In the front room of Peggy Gallagher’s three-bedroom, two-bedroom flat in Burnage, south Manchester, hangs a black-and-white photograph of three young boys with their mother.
Two of them, aged two and seven, are instantly recognisable, with their striking eyebrows, bowl-shaped hair and mischievous smiles.
For fifteen years, Peggy, now 81, kept the portrait in a place of honor, praying that these two boys – who once shared a bedroom – would be reunited.
It’s been fifteen years since Oasis, the band that made the Gallagher brothers Liam and Noel world stars, announced their split. The rift had been going on for a long time and both parties said they would never heal it.
Peggy Gallagher with Liam in 1998
The Gallagher family in the mid 70’s. From left to right: Noel, Paul, Liam and Peggy
In the heyday of Britpop, Peggy met Noel and his then wife Meg Mathews in 1999
While news of their reunion last week sparked a lot of excitement among fans, no one was as moved as Peggy.
People who know the proud Irishwoman say she is “happy” that her sons have finally “put the past behind them”, something she has been urging them to do for years.
In fact, the seeds for this reunion were reportedly sown last year during a mother-son spa getaway at Cliveden House in Berkshire, which Liam bought for Peggy’s 80th birthday.
Aware that she was not getting any younger, she is said to have begged her youngest son to make amends with his brother before it was too late. Peggy’s words, it seems, finally hit home.
Because the story of Oasis – the story of the Manchester council estate boys who formed one of the world’s biggest rock ‘n’ roll bands, famous for drunken brawls, trashed hotel rooms, flight bans and years of badmouthing not just each other but fellow Britpop rivals – isn’t just about Liam, 51, and Noel, 57.
Rather, it is a story of a mother’s grief, of broken Christmases and birthdays spent apart, of how she was never allowed to see her beloved grandchildren in the same room together.
“Peggy was the peacemaker,” musician Matt Deighton, who replaced Noel for three months in 2000 when he left the band while on tour, said in an exclusive interview with the Mail last week.
Mothers like her, he adds, “keep people grounded”. And there are few in the brothers’ circle more down-to-earth than Peggy Gallagher, née Sweeney, whose home town of Charlestown, County Mayo, was in ecstasy this week as locals shared their joy that her boys were reunited.
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 no one is more delighted than Peggy.”
John, now in his 80s, remembers the young lads growing up in Manchester and coming to Ireland for the summer holidays. The same photo 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 unlikely to be shared by legions of flight attendants and hotel housekeepers.
“I hope that next summer, when they come over, they’ll stop by and sing us a song.”
Chances are: the Gallagher family still own a holiday home outside Charlestown, and it was nearby, at Granny Margaret’s house in Sonnagh, that they spent countless summers of their youth, crammed into a small cottage with their cousins. Immersing her ‘English’ sons in her Irish heritage has always been important to Peggy, the Charlestown postmaster tells the Mail.
“She wanted them to know the terrain and the land and everything that went with it,” he says. “Peggy Sweeney never forgot her roots.”
Peggy described her “very bad” upbringing in 1996. She was one of 11 children born to William, a laborer, and Margaret. “We never had shoes or socks. At night the girls slept six to a bed: three on the bottom, three on the top. Things didn’t improve when my father left home… he just disappeared, never said goodbye or anything.”
The red brick council house 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 supermarket and a café, working 14-hour shifts for £1 a week.
In the years that followed, young Peggy scrubbed floors, cooked, cleaned, dusted – anything to keep the family going.
When she was 18, she decided it 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 people 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 there too, seven of them living within three streets of each other. It was here, at the Astoria, an Irish club where she liked to dance, that she met Tommy Gallagher, a builder from County Meath.
He was, writes biographer Paolo Hewitt in his book Getting High: The Adventures Of Oasis, ‘a quiet, unassuming young man’ who ‘didn’t drink and didn’t say much’.
They married in 1965, but Peggy soon discovered that Tommy had a mean streak, which worsened after he discovered drink and they had three sons: Paul in 1966, Noel in 1967 and William (Liam) in 1972.
“Tommy was never the type to fuss over little babies, so I took care of them, got up with them in the night and still went to work. I had no choice,” Peggy once said.
‘Paul and Noel grew up not really knowing their father; they were just afraid of him.
‘If they cried, he beat them. If they stammered, [both boys had bad stutters as children]he beat them.’
When Liam was born, she adds, “everything went dramatically wrong.”
The baby suffered from severe eczema and psoriasis and cried non-stop for six months. Peggy gathered the strength she had learned from her own tough childhood and decided to take control of their future and leave.
In 1984, she secured a council flat in the suburb of Burnage. One night, while Tommy was drinking, they loaded their furniture into a van and set off.
“I couldn’t tell him when we were leaving because he would have killed us,” Peggy says matter-of-factly.
‘I never wanted to have contact with him again, or see him again. Neither did Noel, Paul or Liam.’
Life improved for the young Gallagher brothers after their father disappeared from the picture. Apart from a disastrous reunion arranged by a newspaper in 1996, they have not seen him since.
Neighbours on the estate where they grew up recall watching Liam, Noel and Paul play together outside their redbrick home. Peggy recalls that there were no tensions then. When the brothers hit it big, with their first record Definitely Maybe becoming the fastest-selling debut album in British history in 1994, they tried to persuade Peggy to upgrade her council house to a country house in Cheshire, but – ever the humble one – she refused (although the Mail understands she now spends much of her time on a nearby estate, in an attempt to avoid the pilgrimages of fans to her doorstep).
“All she asked was if we had a garden gate that squeaked really badly, and she said, ‘What if you could replace the gate,’” Noel recalled in a 2021 interview.
What she didn’t like, however, were the stories that came out about her sons’ misbehavior on tour.
After their infamous backstage brawl in Paris in 2009, which led to their split and the ensuing 15 years of acrimony, Peggy refused to get involved.
But in her private life, it was a source of anxiety. “I worry all the time; I’m the biggest worrier in the world,” she admitted in an interview.
And in a 2019 documentary, Liam said, “The way I see it, honey, life is very short and if something happens to either of you…”
Yet the rift refused to heal, with bad blood between Liam and Noel trickling down to the next generation – something Peggy dreaded. She relished being a grandmother to Liam’s three children (he never met his fourth, a daughter living in America who was the result of a brief 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 when she was just starting her modeling career, telling her: “You look like your dad in a blonde wig.”
Later that year, his brother Lennon, 18, lashed out again, mocking Anais online. Liam also clashed repeatedly with Noel’s ex-wife, Sara McDonald.
The incidents hit Peggy particularly hard, who once said it would be “terrible” if Lennon and Anais, who are only four months apart in age, didn’t know each other.
The residents of Burnage saw first-hand how sad Peggy was when the brothers and their children visited separately – never together.
There were no big family birthdays, no Christmases at home with the whole clan. Photos over the years show her posing, smiling, with one side of the family, then the other.
Neighbor Bernard McClennan, 75, a retired floor layer who knew Tommy Gallagher, remembers Noel only coming down to visit: “He would come down when it suited [Manchester] “City plays.” Another neighbor, 54-year-old John Speed, notes, “I don’t know how they get back together. They hate each other to death — they really do, in a big way.”
There were already signs of rapprochement when Anais, Gene and Lennon were photographed together at a Chanel fashion show in Manchester last December.
When the Oasis reunion was officially announced on Tuesday, millions of fans went into mass hysteria, demanding tickets, some for £500 each.
“Wembley Stadium is getting a real band that’s shaking the walls again,” says former member Matt Deighton, whose album Today Become Forever was released last year and who remembers “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 shared by Peggy, who politely declined to give interviews last week, preferring instead to celebrate this major milestone in her own way: quietly, privately and out of the spotlight.
As she once said, “If you don’t have a family, you end up with nothing.”
If they did it for anyone, it was for their mother.
- Additional reporting: Nicola Byrne and Stephanie Condron