Raymond McCord at the Bobby Sands mural on the Falls Road.
star of the sea
Raymond McCord recalls a Belfast childhood playing football with Star of the Sea, and the fight for justice that has defined his life.
Declan Bogue
THERE WERE NO lofty ideals at play when the Northern Ireland Housing Trust started construction on the Rathcoole estate in north Belfast in the early 1950s.
Part of a post-war building boom, the 366 acres on the slopes of Carnmoney Hill would serve as modern housing for those stuck in deprivation in the inner city areas, allowing the city to be spruced up.
If there was an ambition for the area to be cross-community, nobody was shouting about it, but around one-third of the families moving into Rathcoole were Catholic, populating the local Stella Maris schools.
A local doctor and youth leader, Liam Conlon, had already founded Star of the Sea youth club, the history of which still lives on in Super League basketball club Belfast Star. In the ‘60s, Conlon gathered an underage team of whoever wished to play soccer. The rule was there was to be no talk of politics and religion.
They played together, they won together. Recollections from those who coached them testify that across five years, they weren’t beaten once on their way to winning multiple competitions.
Players were invited to cross-channel trials. Almost half of them played at some level for Northern Ireland at youth level.
The story has inspired recurring journalism features as well as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. On Tuesday, it is brought to life once again in a new TG4 documentary by debutant director James Wynne: ‘Réalt na Mara – An Pheil, Na Trioblóidí agus An Iarmhairt’ (Star of the Sea – The Football, The Troubles and the Aftermath).
***
It wouldn’t be much of a story without a chilling and deathly twist.
As the grim ‘70s hovered into view, things changed. Catholic families were being burned out of their Rathcoole homes. Their places were being taken by Protestants with sectarian tendencies.
Within a matter of several years, players had gone to the extreme edges.
Star of the Sea’s left-back, Bobby Sands, helped plant and detonate an IRA bomb that took out the Balmoral Furniture showroom.
Their right-back, Michael Acheson, joined the Ulster Volunteer Force. So too did midfielder Terry Nicholl.
Denis Sweeney narrowly avoided being in a pub bombing, which influenced his decision to become a doctor. Tommy O’Neill was displaced by pogroms and died a young man, severely affected by the surrounding environment.
Sands would achieve worldwide renown, scorn, admiration and pity as the first of the 10 Republican prisoners to die on hunger strike in 1981 in Long Kesh prison.
During his fast, he was elected as member of parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The head of Her Majesty’s government, Margaret Thatcher, was unimpressed and would not concede ground on the prisoner’s demands for political status.
In the early hours of 5 May 1981, Sands lost his life and crossed the threshold into another trembling world.
***
The pick of that Star of the Sea team was Raymond McCord.
The son of Hector, an Orange man, and mother Kathleen from the Shankill, Raymond and older sister Jean moved out from York Street to Rathcoole just before he started primary school.
The street he lived in was mixed, and as he said, ‘the happiest’ street in all the estate. His neighbours were Monaghans, Fitzsimmons, Binghams and Reillys.
McCord lived a couple of doors down from Geraldine Noade, who would later marry Sands.
He started playing for Star of the Sea and soon found he loved everything about the team and the culture of the club, with Conlon their coach and youth leader.
His father never tried to talk him into the Orange Order, but he remembers some of the elders trying. The closest he came was being a ‘string boy’, holding the ends of strings flying off a banner on the Twelfth. His suit was bought ‘on tick’ and his shoes were too big for him and cut his feet to ribbons.
The bonfires at that time were harmless affairs; a few bushes cut down and set alight. No pallets, no tyres, certainly no tricolours or effigies of mosques or immigrants on small boats. Two families – one Catholic, one Protestant – would collect a few shillings off the families on the row that would pay for the children’s lemonade and sweets.
Still, McCord could find nothing about it that really appealed to him.
“I played football like everybody,” he recalls now in his living room in north Belfast. “I went to school, I played football and I had a girlfriend at that time. Why would I want to join something that’s going to take you away from that?”
He was more than good. Manchester United came calling and he went over for two months. His coach was Paddy Crerand. The manager was Frank O’Farrell. George Best was still there, training on an adjoining pitch at The Cliff.
And then, just like Best, he decided he was homesick and went home.
Unlike Best, he didn’t go back.
His boyhood club Crusaders wanted him. He went along and had a look. But again, not for him.
“I was happier at home: my girlfriend, my family there, my friends, at The Star,” he says.
Attitudes were hardening. He was asked what he was doing playing for Star of the Sea. They were, after all, a ‘Fenian’ crowd.
And when the football was over, he would be asked in the pubs about Man United, always couched in terms that surely it was the greatest mistake of his life?
“I said, wait a minute. If I had stayed, I’d have ended up probably married to an English girl. Chances are I wouldn’t have the three great sons I have.
“And my three sons are better than Manchester United, Barcelona, Liverpool, anything.
“I don’t regret anything whatsoever.”
***
One of his sons was Raymond Jr. His picture in Royal Air Force uniform hangs on the wall, directly in Raymond’s line of view.
The elder McCord had no truck with loyalist paramilitaries. When he was a teenager, he was asked to join some of the local ‘Tartan Gangs’, a bit of teenage scrapping that proved a recruiting ground for the Ulster Defence Association and the UVF. He refused.
Furthermore, they hit a Catholic friend of his one time, so he exacted revenge.
“I wasn’t being John Wayne. That’s what friends do,” he says.
“You didn’t know until you’re fighting them if they could fight.
“In my experience of them, they were easy to beat, because they couldn’t fight. They were thugs.”
He worked as a welder in the famous shipyards of Harland and Wolff. Huge sheets of metal were suspended by the famous cranes, tied together by bolts, and his job was to lather on as much weld on the inside seam as he could – nobody was concerned about the appearance on the inside of an oil tanker.
He liked the work and he played football for the company team, but he wasn’t crazy about the overall atmosphere.
“The shipyard was full of paramilitaries.
“I had my job. Over the years, (I’d have) a few arguments in the shipyard, you know, over certain things, with paramilitary ones.
“To me, I didn’t see them as paramilitary. I see them as an individual who could try and cause me a problem.”
Occasionally, he would find himself in fights with them. He had absolutely no fear.
One night, someone followed him into the toilets of a bar and launched a headbutt at him, breaking his nose. McCord hit back severely.
He went back to his company in the pub and carried on his night. The barman told him to slip outside the side door and get home. He wouldn’t. Half an hour later, car tyres squealed outside and a group of men emerged in the pub with iron bars and baseball bats.
Once they had him down, they went to work, breaking his arms and legs. Nobody could help. They were told not to even call for an ambulance as he was left for dead.
But paramilitaries offer some status and money. Not everyone was immune from their appeal and gradually, Raymond Jr found himself drawn into that world during his periods of leave from the RAF.
In 1997, a drug deal went wrong and Raymond Jr’s leaders suspected he might have informed in police interviews. He was lured to the disused Ballyduff quarry where he was beaten to death with concrete blocks on 9 November 1997. When Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte raised Raymond Jr’s case in Dáil Éireann in 2005, using his parliamentary privilege, he said that Raymond Jr had been murdered on the orders of Mark Haddock, the head of the UVF’s Mount Vernon branch.
Raymond Sr was made swear to his family that he would not seek physical retribution.
Instead, he put faith in the police investigation. But it went nowhere for years, and he wasn’t being updated. He made some enquiries himself and spoke to leading figures in loyalist gangs and began forming suspicions.
He took them to the office of Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan. In January 2007, O’Loan’s report confirmed that Haddock – identified in the report as Informant #1 – had indeed been a protected species and safe from arrest; he was a British state agent, a paid informer.
Raymond Sr is a tough man, but how he and his family were treated comes out in torrents.
“No church minister condemned Raymond’s murder. No church minister came near my wife’s house. Not one brought even a sympathy card.
“Not one even came to speak to us or say a prayer. This is no joke, not one to this day, not one has ever come here.
“I’m not going to ask the stupid question why? Is it because of fear of paramilitaries? I know there was nothing in it for them.
“Our own so-called Unionist politicians, (Ian) Paisley, David Trimble and them, not one came near the house. Not one attended the funeral.
“I would have no love for those people. Those church men that are supposed to help families whether they like them or don’t like them, supposed to come and give them some type of support.”
He adds, “What they should have done is taken their dog collars off and thrown them in the bin. They’re only Christians when it suits them.”
Only one unionist politician, the Democratic Unionist Party’s Jim Shannon, has raised the case in parliament, and retains contact with McCord.
McCord himself has asked DUP leader Gavin Robinson to back his calls for a public enquiry into Raymond junior’s murder.
“He said the DUP don’t support inquiries.
“He talks about the soldiers, the veterans, giving them special protection. All I want is him to support an enquiry for my son. All I want is for him to ask in parliament.”
What frustrates McCord gravely is how Protestant paramilitaries are still operating in racketeering, fraud, drug dealing, prostitution and many other areas.
And the response from American and British governments is to continue to pump millions into the attempt to ‘transition’ when nothing has changed.
“These people still have a jackboot on top of their own community’s head, still raking money in for drugs and extortion, but our ministers stay silent, right?” says McCord.
“Arlene Foster – who I have no time for – said in 2018 that we’re 20 years from the Good Friday Agreement and loyalists, paramilitaries, had to make a choice, and had hit a fork in the road. This is eight years later and they’re still talking.
“I’ve said before, I’ve said in Dublin to Dublin politicians who are on the Good Friday Agreement committee, I’ve appeared in front of them several times. Don’t give them anything. Stop the money. Stop all their money.
“They shouldn’t be entitled to it. Since they went on ceasefire in 1994, the UVF has murdered 32 Protestants since their ceasefire.”
It’s coming up to 29 years since Raymond McCord Jr was murdered. Nobody from the ministries nor unionism has been to see him or the family. If politicians approach the door of his two other sons, they are immediately dismissed.
The death threats to Raymond Sr continue. Raymond Jr’s headstone has been smashed three times.
***
His mood flips when he goes back into reminiscing about Star of the Sea. Next week there will be a screening of the documentary at the Odeon Theatres in Belfast. He is compiling a list of old friends who have asked to have tickets reserved.
Across the way, two sets of Polish neighbours have asked him about it and have booked their tickets. He and some others are trying to track down the remaining members of the team who didn’t take part in the documentary.
“Dessie (Black) in goals… Geordie Hussey could have played in English league football. And I mean that, Geordie was good, fast and strong, and a good lad.
“Tommy O’Neill, forward, had nice skill. Terry Nicholl, Terry was one of the underrated ones. Terry had some skill. Terry should have been at least, a real, one of the top players in Irish league football.”
Instead, Terry went to jail. When he got out, he wanted to explore more of his Mormon faith and join family in Salt Lake City, Utah, but his conviction meant there was no chance.
“Big Paddy (Davidson). What a full-back. Fastest footballer I’ve ever seen in my life. Paddy didn’t get the credit…
“Bobby Sands…”
He takes a moment.
“To be honest, I remember doing an interview and people said, ‘What about Bobby Sands? The hunger striker?’
“I said, I don’t know. I’ve never met Bobby Sands the hunger striker in my life. Because when he left for Twinbrook, I have never seen him again.
“His wife lived about eight doors from me. We walked together on the same street.
“He wasn’t skilful, but Sandsy played for the shirt. He wasn’t one of the tough guys on the team but let people know he was there. Just because he was going in hard didn’t make him some sort of street fighter or, you know, hard man.”
He continues on.
“Denis Sweeney, fantastic player too. Willie Caldwell: the scouts were after Willie, Willie was the George Best of the team. He was running the ball.
“Terry Nicholl, Michael Acheson…”
He comes back to Sands.
“Willie says he (Sands) had the courage of his convictions. Willie is a Protestant guy.
“But I would disagree. I believe Sandsy was used because I said the Bobby Sands I knew, the Terry Nicholl I knew, and the Michael Acheson I knew…
“People say he made his own choice, I think he got to this stage it was too late to change because he was going to die.
“But he made a choice the same way I made a choice when my son was murdered: I’m not stopping, I’ll get the people, get justice for my son.
“I believe that the only time a man’s gonna die, it’s for his family, to stop people killing his family, get in the way of it, defend them.
“Because nobody wants to die. Unfortunately, people take their own lives, mental illness and things like that, depression. This is completely different.”
He continues. “Do I regret that he died? Certainly, certainly regret he died there.
“I knew his wife. Grew up in the same street as me. A good girl. Good woman from a good family. When he was put in jail, I ran into Geraldine and I said, ‘How’s Sandsy?’
“And he got out after that. People can turn around and criticise and speak of him who don’t know him, and they say because he’s only out of jail and he goes back in again, that he didn’t learn his lesson.
“I’m not going to judge him at all because I don’t know what was in his head.
“What I can say is the Bobby Sands that died on hunger strike, Bobby Sands who joined the IRA, wasn’t the Bobby Sands that I knew at football, right?”
He turns his attention to Nicholl and Acheson.
“I have to bring Terry and Michael into it, of course, and in the same way I’ve never seen badness in Terry, I have never seen it in Michael.
“I spoke to Michael after he got out of jail a few times. Private conversations, and we’re good. The friendship was still there.
“If Bobby Sands had to come out of jail and we had run into each other in Belfast and we spoke, I’d ask, ‘Why did you join the IRA?’
“I’d have no doubt we would have a couple of pints, and I mean that. I don’t care what people in my community say about it. I don’t care what their opinion is.
“But we wouldn’t have had much of a conversation about that. Because then you talk about the ordinary things in life, what we’ve done when we played football, and that’s what people need to do now, you know where I’m coming from, you know?
“I’ve never ran into his family since Bobby died. I know he has a son and I hear from others that his son is a nice lad. People I know speak well of him.
“For me, I’d love to meet him. If he wanted to know something of his father, I could tell him what he was like when we were 16, 17.”
***
Today, Raymond McCord is immensely proud of the job that director James Wynne has done on this documentary. He is intrigued about what other people think of it.
He would tell more people about it but he knows the reaction he’d get when he tells them it is being screened on TG4, and that a good deal of it is narrated as Gaeilge.
He feels the documentary needs to be studied on a deeper level: about the innocence of children and how children who are mixed through each other don’t know the differences, if indeed there are any.
“We weren’t professors. We weren’t human rights activists. We were 16-year-old footballers.”
Naturally, he becomes a central focus of the documentary, but he feels the greatest contributions came from Denis Sweeney, Geordie Hussey and others.
Sweeney said it took him years before he realised that the team was made of different religions.
“Geordie says playing for Star helped to make him into the person he is today,” adds McCord.
“A young lad, with strong Unionist convictions. He’s not afraid to tell the truth.
“That’s important to me.”
Réalt na Mara – An Pheil, Na Trioblóidí agus An Iarmhairt (Star of the Sea – The Football, The Troubles and the Aftermath) will screen on Tuesday 20 October at 9.30pm on TG4.
Written by Declan Bogue and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.