Cork's Amy O’Connor still shattering glass ceilings

Amy O’Connor’s criticism of camogie’s rules and tactics is a breath of fresh air in a sporting climate where so many stars now spout vanilla.

The Cork forward is as groundbreaking off the pitch as she is frustrated on it right now, which explains why she’s not afraid to speak her mind, despite her relative youth. Still only 22, her prodigious talent in a number of sports meant she had to make some hard choices at a young age.

As a teen she once played a county (gaelic) football final, a championship camogie game and an All- Ireland soccer semi-final all in one day.

She was on the Ireland U19 soccer team whose progress to the semi-finals of the 2014 European Championships was a massive breakthrough for the Irish women’s game.

But unlike former-teammates and Irish internationals Katie McCabe, Megan Connolly and (now starring for Arsenal and Ireland) and Sarah Rowe (currently juggling Mayo football with Aussie Rules), O’Connor plumped for camogie when playing multiple sports became too much.

Science is another of her passions and when she found that there was only Leaving Cert biology available in her Cork city secondary school (St Vincents), she successfully campaigned for chemistry to be introduced.

Not only did she get into one of the toughest courses in university — pharmacy — but when she graduated in UCC last summer O’Connor received a special award for managing to successfully balance top-level study and sport.

What makes all of that particularly exceptional is that O’Connor is the first of her family to attend third level education.

She is not disparaging in any way when she describes her native Knocknaheeny to non-Corkonians “like Ballymun in Dublin,” seeking only to explain the level of social deprivation in parts of her community.

“My mam and dad never got the opportunity to go to college but they always told me ‘education, education, education!’

Not many from my school went to college but they always encouraged it too. Now the girls who didn’t go to college are doing just fine too,” she stresses. “There’s just not enough exposure to education in our area where there’d be some anti-social behaviour and drugs and alcohol. It’s very hard to break that cycle.

O’Connor has spectacularly broken it and her brother is also now in university, much to her parents’ delight.

There was no history of serious sport in her family either.

She first tagged along to soccer with a young male cousin. He quit, she didn’t and she never looked back, crediting sport with giving her discipline.

“I’d train seven nights a week so I had to come home and do my homework first. My poor dad travelled the length and breadth of the country with me for games and training, and when he was working my mam would do it. The school was brilliant to me the whole time too, even when I missed 11 weeks in sixth-year because of international soccer.

“The teachers would stay back and help me with things.”

She’s now doing a one-year Masters in Pharmacy in the College of Surgeons now, the final element of her studies, but it won’t interrupt her inter-county commitment as she only needs to travel to Dublin periodically.

Cork, who’ve lost the last two Division One finals to arch-rivals Kilkenny, open their league season away to Tipp in a tough group that also includes Galway, Waterford and Wexford. “Everyone goes out to win every game. It just hasn’t happened (for us) and last year’s league final kind of haunts me. I didn’t turn up on the day and we didn’t turn up on the day,” O’Connor admits.

Winning the last two All-Irelands has seen Paudie Murray’s side come through their expected “transition period” remarkably well and she expects him, once again, to trial lots of young players in the league.

“I thought we’d go through a big transition period because we were so young. Hannah Looney is only 21, Laura Hayes was minor last year. This is the first year we’ve had players who were born in the 2000s! But then you have Gemma (O’Connor, this year’s captain) and Aoife (Murray) who are so experienced, and you hve the likes of Julia White and the Mackeys in the middle so we’ve a lot of balance.”