The glory years of the late 1980s and 90s still have Barry Cunningham brimming.
Killybegs won five Donegal senior football championship titles and reached the 1991 Ulster final, which they lost to Castleblayney.
Cunningham, his cousin John Cunningham, Barry McGowan and Manus Boyle all won the All-Ireland with Donegal in 1992 and Killybegs captured Dr Maguire that autumn.
They were special days and special times around Fintra.
“We had a very talented group of players all around the one age,” Cunningham says now.
“We turned the club from a backwater intermediate team into one of the top clubs in Ulster over a ten-year period.
“It started at Under-12. We went out against teams and obliterated them. We had the nucleus of a very strong team and everyone stuck together. We had complete confidence and we knew that something special was happening.”
The first of the five SFC wins came in 1988 (the club’s first since 1952) and it is a year that will always be remembered around Killybegs.
In a League game against Aodh Ruadh in Ballyshannon earlier that year, Eamon Byrne died while playing for Killybegs. The team didn’t use the number 7 shirt for a while and the new pitch at Fintra is named in his honour – Eamon Byrne Memorial Park.
His team-mates channeled their efforts into winning the title in ’88 – and a late goal by Jimmy White gave them a dramatic 2-10 to 2-8 win over neighbours Kilcar in the final.
Cunningham says: “We were on a mission that year. There was pressure on it and it was an issue, but we got a bit of luck that we deserved.”
Listen to the full interview below …
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