Although the Wolfe Tones Club dates from 1952, there’s nearly a century of structured Gaelic games tradition in Kildress.  Previous local clubs included Dunamore Red Hand (playing league football in 1911); Dunamore St Patrick’s; Kildress St Mary’s (Tyrone Junior finalists n 1938; & Murnells Wolfe Tones.

The Wolfe Tones Club was deliberately formed to provide a single, parish-wide club.  Since its foundation it has, like many others right across the Ireland, painstakingly grown to enjoy a strength that a one time could not have seemed possible.  GAA Clubs mirror their communities and the Wolfe Tones story reflects that of Kildress… Difficult times; limited resources; several setbacks; the odds seemingly stacked against it… but all the time a firm belief that this place; its people; and this work were important and that the future could be made better than the present and the past.

For its first decade, Kildress was a junior club, becoming one of the stronger ones in East Tyrone but frustratingly unable to prove itself as the best in the County overall.  The big breakthrough came in 1966 when the county Championship was won, an achievement that created a momentum all of its own, and one that has never since faltered.  The club’s base at Gortacladdy was bought on the back of that title and five years later the Wolfe Tones were Tyrone Intermediate Champions.  The 1970s saw Kildress make a bit of a mark in Senior football… but as poor ecominic times returned, so too did emigration and by the mid 1980s a weakened Kildress was back in the Junior grade.

It took a decade to get out of Junior football but the winning of a second Tyrone Junior title in 1994 with a young and talented team was to kick-start something special.  By the Millennium, the Wolfe Tones were playing Senior football again and as Tyrone entered the most glorious era in its GAA history, Kildress too “dined at the top table”: next year will see Kildress in the Senior grade for an unprecedented ninth successive year.  Like Tyrone, in Kildress it hasn’t just all been about the adults and after long years of often just making up the numbers at underage level, since the late 1980s the Clubs youth teams have been consistently strong and successful.

Gortacladdy too has changed dramatically with the Clubrooms rebuilt and extended; the pitch re-laid; and a stand built.  In 2003, that unforgettable year for the GAA in Tyrone, another landmark event happened when the local Cenel Eoghain Ladies Gaelic Football Club merged with the Wolfe Tones.  The ambition of the early Fifties- a single parish GAA Club- was at last fully realised. 

We’ve now bought the land we need for a second, floodlit pitch and have the promise of Sports Council funding to help build that pitch.  But they won’t do it for us… and anyway, it wouldn’t be the same if they did.

Our aim is to continue that development at Gortacladdy.  In the 1950s and 1960s Kildress put one team on the field; now we put out 14.  Then we helped twenty young men play football; now we provide structured Gaelic activities for about 250 of our people, boys and girls, men and women.  We’re proud of our place and proud of our club.  We believe our place, Kildress, is the better for having a GAA Club in it.  The better our Club gets, the better our place gets.