After we won the Ulster championship my daughter Cáit made a poster for me. She carefully cut some pictures of the team out of the local paper and glued them all together. And among the things she wrote on the poster was the line ‘All your hardwork paid off Dad.’

Simple. A daughter’s belief. Her commitment. Her love. A simple poster. Her awarenes & recognition of the work that had gone into a bit of success. And the simple response from her, to put it in writing. She knew because she tags along to training with me and does things like set out cones, and I give out to her and boss her about, but she loves it.

Every father loves his daughter. He worries about her, where she is, what she is doing. She will get away with things the boys in the house never would.

My daughter’s poster sits at eye level as I digest the news of Michaela McAreavey’s passing. Every Tyrone fan was well acquianted with her simple handwritten note to her dad, her encouragement probably an unexpected source of inspiration in 1997. Simple, innocent, burning with enthusiasm.

I thought of my hopes for my own daughters. And of Michaela and her husband John. What hopes and dreams did they have? I thought of my own honeymoon in South America looking forward to a life together. What if anything had happened either of us?

At training during the days and weeks after she died, I looked at our players. She was no older than some of them. Young, vibrant women, healthy, full of life, it just bursting out of them. It just shows you, you know not the day and the hour.

Mickey Harte’s achievements have been an inspiration to me over the last nine years. His approach introduced me to the likes of John Wooden and Pat Riley. His message to be your best and to respect difference in other people useful rules to follow. He is obviously a deeply spiritual man. He is also extremely competent in dealing with the dreaded media, the management of the new from the family’s perspective was impeccable to avoid intrusion.

Still, behind all the coverage lies a human tragedy for Mickey, Marion, John, Mark, Micheal and Mattie and the rest of the family circle. They have my total sympathy.

The simple image of Michaela’s rosary stuck in my mind and, like Cáit’s poster, a simple song sparked with additional poignancy.

Here’s a rosary, Count on every bead

With a prayer to keep, The hope you hold.

May God hold her in the palm of his hand. And may John her husband hold on to hope, counting on every bead as his wife would have wished.

In the last few days I’ve written a piece for the Omagh CBS Book, due in March. Was very honoured to be asked to contribute. Started a regular piece for the Irish Marketing Institute, submitted the other day.

Yesterday for fun I had a shot at the Creative Copy Challenge – they give you ten words and you’ve gotta write a piece. Good writing discipline and good fun. Not too difficult either. I would view at as an exercise in telling the story in as few words as possible but still retaining meaning. Comes out every Monday and Thursday, let’s see how that goes.

I wrote that piece about sport here a while back but I find the approach to sports funding here in the North highly frustrating, to put it mildly.

Another piece of writing I have to do that won’t be at all creative, not very interesting, quite important and probably depressing is my Annual Tax Return.

When the London Olympics were awarded there was much celebration among the British sporting fraternity. They told us that the award of the games would do wonders for sport across the four ‘home nations’ – the facilities developed as a result of the games would provide a legacy for future generation of sportsmen and women.

Aspirations would be raised – there would be role models in every area – aspiring to be Olympians. What nonsense.

The reality of Olympic sport as we know is a far cry from De Coubertin’s original Olympic spirit. He famously said: “Sport is part of every man and woman’s heritage and its absence can never be compensated for.”

In fact, the games are tainted irrevocably by doping and are bloated with commercialism. Each four year cycle is a celebration of rampant capitalism as much as a festival of sport. Fair enough, that is the world in which we live.

What of the impact on local sport in the North of Ireland of the award of the Olympic Games to London in 2012 and what that means for sport at grassroots level as opposed to the hype and spin coming from Lord Coe et al.

Clubs across the North, in all sports, rely upon Sport NI – formerly the Sports Council – for infrastructural funding supplemented by their own volunteer fundraising.

This money generated through the Sports Council Lottery Fund is administered on a competitive basis – clubs complete extensive paperwork making their case as best they can. This includes detail on levels of participation of males, females able-bodied and disabled athletes. It also required information on provision by the club or organisation across the ‘two communities’ and other en vogue elements such as commitment to targeting social need.

This funding is invaluable – Sports Council Lottery funding provided through their Building for Sport programme has allowed the development of some first class facilities in communities across the North. It helps local grassroots sport in a basic but practical and fundamental way and allows the army of volunteer coaches, players and administrators to pursue their chosen sport in good quality facilities. These people are Olympian in their ideals and approach in the true sense of the word.

To quote the founder of the modern Olympic movement: “The important thing in life is not to triumph but to compete.” And again: “Sport must be the heritage of all men and of all social classes.”

Sport NI revealed in 2006  that the current round of funding – closing date last January – would be the last for a period of time whilst they reviewed the funding mechanism. An army of volunteer organizations hurried to complete their submissions on time. To make a long story short, these submissions were considered and although many had merit as you would expect – reflective as they were of the enthusiasm and passion engendered by local sports activists – ALL, I repeat ALL bids were not funded because the money has been redirected for London 2012.

Subsequently a number of these bids were flagged through based on those organisations that were in a state of readiness and could complete large scale capital development within one calendar year. It is a testimony to the enterprising spirit of local sport that many groups did just that and stepped up to the plate, delivering, or over-delivering.

Pause to consider the implication of that outcome. The games which were supposed to provide infrastructure and a legacy had the exact opposite and detrimental effect on local sport. Rather than get new funding and facilities, grassroots sport is being denied the one existing infrastructural support programme that exists. The legacy of the games is more likely disillusionment and despair at the redirection of funds back across the Irish sea to an Olympics that frankly few people here will benefit from.

As part of the Olympic bid some funding is being developed for some key sports for example development of elite facilities for rowing, fencing or whatever. These are low participation sports.

The high participation sports like rugby, soccer, gaelic games and hockey which are subsidized by the efforts of amateurs will be hit. The fact is that over the years of the Troubles, sports teams were one of the means whereby young people were kept interested in some sort of community spirit and kept away from the anti-social activities which many of their peers fell into.

For these people, having subsidized sport and written a cheque for investment in the future through their dedication and commitment – to paraphrase Martin Luther King – government has returned the promissory note literally marked insufficient funds.

At this juncture in our history, when diabetes, obesity and heart disease are threats to society due to increasing sedentary lifestyles amongst our young people, our political representatives should be saying:

“Sport is a core value for. We will invest in it – we will make our 1.5 million people the healthiest in Europe by giving them the opportunities to access sport. We will invest more in this than any other country because having been bruised and battered for thirty years it is time to rehabilitate this society through a commitment for sport.”

There is a window of opportunity now, to say we wish to draw a line in the sand. It could be the Assembly’s ‘Ninety-nine’ call or whatever you want to call it – to borrow from the great Ulster rugby player Willie John McBride.

Rather than accept the mediocrity of having our funding withdrawn and compartmentalized on spurious grounds, I believe the sports organizations should come together in an organized way and say we will not accept having this funding withdrawn and furthermore we will not stop there – we want a commitment from the Assembly that they will make sport and health and wellness a real priority. Not through words but through practical support.

It requires an intelligent and structured approach, targeted at the right people. What is possible is a planned campaign of lobbying, engaging sport and stakeholders alike.

Roy Keane said when he left Saipan and an Ireland team that was accepting of mediocrity “Dead fish go with the flow.” That is the choice.

May Friel. A brave Donegal woman

When I was in my pre-school year, for practical reasons my parents farmed me out to live with my grandmother on the other side of Omagh.

She had recently been widowed, her and my grandfather Hugh Friel having moved to a new bungalow on the edge of the town. There she lived with her cat Rascal, a beautiful and friendly cat that she found in the garage and kept for many years.

Staying with my granny had a longlasting effect upon me.

Every morning we walked the distance to mass in town. I look at my own children now and realise that I must have deeved her head talking rubbish, playing with my toys.

She always said I was very good. I had reason to be – every day she would buy me one thing in the shop. I knew not to ask for anything else.

At the weekend I would be returned to my family where I called my mother granny and my other brothers ‘Jimmy’ – my uncle’s name.

It was an idyllic time and whilst I cannot recall many of the specifics with the passing of the years, it is shrouded in a warm glow of happiness.

When I started in primary one, I used to wait after school in my uncle’s pub. There I would hang around and talk to the men in the bar. I am sure looking back that the only men drinking in a bar at lunchtime would have been fairly hard core locals, yet here I was shooting the breeze with them.

I remember these guys lowering pints, half ‘uns, nicotine covered fingers toking on endless fags. In those days pubs didn’t have televisions so these guys sat at the bar. And drank. And drank.

I enjoyed dipping my finger into the spill trays below the beer taps. A toastie machine appeared in the bar, a total novelty. The smell of toasted ham sandwiches mingled in the fugue with smoke from Benson and Hedges, Regal and the occasional bit of pipe tobacco. Occasionally I might be bought a bag of crips, Golden Wonder Smokey Bacon stick in my mind and maybe a bottle of Coke.

I would happily play round the place, passing time until I was picked up by my dad or my granny or whoever. My particular friend was one old guy Maxi Chisum who must have been kind to me. It remains another happy memory.

As I moved through school I continued to visit my granny, staying over with her, keeping her company. She was the person who told me my father had had a heart attack and was in hospital, I arrived home from school to this particular piece of news. I didn’t realise its import at the time. It was Mrs McGale that told me he was dead but that is a story for another day, maybe never.

As I grew older my granny was a constant presence. I used to visit her every Saturday evening after dodging about the town with my mate Brogy. I would then walk back in to Saturday evening mass and on homewards. She used to make me delicious home made pizza with a soda bread base. It was awesome stuff.

At that time I would have been playing football and hurling and she always took an interest in what I was at. I didn’t know at the time that she often took clippings from the paper of reports of matches I played in, and kept them – we found these years later after she died.

As she got older and her health deteriorated a couple of times, she had some sort of mini stroke and had to come and live with us. Although her and my mother were as thick as thieves, after a short while in the same house horns would lock.

My granny was a stubborn woman, and she had her own way of doing things. Being told what to do by her daughter didn’t please her and nothing would do her only to get back to her own house, her own place that she knew and where she felt comfortable.

Her mind remained alert and although another stroke had taken its toll, she would often regale me with tales of living in Donegal and Derry in the early years of the twentieth century. She told me of travelling to Derry, and gunfire being directed at the train. Born in 1901, this was highly likely. She recounted how my grandfather had courted her in Derry and how they ended up in Omagh running the Military Arms pub.

My mother was surprised and perhaps a little wounded that I was hearing all these tales, stories that she had maybe not shared with anyone else.

Eventually a major stroke totally incapacitated her and she was permanently located in Ward 12 in the Tyrone County Hospital. It was full of all sorts of human debris, old people in various command of their faculties. What a place to end up.

Amazingly she staged a bit of a recovery but one side of her body was in a permanent spasm and she was paralysed and very severely incapacitated.

With great effort my mother got her out of the hospital to spend a few days over Christmas with us. I remember the glint in her eye when she grabbed a glass of wine that wasn’t hers at Christmas dinner. She was determined to enjoy things while she could. It was difficult to take her back to hospital but there was nothing else could be done. In my mother’s case she had retired the previous summer but had spent her first year of retirement looking after her ailing mother.

Transferred eventually to the General Hospital in Omagh, she seemed to lose heart. She would have known the General as the Workhouse, to a woman of her age and her vintage, whose own mother lived to the age of 99 and whose grandparents survived the Great Famine, it would have held a certain dread. It was there that I sensed her spirit start to dwindle. It coincided with my first year at University and after acting the candyman during the week I would return to visit the woman who had half reared me in her own gentle way.

In early June, she deteriorated badly and although I had visited, for some reason I had an irresistable calling urge to go and see her again. I called my friend Conor and asked him could he take me to the hospital, my mother already there. When I walked in she was there, lying in her hospital bed, behind the curtain, breathing in a shallow way, her eyes closed, unconscious. My mother said to me, maybe if you speak to her she will come around a bit.

Looking at her, I knew that was not something she would have wanted me to do. It was her time. Touching her hand, I said my own goodbye and let her go. I was happy to have been there to do that. I didn’t know what had drawn me to  the hospital, but something did. I quietly left and went home, my heart breaking. I knew it was only matter of time before she slipped away. My mother returned a short time later with the news.