In the living room of Peggy Gallagher’s three-bedroom terraced house in Burnage, south Manchester, hangs a black-and-white photograph of three young children with their mother.
Two of them, aged two and seven, are instantly recognisable, with their scruffy eyebrows, bowl-cut hair and mischievous smiles.
For 15 long years, Peggy, now 81, has kept the portrait in a place of honor, praying that these two boys, who once shared a bedroom, could be together again.
It’s been a decade and a half since Oasis, the band that propelled Gallagher brothers Liam and Noel to global stardom, announced their shock split, fueled 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. Left to right: Noel, Paul, Liam and Peggy.
At the height of Britpop, Peggy with Noel and his then wife Meg Mathews in 1999
And while news of last week’s reunion left fans in a frenzy, no one has been as moved as Peggy.
Those who know the proud Irishwoman say she is “delighted” that her children have finally “put the past behind them” – something she has been urging them to do for years.
Indeed, the seeds of this reunion are said to have been sown last year, during a mother-son spa holiday at Cliveden House in Berkshire, bought by Liam for Peggy’s 80th birthday.
Aware that she wasn’t getting any younger, she is said to have begged her youngest son to patch things up with his brother before it was too late. It seems Peggy’s words finally hit home.
The story of Oasis – the suburban Manchester lads who formed one of the world’s biggest rock and roll bands, infamous for drunken brawls, trashed hotel rooms, flight bans and years of trash-talking not just each other but every other Britpop rival – is not just about Liam, 51, and Noel, 57.
Rather, it is the story of a mother’s grief, of broken Christmases and birthdays spent apart, of never being able 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 left the band while on tour, speaking exclusively to the Mail last week.
Mothers like her, she adds, “keep people grounded.” And there are few people in the brothers’ orbit who are more down to earth than Peggy Gallagher, née Sweeney, whose hometown of Charlestown in County Mayo was ecstatic this week as locals shared their joy at the fact that her sons were together again.
John Finan, who runs the JJ Finan pub in the village green and knew Peggy’s late mother Margaret, describes Liam and Noel, without a trace 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 80, remembers young people growing up in Manchester who would come to Ireland for summer holidays. The same painting that hangs in the Gallagher home can be found above the fireplace in their pub.
“They are very nice, respectable young men. I can’t find any fault with them,” she says of Liam and Noel, a sentiment probably not shared by legions of hotel hostesses and chambermaids.
“I hope they come and give us a tune next summer if they agree.”
The Gallagher family most likely still own a holiday home outside Charlestown, and it was there, at Grandma Margaret’s home in Sonnagh, that they spent countless summers of their youth, crammed into a tiny cottage with their cousins. Immersing her “English” children in their Irish heritage has always been important to Peggy, Charlestown’s postmaster tells the Mail.
“I wanted them to know the territory and everything that goes with it,” he says. “Peggy Sweeney never forgot her roots.”
In 1996, Peggy described her “very poor” childhood. 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 in the bottom bed and three in the top. Things didn’t get any better when my father left home – he just disappeared, never said goodbye or anything.”
The red brick town hall house in Burnage, Manchester, where Liam and Noel grew up
To help 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 a pub, doing 14-hour shifts for £1 a week.
In the years that followed, young Peggy scrubbed floors, cooked, cleaned, dusted… 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 people at home; I had to move out.”
With her mother’s blessing, she settled in Manchester, where there was a thriving Irish community. Over the next few years, eight of her siblings also moved there, seven of them living within three streets of each other. It was there, at 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, modest young man” who “didn’t drink and didn’t talk much”.
They married in 1965, but Peggy soon realised that Tommy had a wicked streak, which worsened after he discovered drink and after their three sons were born: Paul in 1966, Noel in 1967 and William (Liam) in 1972.
“Tommy was never one to worry about little babies, so I looked after them, got up at night with them and went out 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 hit them. If they stuttered (both boys stuttered badly 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. Peggy, summoning the strength she had learned from her own tough childhood, decided to take control of her future and get out of there.
In 1984, he secured a council house in the suburb of Burnage and one night after dark, while Tommy was out drinking, they loaded his furniture into a van and drove away.
“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 or see him again. Neither did Noel, Paul or Liam.”
The lives of the young Gallagher brothers improved with the disappearance of their father and, apart from a disastrous reunion orchestrated by a newspaper in 1996, they have not 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 rose to fame, with their first album, Definitely Maybe, becoming the biggest-selling debut album in British history in 1994, they tried to get Peggy to swap her council house for a mansion in Cheshire, but she, ever humble, refused (although the Mail understands she now spends much of her time at a nearby property, in an attempt to avoid fans’ pilgrimages to her doorstep).
“The only thing he asked for was that we had a garden gate that squeaked a lot and he said, ‘If you could just replace the gate,'” Noel recalled in an interview in 2021.
What she didn’t like, however, were the stories that emerged about her children’s bad behavior during the tour.
Following their notorious backstage row in Paris in 2009, which led to their split and the ensuing 15 years of feuding, Peggy refused to get involved.
Privately, however, it was a source of anguish. “I worry all the time; I’m the person who worries the most,” she admitted in an interview.
And, speaking to Liam in a 2019 documentary, she said: ‘The way I see it, baby, is that life is so short and if something were to happen to any of you…’
However, the rift refused to heal and the bad blood between Liam and Noel was passed on to the next generation, something Peggy feared. She enjoyed being a grandmother to Liam’s three children (she never met his fourth child, a daughter who lives in the US and was the result of a brief relationship while he was married to Nicole Appleton) and Noel’s three.
In 2017, Liam’s son Gene, then 16, insulted Noel’s 17-year-old daughter Anais on social media as she launched her modelling career, telling her: “You look like your daddy in a blonde wig.”
Later that year, her 18-year-old brother Lennon again mocked Anais online. Liam also had repeated clashes with Noel’s ex-wife, Sara McDonald.
The incidents particularly affected Peggy; she once said it would be “terrible” if Lennon and Anais, who are only four months apart, never met.
Burnage residents saw Peggy’s sadness firsthand when the brothers and their children visited her separately, never together.
There were no big family birthdays or Christmases at home with the whole clan. Photographs taken over the years show her posing, smiling, with one side of the family and then the other.
Neighbour Bernard McClennan, 75, a retired flooring installer who knew Tommy Gallagher, remembers Noel visiting the stadium alone: ”He would come whenever Manchester City were playing.” Another neighbour, John Speed, 54, said: “I can’t understand how they got back together. They hate each other’s guts, a lot.”
There were signs of rapprochement last December, when Anais, Gene and Lennon were photographed together at a Chanel show in Manchester.
When Oasis’ reunion was officially announced on Tuesday, it sparked mass hysteria among millions of fans, who have been clamouring for tickets, some of which cost £500 each.
“Wembley Stadium will once again be home to a real band that will shake the walls,” says former member Matt Deighton, whose album Today Become Forever was released last year and who recalls the “pure, euphoric, powerful rock ‘n’ roll” he experienced during his time with the band. “They are the people’s choice. Hopefully they will continue like this.”
A sentiment that Peggy certainly shares, who politely declined to give interviews last week, preferring to celebrate this great milestone in her own way: quietly, privately, away from the spotlight.
As she once said: “In the end, if you don’t have your family, you have nothing.”
If they did it for someone, there is no doubt: they did it for their mother.
- Additional information: Nicola Byrne and Stephanie Condron