A schoolteacher, a Young Irelander, a centenary
John Mitchel's GAC, 1925 to 2025
In May 1925 a local schoolteacher called Johnny Mullan called a meeting in Glenullin to start a Gaelic football club. They named it for John Mitchel, the Young Ireland writer transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1848, and stitched themselves into green-and-white hoops. The club won the Derry Senior League in 1927 and the Senior Championship in 1928, switched to North Derry competitions in 1938, lost most of a generation to emigration in the 1950s, rebuilt through the 1960s on minor titles, won a second Senior Championship in 1985 under captain Dermot McNicholl, then climbed back through the Intermediate grade — county titles in 2022 and 2023, Ulster Intermediate champions in November 2025, exactly a hundred years after Mullan's meeting. The pitch is Seán Ó Maoláin Park. The crest will be on the Croke Park scoreboard for the first time in the All-Ireland series.
Stephen's Day at Seán Ó Maoláin Park
The 1993 final in the snow
The 1993 Derry Senior Football Championship final between Lavey and Swatragh was pushed back into the winter because the Derry county side had spent the autumn winning the All-Ireland — beating Cork on the third Sunday in September. The club final eventually went down on St Stephen's Day, 26 December 1993, at Glenullin's pitch in deep snow. Lavey won. Anthony Tohill of Swatragh, an All-Ireland medal already in his pocket, was on the losing side. Glenullin's pitch — a neutral ground for a south-Derry derby — held the fixture because the weather had wrecked everywhere else. The story has stuck. Anyone in mid-Ulster of a certain age will tell you they were at it. Most of them were.
Church, school, pitch — that is the shape of it
A parish without a village
Glenullin is unusual on an Irish map because it is named and known but is not a village in the street-and-shop sense. The 1885 St Joseph's Church sits in the parish of Errigal alongside St Mary's at Ballerin a few miles north. The school next door — St Patrick's & St Joseph's Federated Primary — is the only school in the glen. Almost everything else is farmland and lanes between townlands. The community sector is active because it has to be: there is no town centre to inherit, only what the parish builds for itself. The GAA pitch sits in the middle of that arrangement, which is part of why it matters as much as it does.