School Daze: How the GAA gave direction to GM of Cork Airport Hotel

Diarmuid Vaughan, Cork Airport Hotel general manager, spent some school years in the US. He spoke to Ciara McDonnell

I was born in Limerick, but I moved to Bishopstown when I was two. I went to primary school in Scoil an Spioraid Naoimh and then secondary school in Coláiste an Spioraid Naoimh.

I had an interesting time during the primary school years, because our family moved to San Francisco and Boston for five years in the middle of it. I did junior and senior infants here and then went to America for first and second class, coming back for a short stint in third class, and then properly back home in sixth class, with a bit of an American accent.

I didn’t find it hard to settle back in, once we were home for good; I suppose, all the friends that I would have known were still living beside us in Bishopstown and, at that age, you just get on with it, really, don’t you?

School in America was very different to here. During the mid-1990s, you wouldn’t have experienced the same level of security that you would see over there now, but I still had to go through a metal detector every day, on the way in through the doors.

It was very diverse and multicultural, and that was so interesting and thrilling for us. Coming back to Cork, diverse and cultural would mean someone with red hair.

Of course, today, when you look at primary schools across the country, they are totally diverse, and it is wonderful to see, but, back then, the furthest we got was someone from Ballincollig or Ballinhassig.

I was sporty in name, but not in ability. I was mad into it, but not the best at all. I was in no way academic, and I probably made it hard on myself.

I loved going to school, but I hated the work that it entailed. I hated having to do school work at home; I couldn’t understand why I had to sit down after being in school all day; I just wanted to be outside.

I had a love/hate relationship with my teachers, because I found the academic side of things a challenge. In primary school, when I first came back from America, I had former Cork senior football manager Brian Cuthbert as a teacher and that had a huge effect on me.

I am very close friends with him today, and he had a major influence on me as a child.

When we got back from America, 25% of the curriculum was Irish, and, of course, I didn’t have a clue.

Because we had been away for more than three years, we had a choice to give up Irish, but our parents were having none of it.

I was always a sociable kind of person, and even though I didn’t plan this career path for myself, I can see how I arrived here.

When I was in school, I actually wanted to be a garda. When I was fifteen and sixteen, I started working part-time in bars and at the GAA club and then that side of my life took off and one role led to another.

I think that, for young people growing up today, the challenges are so vast, in terms of social media and being ‘on’ all the time, that clubs like the GAA are more important than ever. I think they offer children a discipline and community that doesn’t allow for bad behaviour.

If I stayed in America, and I didn’t have the GAA, I would have gone down a completely different path in society.

I always needed a focus, and the GAA gave me that. It gave me a focal point and kept me on the straight-and-narrow throughout my youth.

Personally, as a part of the organisation, I always felt that I was representing something important and my mind was occupied with that, instead of getting into trouble.

My mother always says that when we came back to Bishopstown, our house was backing onto the GAA pitch, so there was no choice there.

I believe that being a young person today is a lot more challenging than it was when I was growing up. I feel that everything is pumped through social media: every action, every observation, every comment; it is all through this channel.

There is no privacy, whatsoever.

Young people need to know that it is alright to make mistakes. Everybody is going to let down their guard, everyone will make a mistake at some point; there is nobody perfect in this world. When it is all documented and all out there in real time, it is extremely hard to escape it.

The speed at which we are used to accessing information today is dramatically different to when I was at school. I think it has made for a very impatient society.

I see myself, today, getting irritated if I can’t find the answer to something in seven seconds or less. That means that the way we are learning, that young people are learning, has changed.

I question the curriculums in school today, around social media, because of this. It is not a thing to be feared; it is a thing to be managed. The more education we provide our children in relation to social media, the better.

The main thing that we need to teach our children today about social media is that it is an entirely filtered way of being. We need to teach our kids that it’s ok to have bad days, too.