“He was completely unco-ordinated, though he had great stamina and strength But he became assistant treasurer as soon as he came of age. The place was pounds 140,000 in debt when he took over and he got it in the black.” He also raised the money to build a massive new clubhouse, large sports hall, new stand, and most recently had the entire pitch relaid.Sean, a jovial character with a great laugh, was, as Tom put it with masterly Irish paradox, “a loud but quiet man”; he had a big voice but a gentle personality. Sean was so proud he hugged him fit to break.”But the passion of Sean Brown’s life was Bellaghy’s Gaelic Athletic Association football club. And it was almost certainly that which brought about his violent end. One of his apprentices recently won the Northern Ireland Skills Competition. “He was born to teach,” recalls Albert McClelland, who taught welding alongside Sean for 18 years “He just seemed to have a way with kids.

Yet his ambition remained and for the next four years, after work, he went to night school, where he met his future wife, Bridie, and obtained sufficient qualifications to land a job in a firm which made destination indicators for buses, after which came a decade making ejector seats for aircraft before discovering his true vocation and spending the next 30 years teaching young engineering apprentices. There weren’t too many Catholics got into grammar school; Sean was bright enough but the family couldn’t afford it So he went to Magherafelt Technical College for two years. He was no good at woodwork – he almost took his fingers off with a plane; at metalwork he found a talent and decided he wanted to be an engineer.”But engineering was then a Protestant job so, at 16, Sean started work bottling milk in a dairy farm. He was determined to do well; he always did his homework straight away, where I always had to be called in from the fields. His cousin Tom Scullion recalled playing football in bare feet with a rag ball. His brother Seamus, returned from 33 years in Australia, remembered the plays Sean would write for his three brothers to perform in the barn on winter evenings by the light of an oil lamp.

Later there were long teenage bike rides to distant dances in the company of Protestant friends. “It was before the Troubles and we were all just poor people together then,” says one relative.”We used to walk together to the village school,” says Seamus. “He was always the one to stop fights, and stopped me going with the others to pinch apples from the orchard He was the eldest, and had a sense of responsibility. They look back to the boy who lifted potatoes for the local farmer in the spring, went to the Moss to cut turf in the summer and picked blackberries as the autumn approached to get the money to buy new shoes for school It is a jumble of memories. They talk of his birth 61 years ago in a labourer’s bungalow, two miles outside the village where his father worked at the local clay factory. It seemed a world away from the burglars, muggers and rapists whose spectres haunt life in the inner city.