Armagh's Madden show the power of community

By John Harrington

The importance of GAA clubs to their local communities is more often seen during times of grief than of victory.

There are only so many competitions to be won in any given year so the sense of unity brought by success on the pitch can be a rare experience.

Death, sadly, is an annual event, and quite often it’s the local GAA club that takes the lead when providing practical and emotional support to those who have been bereaved.

The GAA is as much about community and family as it is sport so when a club loses one of their own there’s a real sense of collective grief and a natural outpouring of empathy that draws everyone together even closer.

Madden in Armagh know this only too well.

The tragic deaths of Patrick and Ciera Grimley and Ciara McElvanna in a car accident two years ago fused their already close-knit community all the tighter.

The Grimley and McElvanna families are stalwarts of Madden Raparees and at a time of utter shock and devastation their fellow club members did all in their power to rally around them.

The shadow cast by that loss will never truly lift, but a community that was devastated by grief two years ago now has something to smile about together after the club’s maiden Armagh SFC success.

Patrick Grimley’s brothers Niall and Liam are members of the team and Ciara’s husband Kevin is part of the management and the thought that those two families have gotten to experience something good after suffering something so bad means a lot ot everyone in the community.

“I think that there's definitely a part of that for us living in the community and knowing that feeling of pure desolation of two years ago this week and to bring it back to pure happiness, just the extreme of those two things,” says Madden Raparees Chairperson, Brendan Vallely.

“I remember chatting to our team manager Mark Harte at Patrick and Ciera's first anniversary mass, the local community centre is across from the chapel and we were walking down the hill for a cup of tea afterwards and he said he just noticed the demeanour of everybody.

“Shoulders were down, there was nobody smiling, everybody was of the same thought that this should not have happened and look where we are now and he said he just felt he needed to bring a smile back to this community.

“Him and Adrian (O'Donnell) and his squad have certainly done that in the past few weeks.”

The joy of Madden’s victory over Cullyhanna in the Armagh SFC Final is of course tinged by sadness that Patrick and Ciera Grimley and Ciara McElvanna are not around to share in it.

Patrick was Madden club secretary when he died and the zeal with which he raised standards in the club is one of the reasons why they are now county champions.

“I am club chairman but I know that Patrick, God rest him, would be chairman right now if he was still here and that tragic accident on the fourth of November hadn't happened because he was the driving force behind moving us on as a club, ably supported by his great wife Ciera,” says Vallely.

“Patrick was the sort of fella who if he rang you to ask you something, he didn't want the answer in two weeks.

“He wanted it that night or certainly at the latest the next day. He didn't believe in 'this might happen'. 'This will happen', was his attitude. He took on fundraising for the club just two years ago and completed that just prior to the accident. It was an amazing success for us, raising almost £400,000 in a draw and he was totally behind that.

“That night in the club when he announced the figure it was as if he'd just won the lotto. He was just so proud of everybody's hard work. He was so proud that he was involved in it. He was so proud that he'd got this passion back into his club because he'd played in his younger years and then he'd stopped playing and getting involved.

“But then he started commentating with Armagh TV and he got the bug back again. He was just loving life and he was using every ounce of energy he had to put back into Madden.

“He moved this club on at a speed that a lot of us would have found it hard to keep up with.

“There's a lot of people involved that he got involved in the club, got involved in the community. Without his outlook on where we could take this club, we may not have had Mark Harte and Adrian O'Donnell involved. Sometimes all those little things are the things that get you across the line.

“Would he be happy today? Listen, there would have been nobody happier in Madden than him, Ciera, and Ciara.”

Ciara McElvanna's husband Kevin isn’t just a member of the Madden senior management team, he’s also the club’s Coaching Officer and as such has also had a transformative impact on the club.

“In the same way that, from an administrative side of things, Patrick brought people with him, Kevvie would have brought in coaches that are ex-players with us,” says Vallely.

“We have ex-players coaching at under 6, under 8, under 10, under 12, under 14, all because of Kevin McElvanna. I firmly believe because he put that passion there and everybody could see what he was looking for and what was needed.

“He's definitely put out there where he wanted our underage to go to and everybody's rowed in behind him and it's working extremely well for us.

“If I had to ask our surrounding clubs 6-8 weeks ago what is the one thing that you would take from Madden, I'd imagine they'd say it was our underage coaching and set up.

“Over the last number of years it has just improved drastically and that's definitely in no small measure down to Kevvie McElvanna.”

It’s this combination of meticulous organisation combined with a total buy-in from their local community that has allowed Madden Rapparees to punch considerably above their weight.

They’re a small, rural parish around four miles outside Armagh city on the road to Monaghan with a population of little more than 200, so winning a county senior championship is an incredible achievement.

It’s not a complete shock, though. Madden have been building steadily for a few years now and are a great example for all small clubs that you can achieve great things if you believe in yourself.

“It's something that has been brewing for a long time,” says Vallely. “Some of these guys probably would have won an intermediate in 2013 and the younger guys would have won an under-16 and an under-20 championship before so it didn't really faze them the same way as previous players would have been fazed by playing Clann Eireann or Crossmaglen or Killeavy or whatever.

“These group of lads now, particularly the younger players on the team, you know, the 22, 23-year-olds, they would have played at a fairly high level right through their underage career.

“So a lot of this work has been done, it just didn't happen overnight. With all due respects to Mark and Adrian and they would say the same themselves, it's people before them that are at underage level and at the primary school that have done fantastic work to get us to this position.

“You always believe that you could do it, but you always have that wee thing in the back of your mind saying, no, Madden doesn't win this thing. We haven't been there for 27 years, why should we win it? But as we went on through the season, it just got greater belief.

“We had three starters who got bad injuries this year during the league campaign and they weren't playing. That galvanised us as well. Then our two county boys, Darragh (McMullen) and Niall (Grimley), coming back into the fold after the county was over, it helped us immensely.”

They might have been quietly confident going into the county final against Cullyhanna, but to win the county final in the style they did was beyond even the most optimistic Madden person’s expectations.

How did it feel when the final whistle blew and Madden got their hands on the Gerry Fagan Cup for the first time in the club’s history?

“It was just a buzz that I just can't explain to you,” say Vallely. “I read somewhere during the week when Mark Harte said that he just couldn't put into words the feeling of it. It is something that's very difficult to put into words how amazing it was to really get over the line.

“Even the feeling this week of knowing that you're going into the first round of the Ulster championship now is amazing. It's brilliant. It's brilliant to be involved and it's brilliant to be part of it.

“The feeling of goodwill towards us and the feeling in the community here and people that belong to here but don't live here anymore that come back for the semi-final and the final, it just surpassed anything I thought it would ever be.

“I have no doubt, absolutely no doubt, that this will give other clubs of equal stature to us a lot of inspiration. They'll say if Madden can do it, we can do it and I'm not just saying in Armagh.

“There'll be other clubs in different places and it has been the underdog year in a lot of Championships.

“What we have to do now we have to build on it. We can't sit on our laurels and say we've won it now, that's it. There's still an under 12 going out to train again starting next year wanting to be in Madden's senior team and what we have to continue to do is to build and build and build because we hope this is just the start and that it will feed right down through the line with us that people will want to go and push themselves that extra wee bit.

“When you get these moments you enjoy them. When you've got something, you want to hold on to it.”

For all they have been through, everyone in the community of Madden deserves every bit of joy that comes their way, most especially the Grimley and McElvanna families.