Carey’s cathartic journey
TOP class.
It’s how he was viewed as a player, the best Limerick hurler of the last 25 years according to a competition that honoured him at a gala 18 months ago, and the scorer of “the greatest winner ever scored” in the view of that most captious of hurling critics, Kevin Cashman, a view that anyone who witnessed that incredible solo effort against Clare in ‘96 would hardly dispute.
It’s also how Ciaran Carey feels about life these days when you ask. “Top class.”
He’s 41 now but still looking fit and lean, so much so that he’s thinking of reversing his decision last year to finish up with the club and instead listening “to the little man in the back of my head gnawing me to go back for another year”.
He’s enjoying and learning a lot serving as a selector to Donal O’Grady, just as he is working in town helping the homeless get back on their feet.
On top of all that he’s studying for a diploma in counselling to help those fighting addiction, all the while winning the battle with his own.
It mightn’t be the kind of work and study that’s for everybody but helping others seems just right for Carey.
“Over the years I would have had a list of jobs the length of O’Connell Street,” he smiles, “but it’s like I’ve finally found my true calling. I’m in a very good spot at the moment.”
He wasn’t a few years ago. In boom time Carey worked in the building trade for a friend, doing some labouring, then getting on the scaffold ticket before driving machines when suddenly it all went wallop. With it so did Carey’s confidence.
“I was idle for over a year and a half, going off my head. I had no discipline at all during the day, nothing to get up for. I suppose thank God for hurling, that at least in the evening I had something to look forward to in training, but you were still going home and knowing the following day there was still a huge void. It was very hard to kill time. You can only cut the lawn so many times.
“It’s extremely hard when a person has been working most his life and suddenly he’s not. It might sound silly but if you take away a fella’s ability to work, it can batter his manhood and his self-esteem, something simple like not even having a few quid to go down to the shop. It just wasn’t there, like.
“My confidence was shattered and I was wondering what it’s all about. I wasn’t going to do anything crazy, nothing like that, but Jesus, it just flattened me as a person.”
Eventually he decided to rise up by helping others do just the same. He started looking for voluntary work and soon he was getting shifts in McGarry House, a low threshold homeless hostel on Francis Street. He again had a reason to get out of bed, something to occupy him from nine to five and something much more.
“I had more self-worth as a human being. And fairly early on I had a gut feeling that I had a grá for that kind of work.”
It’s obvious to see why McGarry House asked him to stay on as an employee. Carey is talking to us while supervising one of the clients for whom the centre has become home and while this character is a bit of a handful, Carey’s earthy, empathetic manner means he’s able to connect with and gently steer his friend, whom we’ll call John.
John has a mental and physical disability yet can instantly spot the barely visible dictaphone, enquiring if I work for the Limerick Leader.
“By God, you’re sharp!” laughs Carey before an emboldened John recounts some of his travels on which, he gleefully informs us in his own colourful language, he “rode” his share of women. John’s lack of discretion prompts me to laugh out loud, but not a disapproving Carey who points out there are ladies in the vicinity.
“Relax there, John,” he quietly but firmly says. “Pipe down a small bit.”
So John does, until he mentions, again with great enthusiasm, the matter of “the Dooleys!” And this time Carey doesn’t censure him but smiles and plays along, happy to let the memory of that 1994 All-Ireland give John a memory of his own and the time he slagged Limerick’s finest about his cruellest sporting moment.
As I leave, Carey gently eases John on to his wheelchair, like he would a loved one.
“A lot of them would be living on the streets but I would see them as exactly as I would see myself — they’re human beings. Someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father.
“Nobody knows who could end up in this kind of place. These people can often be marginalised or not taken seriously but all they need is a break in life — and an ear to listen.”
He does something the same in Cuan Mhuire, the treatment centre out in Bruree.
Soon after beginning his voluntary work in McGarry House he got a call asking if he could help out in Bruree as well, so he obliged, working down in the detox centre.
“That’s where they first come in, for the first seven days. It’s a huge move for anyone to make, to reach out for help, and they’re in a horrible spot at that stage, completely flattened from addiction.
“So I’m basically there to meet them, to give them a small bit of a lift and tell them that life isn’t that bad, the sky isn’t going to fall in.”
He was once that soldier. On the morning of the 1998 Munster championship first-round clash with Cork, Carey revealed in a newspaper interview that he was an alcoholic and it’s a battle he’s constantly fought since, often losing, but more recently he’s been winning.
He can relate to those poor souls as they try to begin the climb out of the abyss and Sister Agnes who runs the centre could identify that. That’s why she suggested he should become a counsellor.
Carey was daunted. The course in Galilee House in Athy would take up four days a week and involve its share of assignments and essays.
“I would have started a few courses in the past and copped out because I would have felt that academically I wouldn’t have been able for it.”
But Sister Agnes assured him the academic side would only be a small part of the course.
Counselling was primarily about being empathetic and non-judgemental and he had those qualities for sure after his own struggles with addiction.
Sister Agnes has been right. The assignments don’t dominate the course. They’re manageable thanks to the encouragement he’s been getting from the course tutors. He starts his placement in Bruree next month and by the end of the year should have his diploma. Like Óisín McConville, a graduate of the course, he’s finding he’s cut out for the books after all and really cut out for the work itself.
“It actually brings an unbelievable self-awareness, the stuff we cover. I’m seeing the total different end of the scale, people coming in where I used to be myself, and I suppose that helps, the fact I can identify with all of the feelings that the person is going through. I’ve definitely been guided by someone or something towards this kind of work.”
Coaching is something else he’s found he has a flair and passion for. He’d like to believe as a player he was a deep thinker of the game and constantly on the lookout for ways to hone and improve his own.
In 2007 he took over the county camogie team who were impressed by how snappy and simple his sessions and drills were and went on to win the All-Ireland B title. The following year then he took over the U21 hurling team that would blow away Waterford and only lose to eventual All-Ireland finalists Tipperary by a solitary point, before the economic crash and the personal wreckage that ensued prompted Carey to step down.
Last autumn when a three-man committee was entrusted with finding a new senior management team to succeed Justin McCarthy’s, Carey, being in a better personal space, was happy to answer the call. He didn’t know Donal O’Grady before that but it’s obvious he respects and even slightly fears the Corkman.
Over the course of the interview Carey is unflinchingly honest and candid about many things, including personal matters, but ask about Limerick’s lost year and even their preparations this year and he’s remarkably reticent, because, he says more than once: “Grady would get thick if all that was in the paper.”
In O’Grady’s eyes last year is complete and utter history. The only history relevant to this team is the league just past — and even it’s firmly in the past; it’s all about championship now. Their methods aren’t for public consumption either. Carey only concedes the man’s professionalism is impressive.
“He’d have his finger on the pulse for every single detail. That’s something Limerick needed. Every aspect of a team’s preparation, whether it’s a league game, challenge game or championship, O’Grady has it covered.”
Carey’s watched how coaching has evolved through the years. He always appreciated that it was something of an art to be able to put ideas across to players but he’s noticed there’s an even greater element of teaching to it now, even with established county players.
“You often see a fella joining a certain Premiership team and you hear people saying that’ll be a good place for him to learn his trade now. It’s all about learning.
“I think hurlers years ago mightn’t have grasped that. Now it’s a massive thing. You need to be open-minded and aware you’re learning your trade all the time. Something even like striking the ball. In my time you just struck it and that’s all there was about it. But there’s a technique in that, whether your right leg is in front and all this kind of stuff.”
Then he checks himself. He’s straying “into O’Grady territory”. Neither of them wants him going there.
Everything else he’s comfortable with, even his All-Ireland medal count. Of course he’d love to have one. He thinks he should possibly have three, because, in his view, the Limerick team of the mid-’90s could and probably should have won three on the trot.
But at least he has two Munster medals and two league medals; in his first four years peers like Declan Ryan and John Leahy were winning all kinds of All-Irelands while Carey and Limerick couldn’t even get past them in the first round.
Winning Munster was a dream world away back then.
Besides, medals are only a measure of a player, he says, not the sole measure. Alan Shearer only won one Premiership medal and nothing else. Keith Wood never won a Triple Crown, let alone a Grand Slam or Heineken Cup, yet could anyone say he wasn’t a winner?
“I genuinely would change very little about my career. Not winning an All-Ireland, is it a major deal? Not really. At the time it was galling but you get over it; that’s just the way the cookie crumbled. I’d rather have had a good consistent career over 15 years than having been a flash in the pan for a few years and snatched an All-Ireland or two.” If there’s one thing he’d like to change it’s that he’d be left in the one position for a good five-year stretch.
He made his senior championship debut with Patrickswell as a goalkeeper and it was about the only position he didn’t play for Limerick.
Along with Brian Corcoran and Brian Whelehan, Carey was the most versatile and most-rounded player of his generation but it wasn’t lost on him that Whelehan played the majority of his career as a half-back while Corcoran had five years uninterrupted at centre-back.
The longest stint Carey had in one spot was three consecutive championships at centre-back and even then during games he’d often be brought to midfield.
It’s why he struggles when asked what direct opponent troubled him most. If he had to pick the best players of his era he’ll name check the three Brians — Whelehan, Corcoran and Lohan — ahead of even DJ and Jamesie and Leahy, but it’s not like he had running battles with any of them.
“I’d want to have marked a man at least three times to say that, and apart from Declan Ryan, I can’t honestly think of anyone that I did.”
What he will say straight up is that no one fazed him. “My mentality was the bigger the fish, the more he was the man I wanted,” he smiles. “That’s the way I used be driven.”
As much as he electrified some of the games that defined the magic of the revolution years — Cork in the Gaelic Grounds in ‘94, that point against Clare in the Gaelic Grounds in ‘96, coming from 10 down at half-time against Tipp to draw that year’s Munster final — a part of him curses the perverse cruelty of the old do-or-die format, and how there were years it confined to him just one championship game all summer while he was in his prime.
“At the end of the day it’s like a band going on stage and performing. You’re going out there as part of a team and you can’t be selfish, not passing the ball and forcing things, but ultimately you’re going out to show what you have.
“The man above gifted us all and you have to show it off on the stage if you’ve got it.”
And Ciaran Carey had it. Just like his mood these days, he was top class.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
