When Joe Deacy chose to reacquaint himself with Ireland, the country where his grandparents were born, he made a decision that led to the happiest years of his life and his eventual death. You can draw a five-year line, straight from his first visit to a local Irish club as a teenager in England, to the day he was found unconscious and bleeding from the face on a driveway in the County Mayo countryside aged 21.
Joe died on 13 August 2017. Every August since, his family and friends come to County Mayo, walk up to the gates of the house where he was found and peacefully demand answers for his death. To this day, no one has been found accountable.
I didn’t know Joe, but I knew of him. We both grew up in St Albans, Hertfordshire, and were in the same school year, though we went to different schools. Several of my friends played football with Joe; such was his passion for West Ham that he converted one of my classmates into a die-hard supporter.
A common refrain from people who knew Joe is that they can’t remember how they met: he just burst into their life. He organised trips to Cheltenham races, inviting friends from St Albans, classmates from his secondary school near Watford and his Gaelic football teammates. He was a social mixologist, shaking people together in new combinations.
Every so often Facebook reminds me that Joe and I are still ‘friends’. His profile is still there, the word ‘Remembering’ fixed above his name. Its pictures preserve him in joyous, laddish 2010s aspic: rocking a fedora, flanked by mates, pint in hand. He was blond and sharp-chinned, with a puckish grin.
Each August, a year’s worth of grief and commemoration for Joe’s death is compacted into a single weekend: a charity Gaelic football match in St Albans on Saturday; then a walk to the house in Mayo on Sunday. The game is the sunnier of the two events. People sip Magners and Club Orange by the pitch, chatting in English and Irish accents. Parents and kids share Tayto crisps; toddlers and dogs on harnesses – markers of an adulthood Joe never attained.
After the game, there is a barbecue and live music in the clubhouse. ‘Today is a fitting testament to what Joe was about,’ reads a homemade programme for the match. ‘To be surrounded by his family and friends in a sporting environment, and all while consuming copious amounts of alcohol, was his idea of heaven!’ The teams are St Colmcille’s, Joe’s old team, who train at the Irish Club, and The Hammers, Joe’s family and friends, named for the club he supported with his Wembley-born father, Adrian.
Adrian’s parents, Martin and Ann Deacy, met in London but were from Bohola and Swinford, towns five miles apart in County Mayo in the west of Ireland. That meant Joe spent several summers in Mayo as a young boy. Yet it was only when he was around 16, according to Adrian, that Joe started to play Gaelic football.
