That feast of games and activity though would soon be followed by a famine, a cycle that would repeat itself more than once. Celtic Park duly became the main ground of a revived county board, hosting county and club games, and also the drilling of Redmondite Irish volunteers. When Celtic though in 1913 were refused affiliation to an Irish league dominated by unionist-majority clubs in an increasingly politically tense Ulster, outraged nationalists promptly gave preference to Gaelic football.

As Humphrey Kelleher outlined in his tremendous 2023 book A Place to Play, the ground was initially developed in 1894 as a home for a local soccer team, Derry Celtic, named after a certain side in Glasgow that would actually visit and play in Derry in 1896. Part of the challenge the ground has always had lies in its name and the city it resides in: sectarian yet sportingly secular. O’Kane’s proposed solution was to expand the capacity of Owenbeg from 6,000 to 10,000 and pour finances into coaching and developing clubs from every corner of the city, including the county. Owenbeg was perfectly located, being in the hinterland of a football hotbed like Dungiven and equidistant from the outskirts of the city, the Loughshore and the north coast. “Harnessing the city’s population has always been upheld as the primary reason for Celtic Park’s existence, but for the city clubs themselves what does it actually do?” “Aside from the inconvenience of its location,” he’d write in the Irish News, “you have to question after almost a century of ownership what Celtic Park is actually doing for Derry GAA. In those lean years for the county football team, Cahair O’Kane, one of the finest GAA writers in the country let alone county, felt with Owenbeg having established itself as both a centre of excellence and a county ground, Derry could no longer justify or afford having two stadia.

Celtic heart sketch