The Eskaheen rebirth of Waterside Gaelic Games

You could barely get into Eddie Nash’s front room at Eskaheen View for chairs. Top of the Hill has always been that type of community. They looked after their own. Still do. If someone needs something, help is never more than a door or two away.

The chairs in question were for an impromptu meeting. Just 72 hours before that Wednesday evening in January, most of Eskaheen View’s visitors had been present in Piggery Ridge, Creggan for Sean Dolan’s GAC’s 2001 Annual General Meeting. Yet by the time the guests were knocking on Eddie’s front door, they were no longer members of a GAA club.

“It was a difference of opinion over certain aspects of the direction the club was going in and a few of us decided to walk away from it,” explains Paddy McNaught, one of the men knocking at Eddie Nash’s Eskaheen View home, “It was Theo Duffy who suggested we go over to the hurling club on the Waterside, Doire Trasna, as it was then.”

Twenty years ago Gaelic footballers from Top of the Hill had a decision to make. They played with either Ardmore or Dolan’s, themselves a Waterside club until the club moved to Creggan decades earlier. Paddy and his brother, Thomas ‘Hoss’ McNaught, Brian McKenna and Joe McWilliams were among the men who regularly crossed the Foyle in search of their footballing fix but the fall out from that AGM though was about to change that.

A tempestuous AGM got even more heated when it became clear there would be no consensus among members about how best to take the club forward and with passions running high, a process was set in motion that would see the Waterside once again among the county’s footballing destinations.

“We had a mini-bus and were taking boys over to Dolan’s every week,” explains Paddy, “There was a Dolan’s Under 12 team that won the North Derry championship years ago and there was hardly a Cityside youngster in it, they were all Top of the Hill.

“We classed ourselves as the ‘child minders’ up at the Bishop’s Field in Creggan,” laughs Brian McKenna in agreement, “Every Saturday morning all the weans from the Waterside and the Creggan came and we trained them.

“Ardmore also had a really good side, winning an ‘A’ North Derry minor championship with a team made up mostly of boys from around Top of the Hill, boys like Paddy Tracey, Sean Paul Nash, Dee McGinley, Gary Fleming and a few others,” adds Paddy.

The majority of Dolan’s Waterside contingent left the club following that acrimonious AGM, alongside the likes of John McChrystal, and whatever the rights and wrongs of it, they now found themselves without a club and facing at least a year without football. There was a chink of light however, in the form of Waterside hurling club, Doire Trasna which had been set up seven years earlier in 1994 at the behest of a group of former St. Brecan’s High School students and was then being run by Paul Simpson and Alan Nash, son of Eddie.

Back to Eskaheen View then.

Paddy: “We went to Eddie, who had been running the underage set-up with Dolan’s at the time, to ask Paul up to his house. Mickey Carlin and about half a dozen of us went over the see him. Paul might have been a little shell shocked by the whole thing which probably came out of the blue for him but everyone was singing from the one hymn sheet. For us to play football the following year, we couldn’t start up a new team, so we approached Paul and Alan.”

Joe: “We all met in Eddie’s living room. There were chairs dotted everywhere, I’ve no idea where they came from but I think by the end of that night we had elected a committee.”

Paddy: “As Paul was the Chairman of Doire Trasna, we end up adding the ‘Na Piarsaigh’ to the club name and applied to enter a football team in the Derry leagues.”

Brian: “Trasna were already registered with the county as a club so it made things much easier in terms. With Trasna being affiliated, it meant we didn’t have many of the normal obstacles.”

Barely three days on from the fall-out of Piggery Ridge, the Waterside had a new GAA club, or at least a reincarnated one. But that was the easy bit. Establishing the club among its community and in the county was a different matter.

“We were really only intending to play underage in the beginning but I think we had to have a senior team so the club could have voting rights,” recalls Hoss McNaught.

Paddy: “We had a few fairly useful minors - players like Eoghan Carlin, Cormac Carlin, Vinny Morrison, Dee Starrett, Barry and Ciaran McKenna, David Ogilby - boys who could play senior football.”

Joe: “That first year we were basically just fielding. At that time there was no rule about age which helped us through that first year.”

Brian: “A lot of those boys were 14 and 15 and they gave as good as they got, playing senior football. We had other boys like Sean McGlinchey, Dee Gallagher, good, experienced players, who the young lads played round.”

Paddy: “It took us two or three years to get settled and those boys deserve credit for getting us through those first years.”

Settle Trasna did though and if, off-the-field, the battle for a home would take until this year to resolve itself, there were no such problems on it, albeit after a bumpy few months.

“The first match we ever played was against Limavady, up in Limavady, and we lost 28-1,” adds Hoss, “That was our first senior league game. We were just thrown together.”

Joe: “I think the first home match was against Lissan.”

Brian: “I can remember a certain man slapping one of his own players for whining but it wasn’t that first match.” (laughs!)

Hoss: “It was a different game in those days (smirking) . . .”

Paddy: “I always remember the first match we didn’t lose, it was against Doire Colmcille. We ‘drew’. We’d actually won by a point but the referee, and I’ll not name names (laughing) called a draw. He had a page with ‘Trasna’ at the top of one side and ‘Colmcille’ written on the other. We knew we’d won by a point so weren’t happy and said, ‘Let’s see your scores, then.’ He counted down our list first and we had seven points. He then went over to the other side and went, ‘One.....’

“Hold on, hold on I said, that’s the ‘i’ from Colmcille! (laughing). We had to take a draw! That was in our second year and our first ever point.”

While the senior team had to wait a season for their first point, there was no such problems for a talented minor side who, under the management of Brian McKenna, were soon putting Trasna on the map.

“Our first real success was 2002-2003 when Brian’s team won the North Derry Minor Championship. That was only our second year. They were an excellent team,” states Hoss.

Brian: “I remember we played Dolan’s and there is a great photo, Paul Loughrey and our Ciaran (McKenna), and the two of them and knocking lumps out of each other. His mother always says, ‘That’s terrible, two cousins fighting’. I’m just glad she didn’t see the rest of the game!” (laughing)

Joe: “We beat Drumsurn in that final in Limavady. That minor team formed the basis of our senior team for the next 10 years. I remember before a couple of those minor championship games bringing big Brian McGilligan in to talk to the boys. They loved that. I think it was against Craigbane down in Glack.”

Brian: “Do you see those young fellas, you had to give it to them. They were a dedicated bunch. I always knew if we were winning or close with 10 minutes to go that we’d win the game. They were flying fit. Our minor team was our senior team, basically. Most of them then played right through for 10 years.”

Joe: “We won the Junior League after about four or five years, in 2006. Hoss was in charge.”

Brian: “But I built the team for him.” (laughing!)

Paddy: “Remember me and Kevin Houston went up to Under 15 county training and Richard Ferris was taking it. We stood and watched what Richard did and then came back to Hoss and he said, ‘We’ll do what Richard was doing.’

Hoss: “The boys were throwing up and everything but they were up at the old St. Brecan’s school pitches in snow a foot deep with a generator and lights doing it. And we had 25-30 out.”

Brian: “Then, once training was over we had to bolt to the car because the boys would destroyed us with snowballs. If you got caught they let you have it for all the training!”

Hoss: “But we were still getting beat in the last five or 10 minutes of matches at that stage so we took the decision that if you played soccer on a Saturday or Sunday you had to be sub. We weren’t telling the boys not to play soccer, that was up to them, but the first time we played a match with that rule in place was the first time we beat Dolan’s. It was down at the Complex, in the Neal Carlin Cup, I think we beat them 0-6 to 0-1.”

“We won our first three matches at Intermediate level the next season too after promotion. The boys s**t themselves (laughs), they thought they were going to go up to seniors (laughing). I remember Micheal (McNaught) saying, ‘I’m going no further up that f***ing league! (everyone laughing).

Further trophies have followed, most notably under Paul Simpson in 2011 and 2017 when the Junior Championship was won, while an Ulster Junior Club Final spot slipped agonisingly out of the grasp of the 2017 side.

And off the field too, the club has been winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the community in which it is now firmly rooted. Premier League soccer tops are being replaced by Doire Trasna tracksuits, t-shirts and training gear.

The next step is the opening of the club’s new home on Corrody Road which will be a fitting way to mark the club’s 20th anniversary this year.

“If you ask me, we are way ahead; way ahead of where we thought we’d be. I’m not sure if someone had told me that 20 years I would have believed it,” claims Hoss.

Brian: “I actually thought there was a stage when we were fit to go into Division One and then we just fell apart. I don’t know what happened. Then again I remember thinking we might have a pitch in five years!” (laughs)

“Once things return to normal as regards Covid, that new pitch will be huge for us. When young people have somewhere to come to on a Saturday morning, or an evening through the week, it gives them ownership of the club. That’s what I believe.

“It was hard for us and when you consider what, for example, that minor team of 2002, had to go through. Changing behind bushes, being dragged from one pitch to another, never knowing where the match was until the last minute.”

Paddy: “They could have been playing at St. Brecan’s, Prehen, the Sports Complex, Slaughtmanus, Ardmore, anywhere - for training and matches. Now, I’d say there are as many weans playing GAA as soccer.

“It’s great to see the sort of people who are now getting involved with the club. In those first days every single young lad playing was from Top of the Hill. There was 13 from the one class in St. Brecan’s on the one minor team at one stage.”

Joe: “It’s crazy now because you walk through the whole town and see boys and girls wearing Doire Trasna club gear.”

Paddy: “I was walking down Foyle embankment the other day with my Pearses jacket on when I saw another one coming toward me and I was thinking, ‘Who’s that?’ He must have been thinking the same but that shows how much the club is growing. Once you could have got almost every member into the one room.”

It’s been a remarkable two decades. Club membership is on a continual upward trajectory and the new pitch promises to be the single most important club event since that January evening back in 2001.

So what does the next 20 years promise?

“I don’t see why in 20 years time we can’t be where Coleraine are. Twenty years ago Coleraine were playing junior football,” claims Joe, a former County Board vice-chairman.

Paddy: “I remember Ardmore beating them in a Junior Championship final. Ten years later they were winning the senior championship. Coleraine have experienced a lot of the same problems as we have had and they’ve shown it can be done.”

Joe: “Coleraine came on leaps and bounds once they got their base and now we have ours, so it’s up to us.”

Hoss: “It’s an old saying but you need to breed Gaelic footballers. There are very few come to you at 16 to start playing. You have to bring them in early and the club has done that well in recent years but this new pitch will help us do it even better.

Brian: “I’m a great believer in having a club base. That brings the kids to the clubs and they are what help build your club. They have ownership.”

Joe: “We’ve been talking about the last 20 years and I can’t let this go without saying one thing. If it was not for these two here (gesturing at Hoss and Paddy McNaught), we wouldn’t be here. It’s a simple as that.”

Ambition and hard work fuels any club and there remains plenty of both for Na Piarsaigh Doire Trasna but one thing is certain, 20 years after Eskaheen View, the Gaelic footballers of the Waterside no longer have a decision to make. They have a home.