Terrorists entered the building with guns in their hands and hate in their hearts.
The light was fading on the 1980s and it had long since disappeared out of Ulster. Day after day, the cycle of news told you about deaths, unemployment and emigration.
And this was to be another one of those afternoons, a January weekday, the dark sky overhead reflective of the national mood.
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While murder was playing out in one corner of Down, a few miles away there was fun and devilment, a 16-year-old prankster putting posters on school walls advertising the upcoming comic relief.
A couple of hours later, when the kid was summoned to the headmaster’s office, his initial fear was to think he was in trouble, given how he hadn’t sought permission to stick the posters up.
It was the look on the principal’s face which hinted at something greater.
“You need to take a seat,” he said to the boy.
There was a moment’s silence, broken by words that have stayed with the boy since.
“Your father has been shot.”
“Is he dead?” the boy replied.
“Yes.”
The boy’s name was Patrick Kielty and he tells this story in Once Upon A Time in Northern Ireland, the BBC’s recent series on The Troubles.
This September Kielty will be crossing a broadcasting as well as a geographic border, landing in RTE as the fourth permanent host of The Late, Late Show but the first out of that quartet to have an enduring link to the GAA.
To say Gaelic football has ran through his life is not an exaggeration when you consider the most tragic element of those 52 years, Jack Kielty’s 1988 murder by loyalist paramilitaries, stemmed from his father’s position as Dundrum GAC chairman.
Kielty explains: “My dad was a building contractor.
“And rather than pay protection money to loyalist paramilitaries, he decided to go to the police. You see my dad was chairman of the local GAA club (Dundrum in Down), which would have been considered a Catholic organisation. So you put both of those together, that was reason enough for them to kill.”
Video images of Kielty, and his older brother, John, carrying his father’s coffin cut to the soul. The pair were teenagers, boys catapulted into adulthood, and it’s only when you hear Kielty speak about the experience now that you begin to imagine what he went through.
The headmaster’s office. The intake of breath. The funeral. The coffin. The hundreds of sympathisers. The gathering knowledge that his father’s love of the GAA was a considerable factor in his execution.
The youngest of his two boys would have been excused for turning his back on the GAA after that, going his own path, trying to leave the past behind.
But it hasn’t been that way.
Instead the links have stayed unbroken.
You may not know that your new host of The Late, Late was once the youngest ever delegate at the GAA’s congress, representing Down, along with his brother, at the 1987 congress.
You may not know he coached his home club, Dundrum, at underage level, that he was a Down minor for three years, making the team in 1988 and 1989, having to be satisfied with a place on the bench in 1987, the year Down’s minors won the All-Ireland.
“And that’s why,” Kielty joked when asked about this in 2017. “When I actually got onto the side, we didn’t win a thing. But when I was a sub, we won. There’s a definite correlation there.”
For what it’s worth, he is remembered as a decent player, one of his contemporaries from that era recalling his performances in goal. “He was a fine club player,” says Michael Tucker, who played for Tullylish against Dundrum in Division 3 of Down football. “We only came across him a few times. He stood out. He was good at his job.”
He’d have had to be to win an All-Ireland medal, even if it was as a sub.
Part of his story, indeed part of the tragedy, is that it was only a month prior to his father’s murder that the two Kielty boys received their All-Ireland medals at a special presentation.
That should have been their stand-out childhood memories.
A gunman ended such hopes of innocence.
The story since is the one we know more about, the funnyman’s ascent to the stage, first at St Patrick’s Grammar in Downpatrick, when a teacher warned him he’d be dropped from the school Gaelic football team if he didn’t act out a sketch.
Scared beforehand, energised thereafter, he sensed he could do something.
And he did, making a name for himself at The Empire Laughs Back in Belfast’s city centre before graduating to bigger platforms on BBC and Channel 4.
While all this was going on, his old club carried on. His brother became Dundrum chairman, carrying the baton his father once ran with. They opened a new pitch in 2009, named after Jack Kielty. Paddy the guest of honour.
Then a year later, Down shocked everyone, including themselves, by reaching an All-Ireland final, their first in 16 years, one they could, indeed should, have won, before getting schooled in the final quarter by a more experienced Cork side.
That night the show had to go on, even without the Sam Maguire in attendance, as 1600 people gathered in the ballroom of the CityWest hotel, Kielty invited to compere an event which had been billed as a celebration but which had the potential to be a disaster.
That it didn’t end up that way is testament to Kielty’s ability as a performer, firstly, but also his local knowledge.
Some of the gags were predictable, a reference to the CityWest’s location on the Naas Road. “City West? My ass. This is Mullingar,” he joked.
As he spoke, an eastern Europen waitress passed by the stage.
"If you want to show your appreciation, give them a tip,” Kielty said. “Or alternatively, marry them and make them legal residents in this country. Cead Míle Falski.”
He was on a roll.
"I would like to pay tribute to the players at the top of the room," Kielty said. "I’d also like to thank the people in the middle of the room who have all paid for their tickets. Then of course, there are the people at the back from Kilcoo who have sneaked in."
Boos mixed with laughs for that gag but he was unperturbed.
A Dundrum GAC man first, a Down man second, Kielty spoke proudly of fellow clubman Paul McComiskey’s performance that afternoon, when he scored three points from play before being substituted. That was his cue to bring Seamus Walsh, who was Down’s chairman at the time, and another Dundrum native, to the stage.
“Don’t worry, Seamus,” Kielty said upon greeting him. “Wee James (McCartan, the Down manager) won’t drag you off halfway through your speech.”
The jokes continued and as we sat in the audience and laughed our way through the routine, we didn’t think too deeply about any potential pain lurking behind the funnyman’s smile.
But this year he has revealed it, firstly on The Tommy Tiernan show and then this week on Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland .
“I wanted to be the person my dad wanted me to be,” Kielty said on the BBC programme.
“I wanted to do something, lead my life and be happy. And so that was the backdrop to my university years and getting into stand-up.
“The sense of humour is very strong in Northern Ireland, having fun at a bar, having craic, because if you are having fun, you don’t have to talk about yourself. Nobody wanted to ask how are you? That was terrifying. That takes a moment to work out how I am.”
Now as a 51-year-old man he has belatedly made that journey of self-discovery.
The lucky ones are RTE. In a week when confidence in the station have been shaken to the core, following the revelation of how Kielty’s predecessor, Ryan Tubridy, was paid, the programme’s survival is in desperate need of a fresh voice.
That’s a burden most would struggle with.
Then you think of the trauma a 16-year-old endured 35 years ago and you know this battle is child’s play compared to that fight.
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