Aspiring astronaut Shane O'Donnell shooting for the stars with Clare

The Banner talisman has ambitions beyond this planet, he says.

Fri, 17 May, 2024 - 06:58

Paul Keane

A couple of days out from Clare's crucial Munster SHC clash with Waterford, you'd expect Shane O'Donnell to go through the motions.

He's the PwC GAA/GPA Player of the Month for April in hurling so there are media obligations but, so close to a game, players will typically dole out humdrum quotes.

Coming up against the county that he made his championship debut against in 2013 at least presents a talking point. He scored a goal in that game.

"Thankfully I managed to get something on the scoreboard before being whipped off," smiled the Ennis man.

He told an interesting story too about how he was actually called into Davy Fitzgerald's panel in the first place.

"I ended up getting a call but only after probably two weeks of hearing from random people that I had been called up," said O'Donnell. "It was very strange. I kept telling people, 'No, I haven't been called up' and then they were like, 'No, you have!'. Two weeks later, I actually got a call from Louis Mulqueen who was a selector at the time."

O'Donnell, only 18, wasn't sure if he was ready for it. Three months later, he scored 3-3 for Clare in the All-Ireland final replay defeat of Cork. Over a decade on, it remains the highlight of his career.

Which is where the interview gets really interesting because, in O'Donnell's mind, there is one thing that would eclipse that feat of genius in 2013 - becoming an astronaut.

"I think that would probably do it alright, it would do it in my eyes anyway," he nodded.

A PhD graduate in microbiology, O'Donnell received a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to Harvard University in 2018 and hopes to combine all that knowledge with his long-held desire to travel into space.

"I don't think there has been an Irish person sent to space, that's my understanding anyway," he noted.

As it happens, the first Irish astronaut gained her wings last month. Rosemary Coogan, from Belfast, graduated from space training as a new European Space Agency astronaut. She beat 22,500 applicants to a place on the programme. So O'Donnell has his work cut out.

"They do recruitment drives roughly every 10 years or so for their next round of astronauts," he explained. "They did one a couple of years ago when I was not quite finished my PhD so it was extremely poor timing from my perspective.

"It's something that I think tens of thousands of people put their hat in the ring for so I'm not under illusions that I'll just wait until the round of recruitment and then voila, I head off to Paris! But it's certainly something I'd be very interested in.

"They do look for researchers to go to space and microbiome research is what I did my PhD on. They do actually do quite a lot of microbiome research on the ISS, to try to understand how microbiomes survive in zero gravity."

For Clare supporters, winning a Munster title is the final frontier at this stage. But there is so much more to O'Donnell than just the pursuit of trophies.

He is happy, for example, to wade into the GAAGO debate.

"I know that Jarlath Burns came out on Claire Byrne during the week, talking about that they see GAAGO as becoming a huge revenue generator for the GAA and my gut feeling is that it's not right," he said.

"I really just think, at the heart of it, what is the purpose of the GAA? Is it to make money? I really don't feel like that is what it is there to do. If you were to settle on the GAA's purpose being to grow the game, then I think the GAAGO stance becomes a difficult one to take."

O'Donnell, who received a serious concussion injury in 2021, complained last year about the GAA's financial cover for injured players. This has improved slightly since. He feels a percentage of loss of earnings, say 75 percent, would be ideal.

"That would have been preferable, to have a percentage, but I will accept or appreciate that they did make some change off the back of that," he said.