Setanta: I wouldn’t be in Oz if GAA was pro

FORMER hurling star Setanta Ó hAilpín has revealed he would never have left his promising GAA career to become a professional Australian footballer if the GAA had paid their players.

In a revealing new interview, the Carlton player said his older brother Sean Óg encouraged him to become a professional sportsperson Down Under.

Setanta, who won an All Star when he was just 20-years-old, cut short his promising hurling career eight years ago to jet out to Sydney to play Australian Rules but he admits that hurling is still his first love.

He said: “I’m a realistic person and I know if GAA was professional I wouldn’t be in (Australia) in a million years.”

The 28-year-old former Cork player said he still harbours dreams of playing hurling at the highest level again.

He said: “It’s always at the back of my mind. I’d love to go back and play for Cork but at the same time you have to be realistic. I’ve been away from hurling for eight years now and I’ve seen how hard it was for my brother Aisake to pick it up again. If the economy was different I’d gladly go home and give it a crack.”

Ó hAilpín said in an interview with Australia magazine that watching his older brother juggling an exhausting schedule of work and training helped him make his decision to become a professional player.

He said: “I’d watched Sean Óg for years go to work, go training, eat and then go to bed before doing it all over again. For him to do what he did for so many years without getting paid for it is a credit to him. And not just to him but to all the other players that do it. So many people give their life to the GAA without getting paid for it. (Sean Óg) spoke to me and he said ‘Not many people get this opportunity and if I was you, I’d go for it’.”

His family moved from Australia to Ireland when Sean Óg was 13 and Setanta was six.

He said: “Sean Óg would have had an Aussie accent which is very hard to believe when you listen to him now.”

He said his older brother has always been a huge inspiration to him on the sports field.

He admitted: “You think that he lived in Australia until he was 13 years old and then went home. I can’t even imagine how difficult it was for him to start playing Gaelic football or to even pick up a hurley. My very first thought of playing GAA or for Cork came from watching Sean Óg and wanting to play alongside him. That was motivation in itself. He taught me how to live my life in the best way. He went up to university in Dublin and went up and down on the train while he was playing for seven or eight teams and getting his degree in college and then working in the bank where he is now. It was incredible. He got given the keys to Cork city recently and all of that is through hard work and that’s generally his motto in life.”

Setanta said he is glad he has stuck it out at his professional career: “There were people that thought I’d come to (Sydney) and do one year max and then get homesick and come home. I suppose in the back of my mind I wanted to prove a point. It’s where I got my drive to succeed. Irish boys can be known as Mammy’s boys but as much as we all love our mothers you really have to take the plunge sometime and no better place to take it than Australia.”