Personal Life
Canavan is from Glencull, near Ballygawley, County Tyrone and was the tenth of eleven children. His older brother, Pascal, played with him on the Tyrone panel for most of the 1990s. He is married to Finola (sister of former Tyrone team-mate Ronan McGarrity), and has four children, Grainne, Claire, Darragh and Ruairi, and has been a Physical Education teacher in Holy Trinity College, Cookstown, throughout most of his career (Gaelic games are amateur sports). While there, he taught Eoin Mulligan his point-taking technique, and the pair have been known in the media as 'master and student' ever since, particularly by television commentators.
He writes a column for the Gaelic games magazine, Hogan Stand and the Northern Ireland edition of The Daily Mirror. and in 2008, Canavan joined TV3 as a football pundit for their first year of broadcasting live GAA matches.
In 2003, just over a week before Tyrone's Ulster final appearance against Down, Canavan's father, Seán, died. It came as a shock to Canavan, who had thought his father (who was already in hospital) was getting better. He decided to play in the match, stating that he knew, subconsciously " was going to be playing in the Ulster final all along and Daddy certainly wouldn't have wanted to do anything but play."
Canavan has suffered from asthma since he was a child, and has battled throughout his career to control the ailment. He told the Asthma Society of Ireland, "I thought to myself, this is something that I am just going to have to put up with." In later years, however, improved medication has afforded Canavan what he described as, "a better quality of life".
Read more about this topic: Peter Canavan
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