Mayo's Michael Feeney, MBE, talks about his cancer battle and football passion

By Dr. Richard Martin

HOW do you describe Castlebar man Michael Feeney, MBE?

A visionary. A risk taker. A peacemaker. A historian.

I’ve known his brother Martin Feeney and his nephew Justin for over 20 years. I wanted to meet Michael and hear the remarkable story of how Milebush Park was developed and how he literally put everything on the line to make it happen.

This is a man of substance. Let’s hear his story.

RM: Nice to meet you, Michael. A privilege and an honour.

You're from an old Castlebar Celtic family. Your brother, Josie, was a Celtic icon. He played for Ireland.

Did you play soccer for Celtic?

MF: I did, and I was proud, very proud to be vice-president of the club at the moment, a great honour. I played with my brothers Josie and Vincent. The three of us played in 1964 on the team that won the Connaught Cup.

And it was a great privilege to have played with two of my brothers during that period. I was involved in the club in the 1970s, in and out, and then I was working in the bacon factory. And they set up a football club there, Barcastle, and it went for many years.

RM: So did you get involved with Barcastle?

MF: I did, yeah, because I wasn't playing football at the time.

RM: So you were more of an administrator then?

MF: Yes. It was the late ‘70s. The bacon factory were selling the land, and the football club had been playing on it and developed it for a long time. So myself and Frank McHale and Tommy O'Boyle, we came together and we bought the pitch. Now that pitch is the property of Castlebar Town.

We bought it for football, not for ourselves.

RM: Your own money?

MF: Yes, at that time, to buy it.

RM: And who paid you back?

MF: The club did eventually, yes, by fundraising or whatever.

RM: That's amazing, And then Milebush Park, that's a famous story.

MF: I was secretary of the Mayo Football League in 1980. I was elected, so I was on the committee for a few years.

And I knew with my heart and soul, having played the game, that soccer in Mayo was going nowhere. They had teams, each club had a team and whatever. But facilities-wise, it was disastrous.

It was terrible. You couldn't do coaching. You couldn't play inter-county matches.

If you had an inter-county match, playing Galway or Sligo or some other team from up the country, we often ended up playing it down in the Valley on the Sandy Banks in Achill, or in Glenhest.

It was clear as day to anyone at the time that we were going nowhere without our own facilities. And when I became secretary, I kept bringing it up every day, we have to get facilities. We have to get a headquarters, we have to buy land.

They thought I was mad. Simply thought I was a crackers because we were going through a recession.

I knew there was land going for sale close to where I lived. And I met the farmer, and he wanted to sell, and we came to a price.

At the time, the actual nett price for the property was £48,000.

But then, with legal fees and with engineering fees, you're talking about £54,000.

I called a meeting, a special meeting of the Mayo League.

I said, look, we have a ground, it's now or never. We're going for this or we're not going for it.

You're talking about the future of the game in Mayo.

RM: Is it true you remortgaged your house?

MF: Shall we say, I could have lost my home. Tom Walsh, the solicitor, told me don't sign that.

I got an agreement first at one meeting, in principle, to buy the property.

So I was mandated then, well, check out and see can you get any money. So I went to the bank.

I was very fortunate.

There was a guy after coming to Castlebar, his name was Michael Desmond.

And I sat down with him in the bank. I told him what we were doing. I said, look, we're talking about soccer in Mayo, and we need a county ground, we need pitches, we need facilities.

And, well, he says, the only way I can give you money, you'll have to get seven signatures on this form. There was 12 on the committee.

So I said, give me the forms.

So I brought them to the meeting a week later and I presented them. Now, I didn't put any pressure on anyone.

I said, this is the situation. The bank will recommend the money if I have seven signatures here.

I went around the room. It went right around the whole table and no one signed it.

And I took the paper and I said, well, I'll go back to the bank tomorrow. I signed it there in front of them at the meeting. That’s the gospel truth.

I'm not kidding you. I signed it there in front of them.

I said, ‘I'll go in with this tomorrow.’

Henry Downes was chairman. ‘You won't.’ Henry Downes says, ‘give it to me.’ He signed it. I had two signatures.

I went back into Michael Desmond the next day. I sat down with him and I said, Michael, I haven't seven signatures, I have two. He said, you have great courage to come. At least you came back and faced up.

RM: So you and Henry Downes put a personal guarantee for £54,000 pounds.

MF: Yes, and it was made clear.

It was bought for football. Not for Michael Feeney, not for Henry Downes. It was bought for football.

If it went pear-shaped, we were liable for the money, not the Mayo League.

RM: That's crazy. Where does that come from? Why did you take that risk? Like no one else would do it.

MF: I don't know, it was a daft scenario.

RM: But you must love football.

MF: Well, I do. I grew up in a county and I grew up in a schools system where if you put the ball on the ground, you'd be shot.

RM: By the teachers?

MF: The Christian Brothers. They were all anti-soccer. Even in jobs, the P&T was sewn up for a long time.

RM: When was it actually bought? What year?

MF: About 1985. The deeds, I have all the stuff, copies of the deeds. The deeds are up on the wall in Milebush.

They're there and my signature and Henry Downes's is on it.

RM: That was an unbelievable achievement.

MF: Well, we got the 12 and a half acres of land.

RM: How did you resolve that debt?

MF: I resolved the debt. I held a meeting at my own house, brought a few fellas in. And we ran a 1,000 member draw. Each ticket was £80.

It gave us more than half of the money to buy the pitch.

We ran bingo sessions also. Once we got the money, the people on the committee followed behind me then. They all came in and backed us to the hilt after.

RM: Was Padraig Flynn (a then government minister) a help?

MF: Padraig Flynn was instrumental.

RM: What did he do?

MF: He was a wonderful help. And I've always thanked him for it. I think he secured about £120,000 over two years.

RM: To develop it?

MF: To develop it.

RM: So Flynn was crucial, really.

MF: He was absolutely and totally crucial.

Out of the £120,000 Flynn gave us the drainage was done, walls were built, the clubhouse was built, the car park was done. And it was a valuable property when I walked out the gate.

I spent years out there by myself.

I dealt with all the contractors. Seamus Regan was the main contractor. I was there about eight hours a day. I was working shift work.

RM: Where were you working at the time?

MF: St. Mary's. And I was doing shift work. So I was able to be there late evenings or mornings or evenings. If it was a night work, I was in Milebush for the whole day.

You mightn't believe this now, but it's much more used than MacHale Park. You'd have to be going out that road regularly to see.

All day long, ‘til 12 o'clock at night, there's buses there every morning and evening.

Between coaching and between schools, girls and boys, it's used around the clock. And I suppose the biggest asset to us, I suppose, is as well as having a full international size grass pitch, you have the astroturf as well. And they have built on, they had to build extra dressing rooms and meeting rooms since I left.

CANCER JOURNEY

RM: I want to talk to you about your health. You haven't been well lately.

MF: I wasn't feeling too good. Indeed, the night I launched the book – Heroic Mayo. December 9, 2023. At Castlebar Tennis Club.

RM: I was there that night.

MF: I was in an awful state.

RM: Really?

MF: I covered it up well, I took painkillers. I had to lie down on the floor of the tennis club for a while before people started to arrive.

RM: Did you?

MF: Before that I had to stay sitting down for nearly two hours, just to relieve the pain.

RM: And the pain was that bad?

MF: It was really severe.

I had been going to doctors for about two years, and I was being misdiagnosed.

RM: And what was the problem?

MF: I had some kind of disc problem at an earlier stage, I couldn't get down to the bottom of it.

I was going around in circles. The pain was severe. I was kind of disabled with it. Could not do what I wanted. It was around that time that blood tests started to show that something was seriously wrong.

I was checked out for prostate cancer. That went on for about six to nine months. But it turned out I didn't have prostate cancer. There were of a lot of scans, scans, scans, scans. I was up and over the bar like a yo-yo.

And then, in May last year, when I was invited down to do a commemoration in Belmullet on D-Day, my consultant in Galway rang me. He says, ‘Where are you?’ I say, ‘I'm driving.’

‘Can I talk to you? Can you pull in there now?’ And I talked to him on the speakerphone in the car. He said: 'We've come across something on your kidney'.

And he explained it to me that it was a tumour.

And he told me what he'd have to do. He says: 'Look, you're gone from way down the list, you're my number one patient now.

‘You have to undergo surgery. It's urgent. It's cancer.'

It was the most aggressive cancer. It was a sarcoma on the kidneys. It's rare enough to get that kind of a cancer on the kidney. It took about three months after the operation for the results of the biopsy to come through for him to tell me what kind of a cancer it really was.

He said I was both very lucky. . .and very unfortunate. They took out my kidney and my spleen, but there was a load of the cancer still there and they couldn't touch it because it was on vital organs. It could only be treated with radiotherapy treatment.

The treatment itself only takes about half an hour.

RM: The radiotherapy?

MF: Yeah. It's just like a machine you go into it. They just point the radiation at you.

It's very challenging going up and down to Galway for it.

These things should be available here in Mayo, because everyone I was meeting up there was from Mayo.

RM: Really?

MF: I'd say three-quarters of them.

RM: Rock Rose House, Castlebar, offers cancer support services. And it's something that you've availed of. When did you start going?

MF: I had the operation and I had a slow, torturous recovery.

RM: When was the operation?

MF: It was in August last year.

And by, I'd say, October, I was able to get out of the house and I thought, you know, there's not many people you can talk to about these things and I said, well, these people are offering cancer services. I'll go up and see. But I was the only man there.

It was only myself and about 25 or 30 women. They were very welcoming. And I had a great time with them.

RM: Did you find it good?

MF: It took my mind off it. And I met a lot of new friends.

People I never knew. And good friends. You know, and every one of those women who are in the choir, all had cancer or were recovering.

They were just like myself, you know.

And they were very welcoming and very interactive. Obviously, it would have been great if there was more men.

RM: But do you find it good?

MF: Well, it helps you to talk to another person who has cancer. A person who understands it.

That understands the stress and the pain and the shock to your system. You know, that kind of thing.

RM: Do you think there's a lot of men suffering in silence?

MF: I’d say there are.

RM: Why is that?

MF: You see, no matter what places like Rock Rose House do, men still might not go there.

RM: It is a tough one because ultimately it's up to the men themselves to turn up.

MF: Rock Rose House are setting up an information meeting in September for men with cancer.

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Mick Byrne describes Paddy McGuinness as being special. He’s right. For me, Micheal Feeney is special.

Everything Micheal Feeney has ever done has been for the betterment of the town and county. The Peace Park. Milebush. Barcastle.

Even now his determination to start a cancer support group for men suffering in silence is noble and altruistic.

He is totally selfless, humble and unassuming. Devoid of ego. It was a real pleasure to sit with him for two hours and feel the presence of his granite-like persistence and tenacity.

He is truly unique and is one of our town's greatest sons.

His legacy will endure for decades to come.

My life on you my friend.