The first time Manus Brennan realised Jim McGuinness might be different, the boy was somewhere between five feet nothing and just tall enough to see over a basketball.

This was St Columba’s Comprehensive in Glenties, where Donegal’s hard winds and harder lessons seem to swirl together like the sea breeze off Gweebarra Bay. 

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“He was a great young fella,” McGuiness’s former PE teacher Brennan says. “Just mad about sport. He picked things up fast and was prepared to put in the practice to get it right.” 

That sentence, Brennan will tell you, could be carved into the stone of McGuinness’s career. Now 13 years on from dragging the county out of the footballing wilderness, he’s back. 


Manus Brennan and Jim McGuinness

But it’s been a long road from Glenties to the steps of the Hogan Stand. And McGuinness’s road has been steeper than most. He lost his older brother Charles, who had a heart condition, just before he started secondary school. 

“Charles was very sporty, very handsome, just a great big brother to look up to,” Brennan recalls.  McGuinness was still a child, and even if he didn’t fully understand it at the time, grief like that leaves a mark.  Later, in 1998, he lost his brother Mark in a car accident. 

“They were very special people in Jim’s life,” Brennan says. “We talk about the glory days and what Jim has achieved, but these are details and major moments in his life that made him who he is.” 

So when McGuinness talks about family and support, it’s not management jargon. It’s lived truth. The scaffolding of his coaching philosophy was built out of loss and love. 

“He could only bring the experiences of his own life to his management style,” Brennan says. “That idea of togetherness came from his family and the place he’s from.” 

In 2014, St Columba’s put up a portrait of their most famous past pupil, flanked by his motto: Focus. Commit. Believe. Achieve.  It’s easy to roll your eyes at that kind of thing now until you remember that McGuinness didn’t finish school the first time round.

He left early, only to come back to education three years after winning an All-Ireland medal in 1992. Brennan and Adult Education Officer Michael Fox met him as he came back to start the Leaving Cert cycle, sitting the examination in 1997.

“Once he decided to do that, I knew he wanted to change something in his life,” Brennan says. 

And change it he did. Letterkenny’s old tech, as it was known – Donegal ETB under the VTOS Programme –  then Tralee IT, University of Ulster, Jordanstown and John Moore’s University in Liverpool.

“That was the real turning point,” Brennan says. “Jim blossomed and really started to enjoy his football. That was probably the most formative time of his life and I feel his time playing at university was nearly more important than his county career.”

He had that peculiar spark – someone who wasn’t always keen on books, but always interested in learning. McGuinness began to fuse the sport he loved with a growing interest in systems, in performance, in people.

He hoovered up ideas from basketball, from soccer, from whatever caught his eye. And then he used them. Brennan insists basketball is still under the surface of everything McGuinness does. The pressing. The transition play. The notion that everyone attacks and everyone defends.

“I remember the Dublin semi-final in 2011,” Brennan adds. “It was the first time I saw a team put a full-court press on a Gaelic football pitch.”

Ideas borrowed from other codes, reshaped for the GAA. But it’s not just about systems. It’s about people.

“His greatest skill is as a teacher,” Brennan says. “That unique ability to get the best out of people. To understand who they are and fill them with belief. He gets that coming from a great family and a great community in Glenties. 

“Those might be only small things in the larger sense, but that is what shaped him and his footballing career. The idea of being a part of a family and supporting each other, and that’s what the people of Glenties have.

“It perhaps all stems from Jim’s mother, Maureen, who is the true legend of the McGuinness clan.”

When McGuinness left his position as manager in 2014, the school he attended, like the rest of Donegal, had come to see him as not just a former pupil, but a symbol of what could be achieved through absolute dedication.

“He wasn’t your typical person,” Brennan admits. “Maybe at the time, people saw him as just another student or kid, but reflecting now, he wasn’t. He had a really hard road to travel in life, and that never stopped him from embracing tough challenges.


A basketball team at Glenties Comprehensive, back Row L to R, Marcus Flannery, Adrian Brennan, Patrick Roarty, Conal Gallagher, Nicky King, Manus Brennan. Front Row L to R, John Gildea, Jim McGuinness, Manus Friel, Kieran Lynch, Connell McLoone

“That’s why I was never surprised that he took the Donegal job when he did. Or when he went to Scotland with Celtic.”

That willingness to embrace the unknown, to walk into the eye of the storm, has always marked McGuinness out. The first time, he lifted a county. This time, he inherited a team in disarray and within a year, he’s now brought Donegal to within 70 minutes of glory.

“I wasn’t surprised he came back,” Brennan says. “Donegal needed him. But it’s not easy to repeat what you did before.”

And yet he has. They were in the doldrums in 2023. Now, they are transformed. That doesn’t happen by accident.

“It’s about belief,” Brennan says. “That feeling that no matter who you’re playing, you believe you can beat whoever is in front of you.”

It’s easy to forget, now that McGuinness is back on the biggest stage, that this is a man who once walked away from school. A man who only came back because he was hungry to learn.

“For a man who’d already won an All-Ireland to go back and do the Leaving Cert – it takes guts,” Brennan says.  “He may not have been the Jim McGuinness we all know now, but back then, as far as I was concerned, he showed that it’s never too late in life and you have to always keep yourself in the game.

“He was a learner, and he still has this incredible ability, even in his 50s, to learn and want to learn. Even before Jim was famous, I used to say to the kids when I was teaching, particularly the ones that weren’t working hard at school, that it’s never too late to achieve in life and I used Jim as an example.”

Even as his career pulled him away – to Celtic, to Beijing, to the elite level of professional sport – he stayed rooted. 

When Brennan retired from teaching in 2014, McGuinness came back to speak at the school graduation. No fuss. He showed up out of respect for his former teacher.

“Jim turned up at the sixth year graduation evening in the Comprehensive School,” Brennan says. “He was a surprise guest speaker. I was the Leaving Cert Year Head and this gesture meant a lot to me personally at the time. That tells you who he is. Even that night, he was asking questions of the teachers – how do you spot talent early, how do you develop it? He was at Celtic by then, but he was still learning.

“Nobody could foretell what he was going to achieve. But that just shows he is a natural at what he does.”

There’s a famous quote from Maya Angelou – an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist – that says people will forget what you said and what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. Jim McGuinness makes people believe they can be better than they are.