CAVANMAN'S DIARY: MacIntyre, man of the land, is called ashore

Paul Fitzpatrick

Around the late 1990s or so, Tom MacIntyre spent some time living around Redhills and Ballyhaise. I know this only because he was a familiar sight when I was a teenager, walking the roads. “Tramped them in wind and rain,” as he’d say himself.
We often stopped and gave him a lift. I didn’t know who he was but I knew he was exotic, different. “He lives off the land, that lad,” someone told me once.
When I was 15, I was off school studying for the Junior Cert. The weather was beautiful. My cousin Cathal, next door, was studying for his, too.
When the parents were away, we hatched a plan. We packed up a few fishing rods and copper spoon baits, a couple of apples and, our prized treasure, two cans of beer, and off we went to Clara Lake, about a mile and half as the crow flies.
Arriving at the lough shore, we found a small rowing boat tethered to a post and decided we would take it out. Madness, when you think of it.
We rowed around the lake for a long time, trawling for pike, catching none. 
After a few hours of fruitless angling and supping the foul-tasting Miller, pretending in front of each other that we liked it, we realised that time had got away from us. Our mothers would soon be home.
It was nearing four o’clock as we furiously rowed towards the shore. We had no time to tie the boat up properly, no time to carry all the rods. We hid them, like an arms dump, in a grassy spot near the reeds and legged it up Rudden’s field, down past McGuinness’s, over the hill and home.
We made it, panting, just in time and, being 15, forgot all about the rods, most of which belonged to my brother. A few days later, he went to get them and found them, to repeat the old joke, just where we left them – gone!
It turned out that Tom had ambled down for a spot of fishing and found his little boat was dishevelled. The rope, which had fastened it to a post, wasn’t tied; in our haste, to my shame, we had left it in a mess.
Anyway, in bad temper, I’m guessing (and understandably so), MacIntyre had eyed the bundle of rods, put two and two together and brought them home with him. So my mother drove up and petitioned him for their return. Could she pay him for the damage to the boat? No, he said, she would not.
He soon relented and handed them back – but minus a good reel. I never knew if he did it accidentally or was he teaching us a lesson. Regardless, I got education that day.
Fast forward about 10 or 12 years and I was working here in The Celt, the pages of which Tom had graced intermittently over the years.
In 2011, he got in touch. Could I organise a couple of tickets for the All-Ireland U21 final in Croke Park, in exchange for which he would pen a colour piece?
I did. And the piece was extraordinary. Somehow, he managed to sum up the emotions of the day while referencing a scene in Barry’s Hotel in 1943 when he heard that Big Tom had lost money on the dogs at Harold’s Cross the night before. Such vivid colour.
In a closing postscript, he returned to the great Cornafean man, one of the leaders of the Cavan football tribe in our pomp.
“It’s a cliché of commentary,” he wrote, “that the Cavan follower has unquenchable belief – witness the thousands who made it to Croker. Cavan football – for all its travails – is brushed by that same delicious ache. An anecdote to illustrate.
“Big Tom Reilly of Cornafean, fabled Cavan captain, previously mentioned here. It’s now the late ‘fifties. I’m walking in Sandymount. Behold Sandymount Strand. Great stretches of bare beach. Activity. A middle-aged man. Bulky figure. Kicking a football around. I take a long look. Is it? Can it be? Dear God in Heaven it’s Big Tom... Still holding a candle, still leading his troops, in search of the dream. Still a participant. The strand, I do not jest, was crossed by an awesome light.”
His writing hit me like a haymaker. I scoured the archives wanting more.
His colour piece on the 1997 Ulster final was mesmerising. The pitch, after the game, he wrote, was "a barn dance". 
“It’s hard to keep back the tears. Why keep them back? Let them flow. All over the place, Cavan followers are crying for joy. It was never like this before, not as long as I remember. Tears. For victory.”
In his despatch from the 1995 Ulster final, he mentioned Shane Connaughton and Dermot Healy. That day, Healy had brought Connaughton a gift of a massive Atlantic salmon, which they stored in the fridge of a pub in Clones.
“Tom was very taken with the fish,” Shane told me. “From the depths. A dream.”
As the years went on, he wrote a few more football pieces for us, each as beautifully crafted as the last, authoritative and inimitable.
After the Kildare game in 2013, he wrote about the unquenchable hope of the Cavan supporter.
“A word on the crowd there on Sunday, the Cavan crowd. It’s true what people say, what the newspapers say, the Cavan supporters are faithful unto the last breath. There they were all around me, not without hope, never without hope, gabby, good-humoured, stoic, faithful while breath is in them...
“We’re believers. That’s the light in the Cavan eye. Credo! It’s a treasure you’d wish for all your children.”
Who else could write that and be taken seriously?
He sent me a signed copy of a book of his poetry – Find The Lady - on one occasion with a note complimenting me on something I had written. Talk about high praise. I still have it and always will.
The fishing rod business, by then, was long forgotten. I couldn’t say I was a friend of Tom MacIntyre’s but I had those few dealings with him.
A great rogue, the greatest writer on what football really means. A Gaeilgeoir and a goalkeeper who once saved two penalties in an Ulster Championship match.
A football man. A spiritual man who believed in ghosts and the netherworld and fairies and a higher state of being. A Cavanman.
He lived off the land, that lad, for sure. 
Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann.