Born in Callanagh, buried in the record books
John Wilson, Tánaiste
John Patrick Wilson was born on 8 July 1923 at Callanagh, a townland outside Kilcogy. He won two All-Ireland Senior Football medals with Cavan — the first in 1943, the second in 1947 at the Polo Grounds in New York, still the only All-Ireland final ever played outside Ireland. He qualified as a teacher, lectured at UCG, and entered politics as a Fianna Fáil TD in 1973. By 1977 he was Minister for Education. He became Tánaiste in 1990. After leaving government he chaired the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains — a body set up under the Good Friday Agreement to help families recover those disappeared by republican paramilitary groups during the Troubles. He died on 9 July 2007, one day after his eighty-fourth birthday. Kilcogy has produced no shortage of talent in football and law, but Wilson remains the most significant figure the village has sent into the world.
A name recorded in 1610 and still not fully explained
The wood and the province
The earliest written record of the name Kilcogy dates to 1610, when the Maps of the Escheated Counties were drawn up during the Plantation of Ulster. The Irish form is Coill Chóige. Coill means wood. Chóige is where the argument starts: it may be a personal name — someone called Cóige whose wood this was — or it may derive from the Irish word for a province, cúige, suggesting a boundary wood at the edge of one of Ireland's ancient provinces. The civil parish here is Drumlumman, which gives nothing away either. The wood is long gone. The name stuck.
Saint Colmcille, 804, and a bell that moved across the lake
Inchmore and the Vikings
Inchmore — Inis Mór, the big island — sits in the south-western section of Lough Gowna. Saint Colmcille founded a monastery there in the sixth century, part of the same monastic expansion that planted communities across the Irish midlands. The Vikings raided Inchmore in 804, a date recorded in the Annals. The community survived and eventually adopted Augustinian practices in the twelfth century, continuing until Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in 1543. A fifteenth-century tower bell from the monastery was removed and now sits in the Roman Catholic church in Aughnacliffe, a few miles away in Longford. The island itself is not accessible by road.
Twenty-one hurling titles in a row and one world handball champion
Mullahoran GAA
Mullahoran GAA was founded in 1888 — three years after the GAA itself — and has been the central institution of this parish ever since. The club's twenty-six Cavan Senior Hurling Championship titles include a run of twenty-one in a row, a record in the association. They have twelve Senior Football titles. The parish produced Phil 'The Gunner' Brady, John Wilson (two football All-Irelands), and Paul Brady, who became world professional handball champion multiple times from the mid-2000s. In a rural parish that has been losing people steadily since the Famine, the club has given the community a reason to stay in contact with itself. The blue-and-gold colours are visible on Cavan GAA days when they're still competing into the autumn.