Louise O'Neill: A lot was written about 'Haulie O’Neill' over the last month. Some of it is true
Louise O'Neill at Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
Clonakilty is a GAA town. Gaelic football, to be precise, and my father was the manager of the senior team this year. When they got to the county final, I told him I had my sage and crystals out, chanting incantations to ensure their victory. With a roll of his eyes, he said: “That has nothing to do with football. Wishes don’t win matches.”
Wishes might not win matches but a little luck certainly helps. And when a game is as tight as the one between Clonakilty and St Finbarr’s was last Sunday, deadlocked at 60 minutes, both sides are hoping that luck will favour them rather than the other.
A ball is put over a bar. A whistle blown. Voices roaring and bodies streaming onto a pitch, but the colours are wrong, I think. Everyone wearing green and red is rooted to the spot in the stands, watching the scene below. It’s not fair. I want to stamp my feet like a petulant child. That’s football, I can almost hear my dad saying. That’s life, too. You win some, you lose some.
There has been a lot written about “Haulie O’Neill” over the last month. Some of it true — his passion, his intensity, how analytical he is, the value he places on the legacy of Clonakilty GAA, and his efforts to protect that for future generations. A lot of it has been less accurate, words spoken by people who do not know him but would seek to mythologise him anyway.
It doesn’t matter; my father won’t have read any of it. “I didn’t step foot on a pitch,” he told me when I congratulated him after the team won the semi-final. “I didn’t kick a ball, did I?”
He paused, and conceded: “I’m proud of the lads though.” And after seeing a group of impossibly young men, carrying the hopes of an entire town on their backs, play with such heart and determination and hunger to bring the Andy Scannell cup home to west Cork, I can understand why he would be proud of them.
Clonakilty were the underdogs — they didn’t get out of the group stage last season and hadn’t reached a county semi-final since 2010 — and there wasn’t a sports pundit in the county who gave them a fighting chance against St Finbarr’s, let alone anyone who would have predicted such a fiercely fought game. But I always believed they could win.
After 36 years of having Michael O’Neill as my father, I knew better than to underestimate him. He has been like David with Goliath so many times, watching giants fall to their knees. I saw him during the water breaks, almost crouching down as he spoke to the players, his arms stretched wide, and I joked to my mother that it was like story time when my sister and I were kids.
Whenever I was having a difficult time – and if you’re a regular reader of this column, you’ll know there were many periods where I was struggling with mental health issues – my mother would hug me, tell me she loved me and that everything would be okay. My father would say ‘yes, that’s all well and good, but we need to come up with a plan to make sure’.
In 2017, when I finally began tackling the eating disorder that had plagued me for the best part of two decades, I felt so unsteady in my recovery, unsure if I would ever know peace from it.
Every morning when I went downstairs for breakfast, I would find a little note from my father on the kitchen table, telling me that he knew I could get better for I was stronger than I realised. And every night after work, he would sit with me and we would talk through my day, analysing what went well, and what I could improve on for the next day.
Many of you reading this won’t know my father, but let me tell you, it’s really something to have that man look you in the eye and say he believes in you. It makes you believe in yourself. It makes you feel like anything is possible.
When I watched sports movies as a child — Cool Runnings, The Mighty Ducks, Little Giants — I always hated it when the team I was rooting for lost. If the plucky underdogs fought their way to the final, I wanted them to be triumphant.
It’s only as an adult that I can appreciate a more bittersweet narrative, one that feels truer to real life. Your team can work hard, play the best they can. They can do everything in their power to claim the trophy as their own and still, there can be heartbreak when the whistle blows. You can’t win every game. But my father’s motto has always been ‘it doesn’t matter how many times you fall, it’s what you do when you get back up that matters’. After the wounds are licked, there will be time to re-group, to plan, to dream. Clonakilty will rise again, that I know. For that’s football, isn’t it? That’s life.
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