Donnacha O'Callaghan: ‘I’m upbeat and positive and I want to be that way’
Former Munster and Irish rugby international Donncha O'Callaghan pictured relaxing in the penthouse of the Dean Hotel, Cork. - Picture: David Creedon
“To be honest, we had a bromance, myself and Trimbie. It was great hanging around with him again.” Donncha O’Callaghan is waxing lyrical about his former Ireland rugby teammate Andrew Trimble, who is also his opposite number on a new trio of coaches on a revamped .
It’s a bromance of rivals though, with the new format of the upcoming 13th season of the competitive show pitting OGs O’Callaghan, Anna Geary, and reigning champ Davy Fitzgerald against a coaching team of Trimble, former Dublin GAA star Michael Darragh MacAuley, and Paralympic swimming champion Ellen Keane.
This season will be O’Callaghan’s ninth, having made his debut on season five back in 2017, when he coached the Beirne family to victory. He triumphed again two years later with the McSharrys in 2019, and on season 11 with the Stratfords in 2023.
These days, he says, he doesn’t need to show participating families the ropes. “Straight away as soon as you meet them, they can all tell you how long they can hang for, wall squat,” says the former Munster and Ireland lock.
“I’m noticing it more and more as it’s gone on. Before, you were explaining the events to them. Now, they’re explaining them to you.” Regardless, the course can still be a rude awakening, he says, with families getting “a slap in the face by the intensity of it”.
The IFF format shake-up has meant each coach now has two families rather than the four they had to manage previously, and the change has been beneficial, he says, resulting in quicker bonding and buy-in between coaches and their competing families.
For the uninitiated, the coaches’ role is more along the lines of a mentorship than the fitness-training role their title might suggest, but O’Callaghan admits that getting the families to take his advice isn’t always easy, with blood proving thicker than water, initially at least.
“The family know each other way better than you’ll ever know them and you are trying to stir an emotion or trying to get a response and you can only get it if you get a little bit of buy-in. That is the difficult side of it.”
O’Callaghan has figured out the best way to get that buy-in early on. “I think always being sincere is the difference, really. If the family see that you genuinely care about them and you want them to do well, you tend to get a bit better buy-in.”
The family dynamic can throw curveballs too, such as when mam or dad have to hear their offspring say ‘do you know what? You are wrong here’, he says, or when teenage lads “feel bulletproof” and think they can “light it up” solo, compromising their team as a result.
Feigning exasperation, O’Callaghan groans “give me the moms every day of the week!” but you know he’s got those teens’ backs, because he’s been that ‘I think I’m bulletproof’ soldier too.
“I was lucky enough to have kind of brothers around me that managed [my expectations] a little bit at a certain age.”
Curveballs aside, O’Callaghan says the depth of the bond he’s witnessed between family members on the show is “what you try to get to with elite sport, that level of care… The beautiful thing is, you never have to question it. That family dynamic is quite special.”
O’Callaghan’s own family dynamic has sparked a whole new career for him as a children’s author, with , the second book in his series — which he pegs as “closer to fact than my autobiography” — hitting the shelves a few weeks ago.
“A kid won’t do a bad page, so you do have to hit the mark with it,” he says of his demanding audience. He’s obviously doing something right as both books have been bestsellers, with the latest iteration zooming to the top of the children’s books bestseller list in jig time.
The O’Callaghan kids — Donncha and his wife, Jennifer Harte, who he married in 2009, have four, Sophie, Anna, Robin, and Jake — always loved bedtime storytime, but O’Callaghan noticed they were often more interested in anecdotes about his own mishaps or mistakes than another reading of .
“They nearly want to see a vulnerability to you. They want to hear the times where you got it wrong and you were scared or you didn’t know how you were going to work it out,” the telling of which, he says, lead to “gluey moments” that allowed him to show “Dad doesn’t always have the answer or Dad gets it wrong a little bit”.
His storytelling provided a safe space in which his kids knew “I’ve got you. You’re totally safe” but also got an insight into the fact that their dad “isn’t a superhero or bulletproof, that he makes an eejit of himself as well”.
“I just think it’s okay for parents to feel you don’t always have the answers,” he says. “You know what I mean? You don’t always have to get it right.” (O’Callaghan, who is one of five siblings, was only five years old when his own dad, Hughie, died prematurely at the age of 40.)
He has been “blown away” by how well the books have been received. “And I’ll be honest with you, like you’re lucky to do stuff in rugby, but that’s right up there for me in terms of achievements. I’m really proud of it.”
The 46-year-old has tried his hand at many things since his retirement from professional rugby in April 2018, a career which he loved and had the foresight to call time on at the right time, from a physical standpoint.
“My body feels amazing,” he says. “I was lucky to do something I love for so long.”
A post-rugby life of leisure was never an option. “Rugby is great, but we all know coming away from this that the money simply isn’t good enough that you will not have to work.”
The Bishopstown native was already on Ireland’s Fittest Family prior to retirement, and has since appeared on various TV networks as a pundit, but is doing that “less and less”, partly because he isn’t a fan of the modern-day push for a focus to be on the negative, regardless of a player’s performance.
“I found it hard, with the framing of stuff, to throw bouquets because all anyone wanted was hand grenades,” he says. “For me, it’s important to stay true to who you are as well. I’m upbeat and positive and I want to be that. I have no problem calling it as I see it, but I just sometimes found it really difficult to be positive because they weren’t looking for it. They’re looking for the next soundbite.”
He found breakfast radio a better fit, although the learning curve proved steep. “I was oblivious for how little I knew walking in there; oh my God, I was embarrassed,” he says of his baptism of fire into the level of tech knowledge and multitasking required in co-hosting the 2FM Breakfast show with Doireann Garrihy and Carl Mullan.
O’Callaghan thrives on challenge, though. He likes hard things — “I have that kind of growth mindset of wanting to get better and improve” — but doing three hours of must-be-upbeat live radio and having to get up “at three in the morning if I was in Dublin, or five if I was in Cork” is “gruelling” by anyone’s standards and he made the decision to step away to focus on other projects (he co-hosts podcast with former Ireland teammate Tommy Bowe, is a Unicef ambassador and a sought-after corporate speaker).
One thing the radio show underlined for him is his glass-half-full nature. “I don’t think you can bullshit that at that time,” he says of the impossibility of faking positivity when you’ve been up since 3am.
“I know I am a positive, upbeat person. I look for the good in things and try to see that always. I do manage myself though, in that I hang around with those type of people as well, because I can find, if I hang around with ‘wet duffle coats’, I can get down. So I’m lucky that I keep my circle of like-minded people who see the fun and the joy in [life].”
Right now, he’s working on book three of Disaster Dad, andthinking ahead to next year’s Fittest Family. His biggest concern at retirement was going from “knowing what I was having for breakfast in a month’s time” to the uncertainty of a life outside of professional sport, but he’s found a groove that fits, and six years on, he’s “a little bit more comfortable” with the unknown aspect of his multi-hyphenate career. He’s found his feet and he’s thriving.
“This might sound a little bit cocky or arrogant, but [I’m more comfortable] backing myself that I’ll be all right. I’m confident in myself that I’ll be okay. ” You have to back yourself, I say.
“You do. You do. You a hundred percent do.”
- Ireland's Fittest Family starts Sunday, November 2 at 6.30pm on RTÉ One
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
