to 0-21 and they left Dublin feeling good about life. If ever a crop of players would deliver glory, they sensed, it was going to be this one.
To trace the root of that success, though, they would go back much further. To 1967, perhaps. That was the year Art McRory began to put shape at minor and vocational level. "Art ploughed a lonely furrow for years," says former Tyrone corner-back and Club Tyrone member Jackie Duffy. "He started it all really. He kept it going when there wasn't much happening."
Conway had grown up hearing stories about the Tyrone team that had won back-to-back Ulster titles in the late 1950s, but a decade then passed without success at any level. There were no structures in place to nurture and sustain it. In the 1970s, they won six Ulster minor titles and that fed a senior team that was good enough to rattle Kerry in the 1986 All-Ireland final. "We had great players," says Conway, "just not enough of them."
Mentally, they were too frail. For Conway, the vilification of Paddy Russell after the 1995 All-Ireland final merely disguised weaknesses that were brutally exposed by Meath in the semi-final a year later. He shudders at the memory. Tyrone sauntered down to Croke Park, treating Sean Boylan's team as a routine stepping stone on the way to the title that had wrongly been denied them a year earlier. Meath crushed them physically and spiritually.
Meath 2-15, Tyrone 0-12. The nightmare is still seared into their brains. Conway remembers reading John O'Keeffe's column in the Irish Times the following day and one line stood out. "It will take some character for Tyrone to recover from this," O'Keeffe wrote. Conway had no trouble with the sentiments. O'Keeffe was merely raising the question they needed to ask themselves.
"There was a lot of fuss after the game about Meath's physical approach but the problem was ourselves. We'd go down the road, get a beating and come back whinging about it. It was the Free Staters, the referee, everybody against us. We'd regroup, go back down a few years later and the same thing again. So that winter we thought long and hard about it. Are we going to sit about whinging or will we try and do something about it?"
A year earlier, Conway and a few like-minded Tyrone GAA men like Jimmy Treacy, Hugh McAleer and Patsy Forbes had discussed the need for a fundraising initiative and the Millennium Project was born. The plan was to find 200 people willing to pay £500 a year, raising a total of £500,000 before the turn of the century. The idea predated the loss to Meath but it was that setback that gave them a sense of urgency and purpose. As it turned out, it took them until 2001 to meet their target by which time the Millennium Project had segued into Club Tyrone.
They don't claim to have been ahead of their time. For years, Eugene McKenna had been flagging the need for a fundraising body but his pleas had fallen on deaf ears. McKenna would often tell the story about how the Tyrone players had been out trying to raise funds two days before the 1986 All-Ireland final. That simply had to stop. "You see here tonight," says Conway. "You won't see any players. Their job is to play football. Ours is to raise money."
In all, there are 16 people listed as committee members of Club Tyrone. Officially, they are the PR and marketing wing of the county board. They raise money and the board decides how it is spent. It isn't an elected committee and selects its members carefully so that they each bring different skills to the gathering. Conway is an expert in planning and development. Hugh McAleer, the chair, is a chartered accountant. Niall Laird, says Conway, is the best graphic designer in Ireland. Adrian Colton is a Queen's Counsel barrister. Jackie Duffy was head of one of the north's biggest construction groups. Patsy Forbes had a huge hand in the development of Derry's centre of excellence in Owenbeg. And so on.
"Most of the people are hand-picked," says Conway. "We identify a wee gap that needs to be filled somewhere. We'll find someone with a particular skill and we'll approach them. But the one thing that binds us together is that we're all Gaels and all interested in Tyrone GAA and putting our shoulder to the wheel for the cause. We all have that in common."
Far from the cliché of the GAA talking shop, Club Tyrone is run with streamlined efficiency. They meet once a month in Cookstown where targets are set and various tasks delegated. "It's not a place where things drag on for hours and nothing gets done," says Niall Laird. "You have your homework done before you start. Everybody knows what they are about. I don't think I've ever been to a meeting that lasted more than two hours."
Conway estimates they have in the region of 500 paid-up members. Through Club Tyrone, they have raised £1.2m towards the £6.7m cost of the Garvaghey Project and have committed to raising a further £1.5m over the next five years. This year they set a target of attracting 50 private patrons to the cause, each willing to stump up £5,000 for a free polo shirt and their name engraved on the wall of the new building when it comes to light. Already they have 85.
The surest sign of success is that others want to know how they are doing it. Once every year they meet their equivalent body in Derry to swap stories and share ideas. A while back, a delegation from Carlow visited them and were given a tour of the Garvaghey site. Last month, Laird and Peter Canavan were invited to Meath to make a presentation on Club Tyrone and how it had benefited Tyrone football.
They are happy to share. Just as they too are keen to draw inspiration from whatever source they can. Conway points to the 2009 Club Tyrone brochure and the quotation on the cover, a line borrowed from Ted Kennedy's concession speech when he lost the Democratic nomination race in 1980: the work goes on, the cause endures. "That's us, you see. That's the GAA. So we'll steal it."
Ultimately, he sums it up in one word: legacy. To explain, he takes you back to the past again. It is 1929. The GAA is still slowly recovering after the turbulence of the Civil War years but, in Tyrone, it barely has a pulse. To help reduce a crippling financial deficit, Mick Coney, the county secretary, has organised a huge sports day in Ardboe. The day is spoiled by incessant rain and the deficit increases. Two years earlier, a trophy had been commissioned for the county championship but they don't have the money to pay for it. The GAA in Tyrone is virtually bankrupt.
And yet it survived. Through tireless struggle men like Coney had managed to keep its heart beating. Years later, Conway would understand what Art McRory meant when he said the 2003 All-Ireland was down to "70 years of people pushing against the wheel, often in adversity." If they achieved so much when the GAA was almost extinct, what did they have to do now when it was flush with health?
"The legacy these lads left us," Conway explains. "There's an obligation on us: men, women, all of us. We need to be doing as a minimum the same as they done. We all buy into that. That's what makes us so strong."
* * * * *
THE double-decker bus climbs the steep hill and turns sharply right into a large open space that looks out charmingly over miles of lush Tyrone countryside. On the top deck, Liam Neilis, the Garvaghey project chairman, churns out the figures. Forty-three acres bought from four different landowners at a cost of £775,000. There will be six floodlit pitches and a 27,000 square-foot building that will house an administrative unit as well as nine dressing-rooms.
The sign on the gate says Tyrone centre of excellence, but they balk at the term. It hints at a sense of elitism they want to avoid. "It'll be an excellent centre," says Neilis. They see it as a solution to the serious lack of schools' pitches in the county and an engine to drive all GAA activity in Tyrone, from the senior football team to hurling, Scór and, even, rounders. All ages and all levels catered for.
It is a lightning rod for their dreams. Neilis explains how the building will be constructed in the shape of a Celtic T, a throwback to the Fort of Tullyhogue, the crowning seat of the O'Neill clan. Conway tells about the Reverend William Forbes Marshall, a poet and Presbyterian minister from Sixmilecross.
Marshall famously once staged a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream on the BBC in which all the actors mimicked Tyrone accents. The English spoken in Shakespeare's time was supposedly close to that spoken in Tyrone. "So door was dure and floor was flure and so on."
And he is thinking now of a balmy midsummer's day when Garvaghey is up and running when, as a diversion from the football, they re-enact Marshall's production. A little thing, he thinks. A small way of marking a significant cultural event of the past and reaching out to another community at the same time. He has a head full of little plans and schemes.
It is late in the night now. Harte has left the stage and the crowd begins to filter away. Conway leaves you with a date: September 28, 2013. A Saturday, he says, exactly 10 years to the day Cormac McAnallen lifted the Sam Maguire in Croke Park. In his mind's eye, he sees it clearly: the 10th anniversary of that historic day being marked by the official opening of Garvaghey. Past and future coalescing in perfect symmetry.
And maybe, he wonders, it's all just Tyrone arrogance. He isn't sure, but he's happy for the world to think it.
- John O'Brien

[ONeill]

That's a good read.

Some times you forget the hammerings.

[new devil]

Whilst I'd have reservations about his stance on the grants issue, he does seem to be a man with vision beyond the norm. But there'll never be a Kildress man as President!

Why?