Our Club hosted a tightly-managed but very telling and poignant handover today as the McGurk family of Drumshambo donated a new defibrillator to the people of Kildress.
The donation marks the ten years since the sudden and shocking heart-related death of the McGurk family’s son and brother, John Anthony, who was of course a Tones past player and one of our 1994 Tyrone Junior Champions.
‘Drumshambo McGurks’ have been involved in our 1971, 1994, 2011 and 2020 Championship-winning teams and, in the guise of JDC Building Works have also of course delivered us our wonderful new Hub building.
Since the still-hard-to-believe death of Cormac McAnallen over 17 years ago, and the subsequent brilliant work of The Cormac Trust, defibrillators are now widely understood and accessible, particularly in Gaelic Tyrone.
The defibrillator of course has local roots in its own right as it was invented by Lisburn’s Dr Frank Pantridge, someone who suffered greatly as a Japanese prisoner-of-war in World War II and who then returned home to a long career in The Royal in Belfast. Dr Frank came up with his first defibrillator in 1965, a machine that weighed 70kg/11 stone and was powered by car batteries!
Since then this remarkable man’s invention has revolutionised the treatment of heart-attacks.
The experience of soccer player Christian Eriksen over the weekend put the importance and the effectiveness of defibrillators in front of hundreds of millions of people. Thanks to the McGurk family’s generosity, we now have an additional one, and, very importantly, one that we can bring with us to away games.
The spirit of John Anthony truly lives on.
‘Ná caoin deor ar m’icheacht ach cuimhnigh orm mar a bhí me | Do not mourn my departure but remember me as I was.’
