My Childhood with Nina Carberry: I’ve never been afraid of competing thanks to my brothers

Carberry and her four older brothers - Thomas, Paul, Mark, and Philip - spent their days riding ponies around their family farm in Co Meath.

MEP Nina Carberry at the launch of the Ratoath Alzheimer’s Memory Walk supported by Aviva. Picture: David Mullen/cyberimages.net

The Midlands-North-West MEP and former champion National Hunt jockey Nina Carberry cherishes her memories, particularly in light of the memory loss experienced by both her parents. Her father Tommy, a garlanded jockey and trainer, died with dementia in 2017, while her mother Pamela is currently living with Alzheimer’s.

“Dad was 75 and living in a nursing home when he died,” she says. “It was hard to witness the toll dementia took on him. Mum is still living at home and a carer comes in to mind her every day. In all of my memories, she’s an independent woman who played a big part in the life of our home and farm, and it’s great she’s still able to play a part in some way.”

One of Carberry’s earliest memories is of her mother taking her from her parents’ bed in the middle of the night and settling her with her older brother when she was four. She would often “sneak into bed with mum and dad but that night, mum went into labour with my youngest brother, Peter John.

“I remember there being excitement in the air. I knew something important was happening.”

Carberry already had four older brothers called Thomas, Paul, Mark, and Philip. Together, they spent their days riding ponies around their family farm in Co Meath.

“Even though my brothers are 11, 10, nine, and four years older than me, it didn’t matter that I was a girl or what age I was,” she says. “They showed me how to hold the reins and ride over jumps. I looked up to them and wanted to be like them. Because of them, I’ve never been afraid of competing with anyone.”

Nina Carberry at the Curragh in 2001, aged 16

Her brothers also involved her in their rough-and-tumble play. Carberry remembers “a game that Philip invented where we would turn the cattle feeder on its side, and we’d all get in and run down the field as if we were mice or hamsters.

“I don’t know how we never got injured. It was daredevil stuff.”

Carberry had a happy time at primary school but struggled during her first year at Loretto Girls Secondary School in Navan.

“That was a huge change from having spent my life surrounded by brothers,” she says. “It took me a while to figure out the dynamic.”

What helped was discovering she had a talent for basketball. Carberry had never played before but with the help of school coach Maria O’Mahony, she eventually made the Irish junior squad.

“Basketball made me feel part of something and gave me great friends,” she says.

Looking back, it might seem as if Carberry was destined for a career in sport, but she is adamant it didn’t feel that way: “Twenty-five years ago, it was hard to see a life in sport, especially as a girl. Even though my brothers Paul and Philip were jockeys, I never thought I could make a living out of it.”

She considered sports therapy and says there was a period when she dreamed of applying for sports scholarships to study physiotherapy in America.

“After graduating from school, I even did a year-long course in holistic health in Dublin that had a sports injury module as part of it,” she says.

“That was the route I was planning to go down.”

Yet she was also racing at that time. Her father had given her an opportunity to join a race at 16, where she finished third. She enjoyed the exhilaration of competing so much that, from then on, she took every opportunity she could to race.

“I rode my first winner at the Curragh in 2001 when I was a few days short of turning 17 and looking back, I think that’s when horse racing took over,” she says.

Carberry recalls her father as someone who was “always busy in the yard while mum tried to balance six kids with keeping everything else going”.

While he was “a man of few words but a great listener who you could rely on to give you sound advice”, she would turn to her mother for emotional support. “As the only two women in a family of men, she was always supportive of me, especially as I was also a girl trying to compete in a male-dominated sport.”

Both her parents had a strong work ethic. Carberry says she and her brothers “had to work for everything we were given. We were never given pocket money. Instead, we’d be given a heifer to feed and look after and would get the payday when that heifer was sold”.

She hopes to teach some of the life lessons her parents taught her to her own children, nine-year-old Rosie and seven-year-old Holly.

“My girls are growing up with each other, not with a gang of brothers, so that’s a big difference,” she says.

“But I think I got a lot of my resilience from riding and learning to get back up whenever I fell off. So my girls are learning to ride and I hope their experience with horses and ponies instils resilience in them. But even if they don’t like riding as much as I do, I’ll support whatever interests they have, just as my parents did when I was a kid.”

• Nina Carberry is an ambassador for Alzheimer’s Memory Walk 2026, which takes place on Sunday, September 20. For details and to register, see memorywalk.ie.