Hanging in the front room of Peggy Gallagher’s three-bed semi in Burnage, south Manchester, is a black and white photograph of three young boys with their mother.
Two of them, aged just two and seven, are instantly recognisable, with their raffish eyebrows, bowl-cut hair and mischievous grins.
For 15 long years, Peggy, now 81, has kept the portrait in pride of place, praying that these two boys – who once shared a bedroom – might come together again.
It has been a decade and a half since Oasis, the band that propelled Gallagher brothers Liam and Noel to global superstardom, announced their shock break-up, fuelled by a long-running rift that both sides swore would never heal.
Peggy Gallagher with Liam in 1998
The Gallagher family in the mid-1970s. From left, Noel, Paul, Liam and Peggy
In the Britpop heyday, Peggy with Noel and his then-wife Meg Mathews in 1999
And while last week’s news of their reunion sent fans into a frenzy, no one has been quite as moved as Peggy.
Those who know the proud Irishwoman say she is ‘thrilled’ her sons have finally ‘put the past behind them’, something she has been urging them to do for years.
In fact, it’s said that the seeds of this reunion may well have been sown last year, during a mother-and-son spa break at Cliveden House in Berkshire – bought by Liam for Peggy’s 80th birthday.
Aware that she wasn’t getting any younger, she’s said to have pleaded with her youngest son to patch things up with his brother before it was too late. Peggy’s words, it seems, finally hit home.
For the Oasis story – that of the Manchester council estate lads who formed one of the biggest rock-and-roll bands in the world, who were famed for their drunken brawls, the trashed hotel rooms, airline bans and years of bad-mouthing not only each other but any other Britpop rival – isn’t just about Liam, 51, and Noel, 57.
Rather, it’s a tale of a mother’s heartache, of broken Christmases and birthdays spent apart, of never being allowed to see her beloved grandchildren together in one room.
‘Peggy was the peacemaker,’ says musician Matt Deighton, who stood in for Noel for three months in 2000 when he quit the band during a tour, speaking exclusively to the Mail last week.
Mothers like her, he adds, ‘keep people down to earth’. And there are few in the brothers’ orbit more down-to-earth than Peggy Gallagher, nee Sweeney, whose hometown of Charlestown, County Mayo, was in raptures this week as locals shared her joy that her boys were back together.
John Finan, who runs JJ Finan’s pub on the town square and knew Peggy’s late mother, Margaret, describes Liam and Noel – without a hint of irony – as ‘gentlemen’.
‘We’re delighted… everyone in the west of Ireland is,’ he says. ‘But none is more delighted than Peggy.’
John, now in his 80s, remembers the young boys, who grew up in Manchester, coming to Ireland for summer holidays. The same picture that hangs in the Gallagher house can be found above the fireplace in his pub.
‘Very nice, respectable young men. I couldn’t fault them,’ he says of Liam and Noel – a sentiment probably not shared by legions of flight attendants and hotel housekeepers.
‘I hope they’ll drop in and give us a tune next summer if they’re passing.’
Chances are high: the Gallagher family still owns a holiday home outside Charlestown, and it was nearby, at Granny Margaret’s house in Sonnagh, that they spent countless summers in their youth, crammed into a tiny cottage with their cousins. Immersing her ‘English’ sons in her Irish heritage has always mattered to Peggy, the Charlestown postmaster tells the Mail.
‘She wanted them to know the turf and the land and everything that goes with it,’ he says. ‘Peggy Sweeney never forgot her roots.’
Speaking in 1996, Peggy described her ‘very poor’ upbringing. She was one of 11 children born to William, a labourer, and Margaret. ‘We never had shoes or socks. At night, the girls slept six to a bed: three at the bottom, three at the top. Things didn’t improve when my father left home… he just disappeared, never said goodbye or anything.’
The red-brick house council house in in Burnage, Manchester, where Liam and Noel grew up
To support her mother, who had a weak heart and was often ill, Peggy left school at 13 and got her first job, working in a grocery store and pub, doing 14-hour shifts for £1 a week.
In the years that followed, young Peggy would scrub floors, cook, clean, dust – anything to keep the family afloat.
When she was 18, she decided enough was enough. As she told Ireland’s The Late Late Show in 1996: ‘I went to England. There was nothing else for me. Plus, there were too many at home – I had to move.’
With her mother’s blessing, she settled in Manchester where there was a thriving Irish community. In the years that followed, eight of her siblings moved over too, seven of them living within three streets of one another. It was here, in the Astoria, an Irish club where she liked to go dancing, that she met Tommy Gallagher, a builder from County Meath.
He was, says biographer Paolo Hewitt in his book Getting High: The Adventures Of Oasis, ‘a quiet, unassuming young man’ who ‘didn’t drink, didn’t say much’.
They married in 1965 but Peggy soon realised Tommy had a mean streak, which worsened after he discovered drink, and after their three sons arrived: Paul in 1966, Noel in 1967 and William (Liam) in 1972.
‘Tommy was never the type to bother with small babies, so I was looking after them, getting up in the night with them, and I still went out to work. I had no choice,’ Peggy once said.
‘Paul and Noel grew up not really knowing their dad; they were just scared of him.
‘If they cried, he hit them. If they stammered [both boys had bad stutters as children], he hit them.’
When Liam was born, she adds, ‘everything started to go drastically wrong’.
The baby suffered badly from eczema and psoriasis, and cried non-stop for six months. Summoning the strength she’d learned from her own harsh childhood, Peggy decided to take control of their future and get out.
In 1984, she secured a council house in the suburb of Burnage, and, after dark one night while Tommy was out drinking, they loaded their furniture into a van – and left.
‘I couldn’t tell him when we were going to leave because he would have killed us,’ says Peggy, matter-of-factly.
‘I never wanted any contact with him, or to see him again. Neither did Noel, Paul or Liam.’
Life for the young Gallagher brothers improved with their father out of the picture and, save for one disastrous reunion, orchestrated by a newspaper in 1996, they haven’t seen him since.
Neighbours on the estate where they grew up remember seeing Liam, Noel and Paul playing together outside their red-brick house. Back then, Peggy recalls, there were no tensions. When the brothers hit the big time, with their first record Definitely Maybe becoming the fastest selling debut album in British history in 1994, they tried to get Peggy to upgrade her council house to a mansion in Cheshire, but – ever humble – she refused (though the Mail understands she now spends much of her time at a nearby property, a bid to avoid fans’ pilgrimages to her door).
‘The one thing she requested was, we had a garden gate which was really squeaky, and she said, “If you could just change the gate,”’ Noel recalled in an interview in 2021.
What she didn’t like, however, were the stories that were emerging of her boys’ bad behaviour on tour.
After their notorious backstage punch-up in Paris in 2009, which led to their split and ensuing 15 years of vitriol, Peggy refused to get involved.
Privately, however, it was a source of anguish. ‘I worry all the time; I’m the world’s worst worrier,’ she admitted in an interview.
And, speaking to Liam in a 2019 documentary, she said: ‘The way I look at it, darling, life is very short and if anything happened to either one of you…’
Yet the rift refused to heal, with bad blood between Liam and Noel filtering down to the next generation – something Peggy had dreaded. She relished being a grandmother to Liam’s three children (he has never met his fourth, a daughter who lives in America and was the result of a short-lived affair while he was married to Nicole Appleton) and Noel’s three.
In 2017, Liam’s son Gene, then 16, insulted Noel’s daughter Anais, 17, on social media as she launched her modelling career, telling her: ‘U look like ur dad with a blonde wig on.’
Later that year, his brother Lennon, 18, took another swipe, mocking Anais online. Liam also repeatedly clashed with Noel’s ex-wife, Sara McDonald.
The incidents hit Peggy especially hard – she once said it would be ‘terrible’ if Lennon and Anais, who are just four months apart in age, didn’t know one another.
Burnage locals saw Peggy’s sadness first-hand as the brothers, and their children, visited separately – never together.
There were no big family birthdays, no Christmases back home with the whole clan. Pictures over the years show her posed, smiling, with one side of the family, then the other.
Neighbour Bernard McClennan, 75, a retired floor-fitter who used to know Tommy Gallagher, recalls Noel visiting solo: ‘He would come down when it corresponded with [Manchester] City playing.’ Another neighbour, 54-year-old John Speed, remarks: ‘I cannot understand how they’re getting back together. They hate each other’s guts – proper, in a big way.’
There were signs of a rapprochement last December, when Anais, Gene and Lennon were pictured together at a Chanel fashion show in Manchester.
When the Oasis reunion was officially announced on Tuesday, it sparked mass hysteria among millions of fans, who have been clamouring for tickets, some costing £500 apiece.
‘Wembley Stadium will get a real band shaking its walls again,’ says former member Matt Deighton, whose album Today Become Forever was released last year, and who recalls ‘pure euphoric, powerful rock ’n’ roll’ during his time with the band. ‘They’re the people’s choice. May they continue.’
A sentiment no doubt echoed by Peggy, who politely declined to do interviews last week, instead preferring to mark this huge milestone in her own way: quietly, privately, away from the spotlight.
As she once put it: ‘At the end of the day, if you haven’t got your family, you haven’t got anything.’
If they’ve done it for anyone, there’s no doubt: they’ve done it for their mum.
- Additional reporting: Nicola Byrne and Stephanie Condron