The Triumph of Hope

“There is joy in great sadness” ~ Eilís Ní Chaiside

138 days after the death of her father, that’s how the young Slaughtneil woman summed up her feelings on winning the All-Ireland senior camogie championship.

Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Eilís Ní Chaiside drifted down the left wing under the Hogan Stand to strike a point off her left side, and in so doing secured her club’s place in history as the first Derry team to win the senior camogie crown.

It’s precisely at times like this that the true universality of sport becomes clear. Without sadness, happiness loses its magic, without losing, winning suffers a similar fate.

Teams, like communities and families, experience sadness or loss together. It is how they choose to deal with the lows that defines them, and in many cases propels them forward towards the highs.

Take the Slaughtneil footballers, for example. With the club founded in 1953, it took a further 16 years to reach the county final. Having lost out in 1969 it would be a further 35 years before they eventually got their hands on the John McLaughlin Cup. That’s not the end of the story though, as what looked like a golden era was put on ice for a further decade as the near misses piled up.

Numbers are easy to commit to a page. 16 years, 35 years, 10 years; all just periods of time but also encompassing entire lives lived, started and ended.

The Derry poet, Seamus Heaney always espoused the notion of ‘Keeping Going’. He saw it as an essential ingredient to the makeup of any individual, saying:

“Getting started, keeping going, getting started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.”

The point about sport is that at its very core is hope. Hope for the future, both individual and collective.

What Eilís Ní Chaiside and her team-mates achieved on Sunday was another triumph of hope. What many of the girls will be feeling this week – the elation, the satisfaction, the dreamlike confusion, almost – is something that many older members of the club will share, possibly in a quieter, more understated way. Slaughtneil adult camogie teams spent 19 years in division one of the Derry league before they ever won a single championship. Today they’re the best team in Ireland.

The hope maintained by people like Thomas Cassidy over his lifetime has now spread throughout his community. It’s gone throughout Ulster and it’s reached the four corners of Ireland where it has been warmly received.

Shortly before five o’clock on Sunday the Derry GAA Facebook page published a photo of Slaughtneil’s corner forward Mary Kelly celebrating a goal. It announced Slaughtneil as All-Ireland champions. Twenty four hours later the photo has been seen by over 100,000 people with comments of congratulations to the girls from clubs all over Ireland. And there’s one very good reason for this, which we’ll leave once again to Heaney to explain:

“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”

Congratulations Eilís, congratulations all.

Aoibhneas!