Qualla: St Patrick's College, Maghera

St Patrick's College, Maghera: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Six Hogan Cups. The Hogan Cup is the All-Ireland championship of post-primary Gaelic football, the schoolboy equivalent of the Sam Maguire. Schools across Ireland - thirty-two counties, hundreds of competitors - vie for it every year, and most go their entire history without lifting it once. St Patrick's College, an unassuming comprehensive on the edge of Maghera, a County Londonderry market town of fewer than five thousand people, has won it six times. Most recently in 2025. They have also collected seventeen MacRory Cups and seventeen Mageean Cups. The trophy cabinet at this single school in this single small town contains more silverware than entire Irish counties have accumulated. Something is happening here, in the shadow of the Glenshane Pass, that does not happen anywhere else.

St Patrick's College, Maghera: The Comprehensive Tradition

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

St Patrick's calls itself a 'co-educational comprehensive college' - meaning it takes pupils of all academic levels rather than selecting at eleven, the way Northern Ireland's grammar schools do. It serves the Catholic parishes of Maghera, Glenullin, Dungiven and Randalstown. Two...

St Patrick's College, Maghera: The 1993 Derry Team

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Derry won their first and only All-Ireland Senior Gaelic Football Championship in 1993, the captain on the pitch at Croke Park was Henry Downey - a St Patrick's man. The midfielder beside him was Anthony Tohill - another St Patrick's man, who would go on to play professional...

St Patrick's College, Maghera: The Glen Years

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Maghera's senior club, Watty Graham's GAC - usually just called 'Glen' - won the All-Ireland Senior Club Football Championship in 2024. At their centre, again, was a St Patrick's alumnus. Conor Glass, born in Maghera in 1997, had spent his teenage years playing for the school, th...

St Patrick's College, Maghera: Beyond the Pitch

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sport is the school's signature but not its only line. The senior choir reached the BBC School Choir of the Year in 2020. Brooke Scullion, born in 1999, represented Ireland at Eurovision in 2022 with her song 'That's Rich' - the kind of pop performance that would have seemed unim...

St Patrick's College, Maghera: The Math of a Small Place

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Maghera has a population of 4,235. The catchment of St Patrick's reaches perhaps fifteen thousand people across the surrounding parishes. To produce six Hogan Cups and feed four players into an All-Ireland-winning county team requires not just talent but the kind of social infras...