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
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)
“One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)