FAI Cup Final

Tim_Riggins · November 12, 2023, 3:26pm

Flares a bit cringe.

Julio_Geordio · November 12, 2023, 3:27pm

Why is the Pats manager wearing a poppy?

iron_mike · November 12, 2023, 3:30pm

He’s from Cork

Little_Lord_Fauntleroy · November 12, 2023, 3:31pm

Ex hun

Little_Lord_Fauntleroy · November 12, 2023, 3:32pm

It adds to atmosphere for mgf

Tim_Riggins · November 12, 2023, 3:33pm

https://twitter.com/conmurphysport/status/1723724770632503603?s=46&t=hy6wc4bLZMiyfotc20UniQ

Lots of damage to the Aviva pitch already. Some lifetime bans needs to be handed out if this continues.

Corksfinedtboy · November 12, 2023, 3:39pm

Seeing my mother being pulled out of the house by Paratroopers with guns…it’s the same s**t we see happening now’

Bohemians boss says he cannot ignore the plight of Gaza

2

Aidan Fitzmaurice

November 11 2023 9:18 AM

The manager of a football club knows better than anyone else how a comment on social media can land someone into deep, deep trouble.

Bohemians boss Declan Devine is one of only three Premier Division managers in Ireland who has an account on X (formerly Twitter) but is the only one to actively engage. And when he posted a message with the Palestinian flag – four of them – four weeks ago as a new phase of the Israel-Hamas conflict began, he provoked responses varying from unstinting support to deep rage.

A month on, the 50-year-old makes no apologies. This despite the drain on his time and concentration that comes with tomorrow’s FAI Cup final where he needs to land the trophy to put a sheen on an otherwise underwhelming season.

For Devine, there is no need to apologise for having a voice and using it. “I’m from Derry. Derry people stand up, Derry people fight back, they don’t accept being treated like second-class citizens,” Devine told the Irish Independent.

“Derry was looked down on. We got nothing and you are born into that, fighting against that. I have no issue with anyone’s religion but I was not born into a free society, no jobs, no prospects. But it makes you stronger, Derry people are different people because we have dealt with so much.

“Me speaking to you here is nothing to do with having more of a voice from being manager of Bohemians but it’s just what I believe. I see the pictures on TV now and it reminds me of my own past. Civilians being hurt, beaten down, it reminds me of my childhood, growing up in the Creggan, in Derry, where the British army were on the streets and they were beating people down, you only had to walk around the corner and people were being stopped, searched, beaten with batons.

“So there’s an aspect of this that takes me back to a dark time in our own history. Having seen tanks and soldiers on the streets, plastic bullets being fired at children, there’s a lot of that I can remember so I think it’s absolutely cowardly for the rest of the world to now sit back and let it happen, that the so-called super nations are backing a regime that is intimidating. This is not Bohemians as a club talking but me as a person, and I feel it’s wrong.”

“I am not a political person but I say what I see, and I see people beaten on the streets. Yes, the Hamas attack was wrong, but we are not talking about one single attack last month, we’re talking about a story that’s been happening for decades. It’s wrong and I say that as a person who grew up in a war zone. People reading this today will say, ‘That wasn’t a war zone in the North’ but it was. Bombs, shootings, homes being raided, family pulled down the stairs and trailed out of the house, I remember all that from the ’70s and early ’80s in a city that had serious levels of deprivation.”

Most families in the North have their own story to tell of those dark days, so of course Devine does. He recalls his house being raided during the hunger strikes, simply because his family had the same surname as one of a Derry native (Mickey Devine) who was the 10th and final hunger striker to die.

“Our house was regularly raided, just because we were called Devine. They’d take my mother away for questioning and let her go, they’d hold on to the men, like my uncles were held. Seeing your grandmother, your uncles and aunts, my mother, being pulled down the stairs and out of the house by Paratroopers with guns, in a town in Ireland, it’s the same s**t we see happening now. We’re seeing that now in 2023, it’s wrong and they are getting away with it.

Bohemians boss Declan Devine attracted controversy when he posted a message on social media in support of Palestine. Photo: Sportsfile

“In our family we had zero connection with any paramilitaries, any trouble, and they came in and beat us down, they could do what they wanted and that’s what’s happening now in Gaza, a big power being able to do what they want.”

Born in Derry 18 months after the city suffered its Bloody Sunday, Devine felt the mark of his homeplace on him from birth. Family circumstances meant that his father was not on the scene.

“My dad died recently, I always knew who he was, in the early days we’d meet up on Saturdays but we went different ways, he went to England and had another family there. It was hard not having a dad about but you were still in a house with 14 other people and I never lacked role models,” he says.

“My uncles were the ones who took me to my first Derry City match in 1985, and they helped me in my football career, I had that solid group and good values behind me. I wouldn’t change it for the world. My mother, four uncles, seven aunts, my grandmother, me and my sister, 15 of us in a three-bedroom house in the Creggan. It was chaos.

“But I was born into a society where I was a second-class citizen. We had nothing, no jobs: imagine trying to feed a house of 15 people with no jobs, you had to live off very little and that was down to occupation, down to our religion. It was the time, like in the Phil Coulter song, where the men were on the dole and the women got the only jobs available in the shirt factory, that’s a song but it was true, in our family the women worked as the men couldn’t get jobs. It was a horrible time.”

A conflict raged through Derry and across the north, Devine saw friends embrace violence. “Yeah, I had mates who ended up in jail, I had mates who aren’t here any more. But that was common for Derry at the time, for some lads I knew there was only one place they were headed and that was getting involved with paramilitaries. That never crossed my mind, none of our family were involved, for me it was being able to get out, going on trials to England at 13 years of age and seeing that there was something else out there. Football was my way out.

“As a kid you were antagonised, the cops and the Brits would fly through the streets, on the corners calling you names, calling your mother names. It was easy to get antagonised so thankfully when I was 11 I got into a football team, and did well, I got a bit of attention – I went to Leeds, Aston Villa, Manchester United, and I signed for Ipswich at 16.”

Now 50, and at the end of his first full season with Bohs the values remain in Devine and he admits to frustration at how his team fared this season.

“I can tell you all the bulls**t but we underachieved in the league, we didn’t win enough Dublin derbies. It’s not good enough to finish sixth,” he says.

“I can’t fault the players, I do fault myself. I didn’t demand enough in certain areas. I am in charge so I have to fault myself, there were games where we didn’t do all that was needed to win. I look myself and say ‘must do better’ and I will dedicate my life to doing better.”

FAI Cup Final

Seeing my mother being pulled out of the house by Paratroopers with guns…it’s the same s**t we see happening now’

Aidan Fitzmaurice

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