Football a matter of life and death... until it isn’t
None of the Mayo senior football panel is yet a husband or a father.
Over the years that will change. Most of them will have kids and all the thrills, spills and worries that go with them, and at times whatever transpired on Sunday, September 23, 2012, will seem to pale into insignificance.
Twenty years ago Seamus Clancy was a lot like they are now. He was the man with the golden hair in that golden summer, recently married to Marcella but not yet a father. He was the full-back on John Maughan’s Clare football team, the man who declared in a dressing room in Limerick’s Gaelic Grounds one Sunday that July that they were all born to beat Kerry that day in the Munster final.
“Nothing else mattered,” he smiles now, “only representing Clare, playing football in the moment, with that freedom.”
But after you enjoy and become a Moment, there’s still a life to be lived. You put a few quid together to build a house, you start a family. Fionn was born towards the end of ’92. Eoin came along in ’95, another great year for Clare GAA. Then in the wonderful but turbulent year of ’98 Cillian was born. Straight away they noticed he coughed too much. Before he was six months old he was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.
“We reacted in two different ways to it,” Clancy admits. “Marcella dived straight in and learned all there was to know about it. I wasn’t able for that. I was afraid to know all the details because I knew the news wasn’t good. Then you learn that facilities are better in other countries where children live longer. It is frightening. You’ll never know as much fear as going to a doctor and putting your child’s life in his hands.”
Cillian has been blessed. In the mid-western regional hospital in Limerick he’s been in the care of a Dr O’Mahony, who has become like a second father to the child, just as Marcella has become like a second doctor to him.
It’s allowed Cillian to live pretty much a normal life, playing football and hurling with Corofin, going to school, other than the six weeks a year or so when he’s laid low in hospital.
“He would just inspire you,” says his father. “A couple of years ago he was playing in an U12 final and he hadn’t been well. Before the game I was looking all round for him when I found him in the bathroom, banging his chest so he could get as much phlegm out of his chest. Nothing was going to stop him playing. After some matches you’d literally have to carry him home, he gives every ounce of himself.”
He’s not exactly like all the other kids though. The other kids don’t have their father minding a water bottle that only he can take for fear of infection. All along they’ve been conscious that when Cillian would turn 16, he’d be deemed by the medical authorities to be an adult. With no adult facility in the mid-west region, he’d have to be treated in Dublin, by a doctor who didn’t know him and he didn’t know either.
A while back they had an appointment with a top consultant in Crumlin. In the waiting room people were wheezing, sneezing, coughing, leaving Clancy sweating: what couldn’t Cillian pick up here?
They eventually went up to a nurse who kindly guided them to the sanctuary of a storeroom where they waited for two hours. In Limerick, Cillian would have been in a private, sterilised room.
In recent years families like the Clancys in Tipperary, Limerick as well as Clare have combined to campaign for an adult CF centre in Limerick, driven by the knowledge that it will add years to the lives of patients like Cillian.
The estimated cost of such a facility is €4.2 million, with not a cent forthcoming from the government.
At the start of the summer the sod of the turf was officially turned. At the end of next year the centre will open.
The JP McManus charitable foundation has been particularly generous. The rest of the money has been raised by the TLC4CF organisation: people like Marcella, who is their secretary, and people like her husband Seamus, who is co-ordinating their third annual north Clare charity cycle. It takes place on Saturday, starting at 10.30am at Kilnaboy National School.
“Being on a bike going along that coast road,” Seamus says, “it’s spectacular, unreal, there’s nothing quite like it.”
What they’re doing is something special too. Last year Maughan came down from Mayo to cycle and support the cause. This year some of Clancy’s old team-mates from ’92 will cycle it.
No longer carefree perhaps, but all the more caring.
* For more info email cyclenorthclare.tlc4cf@gmail.com or look up tlc4cf.com
