The monastery ground

In 1972 the club made the three decisions that shaped everything since. It became Kilmore Recreation. It moved to the monastery ground at Crossgar, on land granted by the Passionist community of Tobar Mhuire, whose generosity gave the club the home it still plays on. And it was accepted into the Northern Ireland Amateur Football League, opening with a home match against Carreras in Division 2B. For years the ground was known simply as “The Square”, the name the 1992 Irish Cup programme still gives it, and the first changing rooms were the upstairs rooms of a house on The Square itself.

Promotion to 2A followed within two years, and the late seventies became the club’s first golden spell. It came within a whisker of being remembered as something far bigger. In the spring of 1979 Kilmore Rec reached the semi-final of the Irish Junior Cup, the all-Ireland junior competition, going down 2–0 to Annalong Swifts before a sizeable crowd at Crothers Memorial Park, Banbridge, with two missed penalties to regret. Nobody wrote it down afterwards, and the achievement sat forgotten for forty-seven years until this project found it back in the newspapers.

Penalties owed Kilmore that spring, and penalties had already paid up once. In the Cochrane & Corry quarter-final at Ballynahinch a fortnight earlier, a man was sent off on each side, Conleth McCarthy equalised in the 82nd minute, and when the referee sent the tie straight to a shoot-out with no extra time, Noel McCarthy, Gerry O’Prey and Ernie Casement all converted to put Kilmore through. They reached three consecutive Cochrane & Corry Cup finals from 1977–78 to 1979–80. The first was won 1–0 against Queen’s University II, the first trophy ever engraved Kilmore Rec FC; the second was lost 3–2 to Annalong Swifts; the third was won 3–2 against arch rivals Dunmurry YM after extra time at the Rolls Royce ground in Newtownards, Danny McHugh heading the winner from a corner two minutes from the end. “KILMORE WIN THE CUP” ran the Recorder’s headline, over a photograph of manager Jimmy McCarthy with the trophy. In the middle of that run came the Co. Antrim FA Junior Shield, won 2–1 against 40th Old Boys at Castlereagh Park, Newtownards, in 1978–79, captain Noel McCarthy collecting it: proof the club could win on the bigger stage, and the springboard to intermediate status.

The league followed the cups. The Division 2A championship was won in 1980–81, and the step up to 1B was taken with such ease that the 1B title came at the first attempt in 1981–82. The champions strengthened smartly too, signing Dromore Amateurs’ captain of three years, Jim Gregg, in the summer of 1981. That carried Kilmore into Division 1A, then the Amateur League’s top flight, where the club held its own for the rest of the eighties and made noise in the Irish Intermediate Cup besides. In February 1983 Kilmore went to Annalong and won 3–1, two up inside thirteen minutes and McHugh finishing it from a corner, to earn a tie against the aircraft-makers Shorts with only six B-League sides left standing. In November 1987 Banbridge Town came to Crossgar and were sent home beaten 4–1, a result their local paper called a shock and, a week later, “the Kilmore Rec debacle”, grumbling that Town’s strike force had been “stifled by the size of the Kilmore pitch”. The small pitch took no prisoners. Another Intermediate Cup win, over Newry Town Reserves, followed in 1988, and in the autumn of 1984 an unbeaten away record earned the club an Irish Cup preliminary-round tie against the RUC at Newforge, previewed in the Belfast News-Letter under the headline “RUC to ‘arrest’ Kilmore”.

The club ran deep in these years: a second eleven was competing by 1977, and the youth section had been entering national competitions since the mid-seventies. Relegation in 1989–90 brought the decade to a bruising end. The response said much about the club. They were champions of 1B again at the first time of asking in 1990–91, back up just as the league was about to reinvent itself.