McCann: On Mickey Harte

The mob-handed hysteria against Joe Brolly for his comments on the way Mickey Harte has Tyrone playing football would be laughable were it not for the dark side.

Harte’s supporters took special exception to Joe responding to Sean Cavanagh’s foul on Monaghan’s Conor McManus in the all-Ireland quarter final with the observation that, “He’s a brilliant footballer but you can forget about Sean Cavanagh as a man.”
Such was the ferocity of reaction that Joe apologised for the remark, explaining that he hadn’t meant to disparage Cavanagh’s character but to condemn the character projected by his behaviour on the field.
It’s understandable the Harte camp should deplore any elision of off-field activities with events on the pitch – a process which might prompt debate on Harte’s use of his GAA status to support causes which have nothing to do with football.
At Derry Crown Court last February, as reported here, Harte supplied a shining character reference for a man who had admitted a disgusting sexual assault on a woman and then throwing her out of a van into a ditch semi-dressed and unconscious. Men on their way to work who found her hours later thought that they had stumbled on a dead body.
Presenting the character-reference, defence barrister Brian McCartney emphasised Harte’s revered status as a GAA icon. Judge Piers Grant cited this testimonial when imposing sentence of 30 months, 15 suspended. The immediate response of Eileen Calder of the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre was to describe the outcome as “just awful.”
In March, Harte spoke on platforms calling for action against the Marie Stopes clinic – recently established in Belfast offering non-surgical abortions up to nine weeks, entirely within the law. He urged Stormont politicians to “put aside normal party political differences” and vote to close the clinic down.
Harte had already been a main speaker at major ‘pro-life’ rallies, invariably introduced with reference to his GAA role.
Four years ago, Harte presided at the launch of a book by a Patrick McChrystal, Who’s At The Centre Of Your Marriage, The Pill Or Jesus Christ?, arguing that condoms spread sexually-transmitted diseases and that abstinence is the most effective and only moral means of family planning.
At the book launch in the Europa in Belfast, Harte declared that, “It’s not trendy or popular to talk about contraception and question its use but I think Patrick presents the argument in a powerful and sensible manner… Ireland has lost a lot of its family values and basic life principles over the last few decades and this is a good time to introduce some very important questions. Irish society could do with a move back to what are seen as old-fashioned values and morals.”
I say nothing of Harte’s panegyric on a platform in Cavan to “a great GAA family”, the Quinns.
Harte, then, readily uses the prestige accruing from his GAA involvement for purposes far outside the ambit of the game. This entitles us in turn to include a number of extraneous factors in any assessment of his influence on football – his special pleading on behalf of a sex abuser; his campaign to close a facility offering a legal medical service to women; his endorsement of a book telling lies about contraception and pleading for a return to the days of squinting windows, Magdalene laundries and clerical rapists roaming the land; his extolling of individuals whose greed and financial sleight-of-hand helped plunge the country into penury.
He may or may not be a brilliant manager, but you can forget about Mickey Harte as a man.

Philip Chevron has always been the sort of fellow who would give you the shirt off his back. I know because he did. It was on one of those nights there used to be in Bloom’s Hotel in Temple Bar, 3am and the bar staff flat out in a relaxed sort of way and wall-to-wall musos, winos, hacks and intellectuals discussing philosophy to beat the band. It must have been after a Pogues or a Moving Hearts gig or the launch of an album or something along those lines. I was ensconced in a corner with John Ryan, Robbie Brennan, Terry O’Neill and suchlike when Philip came ambling past, lean and lithe in that T-shirt with the Pogues all in neat-arranged array in tilted, slouchy James Joyce hats and, right in the middle, James Joyce in a tilted, slouchy hat.
Hey, man (we used to talk like that), I said, adding that (my son) Luke had been saying just the other day that that must be the best band T-shirt ever. A while later, Philip drifted back, wearing a jumper, the T shirt bunched in his hand, which he tossed across the table, with a big smile and a stern warning, “Remember to give it to Luke.”
It was discovered in 2007 that Philip had cancer. The following year, he seemed to have recovered. He joined the Pogues on their 2008 US tour, sang his own great song ‘Thousands Are Sailing’ at every gig. But three months ago, the band’s website announced that the cancer was back and this time was lethal.
I am hoping to make it down to Dublin for the tribute gig at the Olympia. It’s the right order of things. You tell the man how great he is and how much he’s loved and by so many, and then he dies. Not the other way round.