The storm has passed in Donaghmore. Feargal Logan comes to the door of his house just a few miles outside Dungannon and sticks out his hand. “Usually, it would only be myself and Eileen here on our own,” he smiles. “But we have some refugees in from Pomeroy.”
In the kitchen, Eileen’s brother Robert is peeling spuds. Their house is six miles away out the road but, like so many others across the island, the power has been gone since Storm Éowyn came calling and so he and his family are bunking here for a bit. The Logans have spent plenty of the past 12 months counting on the people around them. It’s no hardship to be counted upon now.
It was this weekend last year when everything changed. Feargal Logan was co-managing Tyrone along with Brian Dooher and they had Derry in the second game of the league. They had beaten Roscommon in the opener the previous Sunday and, with Mickey Harte on the Derry sideline, the whole squad had this one circled from a long way out.
But the way it worked out, Logan didn’t make the game. In his four years managing the Tyrone seniors, it’s the one match he has never watched back. By the time Noel Mooney threw up the ball in Celtic Park, he was in an ambulance, on his way to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. He had taken a stroke.
“I went from a twin-track life of law and football to stripping absolutely everything back,” he says. “I don’t want to set aside family but the reality is that’s what it was. Essentially, my days were wholly consumed with either being a lawyer or at least attempting to be a football manager and most of the time trying to be both. It’s quite a change when you’re neither, very quickly. It’s out of your own hands.”
Even now, 12 months on and having had all that time to read up on it and have it all explained to him, he’s still not entirely sure how it happened. He knows it was a vertebral artery dissection – in layman’s terms, a tear in one of the arteries going up the neck carrying blood to the brain. He just doesn’t know what caused it.
The previous day, he had done a session in the gym, a mood-sharpener he had come to enjoy as a kind of get-right ritual the day before a game. He thought for a while afterwards that maybe he had overdone it but it didn’t really compute. Treadmill, punching bag, squats – there was nothing he hadn’t done before countless times.
When the dust settled, he had plenty of friends and family tell him that they’d been saying for years that he put himself under too much stress and that something like this was always in the post. But none of his doctors bought that. Yes, they recommended he have less stress in his life but that’s not what caused the stroke.
“Apparently painters get it sometimes,” he says. “Whatever way they would be craning their neck for painting a ceiling, it can cause the artery to tear. And sometimes women in hairdressers, when they lie their head back it can happen. But in my case, it was just an old neck injury that was there and whatever way I moved my neck that morning, that was it.”
That Sunday, he got up early and went through his notes for the game. He ate breakfast and got ready to go. He made Eileen a cup of tea and was bringing it up the stairs on a tray when he felt the power drain from his legs. He called out and somehow managed to hand her the tray without the hot tea going flying everywhere. Next thing he knew, he was on the floor of their bedroom vomiting.
“Whatever happened, I just fell over,” he says. “And that was that. Unbeknownst to myself and Eileen, that ended up manifesting itself in a stroke. I lay on our bed and Eileen was saying she was going to ring one of my siblings – they’re all doctors. I was saying there was no need at all. It was just a loss of balance and once I had a bit of a lie down, I’d be fine.
“I spent a good while thinking I would still make the game! I thought Eileen might drive me up to Celtic Park. I don’t know what my thinking was, in all honesty. I still intended, after keeling over, to get to the game and be part of that day and take Derry on. But the day took a different route for me, ultimately.”
Soon enough, Eileen rang his sister who came and took his vitals and immediately called an ambulance. They went to Craigavon Hospital and soon enough, with the possibility he might need brain surgery, he was dispatched to the Royal Victoria in Belfast. That journey had its own story too.
“The two paramedics knew who they had on board,” he laughs now. “They singularly refused to tell me the score of the game. I kept asking them how it was going and they were replying, ‘Aw no, we can’t tell you that.’ So I was going, ‘Right, well that means we must be losing because otherwise you’d tell me surely.’ But they wouldn’t budge.”
Tyrone were indeed losing, as it turned out. But their 1-12 to 0-9 defeat was the least of his worries that weekend. In the Royal, they decided he didn’t need brain surgery so that was a relief. But he had a long road ahead of him.
Logan counts himself very lucky – his speech wasn’t affected and physically he emerged mostly unscathed. He describes himself as occasionally feeling like he has a flat front left tyre, causing him to veer a little to the side as he’s walking. But otherwise, after 12 months of rest and physio, he is mostly doing fine.
“Listen, I’m just deeply indebted and thankful to everybody. Because when you’re in that vulnerable place you really appreciate every little thing that is done for you. I really ought to be going around thanking everybody in 2025 for everything they did for me in 2024. I had a good three, four months in bed. I really appreciate the loyalty that was shown to me and I want to repay it any way I can.
“Someone summed it up to me not long ago when they said, ‘Before you take sick, you have a hundred problems. When you’re sick, you have one problem.’ That’s summed up my last year in a nutshell. There is an element of everything else fading away. It’s not that it pales into insignificance but you just get a reassessment and a realignment of your life. I think I was reasonably appreciative of all that I had. Now I’m doubly appreciative of the things in life.”
He gets tired, still. Maybe not to the extent of those early months but it’s still there, still a shadow on his tail that he can’t quite shake.
“The best description I got of it was from a cognitive behavioural lady. She said to think of it as being like when you’re learning to drive. Every move you make in the car in those early days, you’re thinking about it. Whereas when you’re a competent driver, you do all these things completely automatically.
“So after a stroke, you’re back to having to think about everything you’re doing. Everything takes that bit more concentration. You feel like you are learning to drive your body again. You’re applying so much brain power to things that you have spent your whole life doing automatically. You get tired so much quicker. So I would still struggle with fatigue to some extent. But in the scheme of the world, it’s a small thing.”
The scheme of the world. Don’t be talking.
Last summer, he got chatting with Jody Gormley, his former midfield partner with Tyrone. Gormley had had a small stroke himself on holidays in the US and they were comparing battle wounds. Little did either of them know that within months, Gormley would be inviting him and all the old crew to a kind of a living wake, telling them all to have a few pints and not to be maudlin about it.
“Jody and I played for a number of years for Tyrone. We ended up managing against each other over Christmas in 2023 when there was a Tyrone All Stars game between the county team and the county champions Trillick, who he was managing. To think that Jody then was brought back to Trillick’s ground in a coffin less than a year later is just hard to fathom.
“It’s just scary. They lost a county final to Errigal Ciarán and then he told everyone the news afterwards that he had cancer. The week of his funeral, he was getting buried and Errigal were only just after winning Ulster. That’s how quick it all was.”
On the day of the 2021 All-Ireland final, Logan’s son Conor was walking down Clonliffe Road when a red-haired guy in shades and a T-shirt stopped him and asked where he got that jersey out of. It was Feargal’s number 8 shirt from the 1995 final and when Conor said, “It’s my dad’s,” Jody Gormley laughed and told him he had the number 9. Telling the story, Feargal reaches for his phone and calls up the photo they took together.
“Look at him there – he was in such great shape long after he finished playing. Jody was super diligent about taking care of himself. We roomed together 30 years ago and even away back then, Jody was all about gym, fruit, water. Gym, fruit, water. This was long before the rest of the sport caught up with him.
“I was there with a few Mars bars, sharing a hotel room and asking did he want to take [Anthony] Tohill or [Brian] McGilligan the next day. He’d take Tohill without even thinking about it, loving the challenge. He was all about physical fitness and taking care of himself. Sometimes it makes you wonder what it’s all about really. It’s just cruel. Cruel for his wife, his family, cruel for everybody.”
The New York writer Pete Hamill had a line about middle age – it hits you more when you realise they’re coming for your regiment now. Logan says there’s a Tyrone version – when they start taking sheep out of our pen, then maybe it’s time to start worrying. If Jody Gormley wasn’t invincible, nobody’s invincible.
“That was just totally out of left field, how Jody was taken away,” he says. “But it was a salutary reminder to all of us about the fragility of life and health. I had that reminder in 2024 as well and I’m just very blessed that I came out through the back end of it.
“It’s the simple things in life that bring everyone the most enjoyment. It’s been a change to me – 2025 is a year where I probably need to reinvent and get on with something. I need to get moving forward again. I don’t know yet what that looks like but I’m full of gratitude to have the chance.”
The storm has passed in Donaghmore. Recovery is ongoing.
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