Galway camogie legend Denise Gilligan opens up about hearing loss and All-Ireland glory
Denise Gilligan has been working as a first responder since 2020.
The headline has stayed with Denise Gilligan these past 30 years. A passage of ink that symbolised, in a strange sort of way, what she didn’t allow to define or defeat her.
The Galway players were roaming through the Monday newspapers of September 23, 1996. It was the morning after the historic event of the afternoon before. The history-makers wanted to know what had been said and written about the first All-Ireland camogie title brought west to Galway.
Gilligan can’t remember exactly which newspaper it was, but the text is as black and white in her mind as it was the morning she turned the page to find the post-match interview she’d given out on the Croke Park field a day earlier.
It told of Galway’s two-goal teenager being “surprisingly low-key” in the immediate aftermath of the county’s maiden O’Duffy Cup conquest.
Low-key she was, and with good reason. There was no room for revelling or ecstasy when busy trying to lip-read the journalist standing opposite her.
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Gilligan contracted measles at age six. A “severe dose” at that. The timing was particularly unfortunate. It was only a year later that a single measles vaccine was introduced nationwide, the precursor to the MMR shot we’re all so familiar with.
Shortly after her measles vacated, a public health nurse visited the local primary school. It was picked up on that Denise had developed a hearing impairment.
When the full damage was calculated, the bout of measles had left the then six-year-old 80% deaf.
“I was given in-the-ear hearing aids, but it’s difficult for me because I can’t remember what it was like before the hearing aids, given how young I was. As far as I'm concerned, I have always been deaf. I can’t ever remember a time when I had full hearing,” said Gilligan this week.
A first-cousin of Fergal and Niall Healy, hurling is in the blood. She and her hearing aids took off down to the Craughwell field and took flight. And when she did take flight, there was no stopping her and certainly no calling her back.
“My first memory of there being an issue with my hearing was when we were playing a tournament in Salthill, I must have been only 12 or 13. I got the ball, but a foul had been committed, and the referee blew the whistle.
"I didn’t realise it had been blown and drove the ball down the other end. The referee came up and started giving out like hell to me, ‘I blew the whistle, you should have stopped, do you want to be sent off’, and all this.
“I got so upset over it. I remember crying in the middle of the field. Of course, the ref had no idea. They just thought I was someone with an attitude.”
She was 18 when lining out in the ‘96 decider. Her opening goal halved the interval deficit to three. Her second, shortly after the restart, squared proceedings. From there, Tony Ward’s charges powered past Cork.
At the 10th attempt, Galway were finally victorious on the concluding afternoon. Amid the final whistle chaos and the endless scene of being shaken, slapped, and squeezed by maroon-clad supporters, she reckoned the safest act was to take out the hearing aids.
“Mam was county board secretary, so she was there on the sideline. I was like, ‘Mam, you need to take these because I think I am going to lose them on the field of Croke Park.'
“I was going around in the celebrations anyway and next thing I was asked to give a newspaper interview. The next morning it read that a 'surprisingly low-key Denise Gilligan…' but sure I had no hearing aids in so I couldn’t hear a word they were asking me. It sounded like I wasn’t a bit excited about the win, where really, I was trying to concentrate on what they were saying.”
Describing herself as “severe to profoundly deaf”, Denise didn’t advertise her hearing impairment while operating in maroon. Not even to some she shared a dressing-room bench with.
When they got together for the 25-year reunion, a former teammate told her how she never knew of the hearing aids until spotting them when watching back Denise’s player of the match interview from their ‘96 win.
She climbed to the highest ladder rung of camogie. She climbed the Croke Park steps every player aspires to ascend. She did so having set out from slightly further back than the start line where everyone else began.
“If I had the ball on the hurl and you were shouting ‘Gilly, Gilly’, I wouldn’t have a clue whether you were to my left or right, in front or behind, so I needed to be that little bit sharper to be able to spot where that person was,” she explained.
“Having the hearing impairment probably was what led me to become the player I was because I had to be that bit quicker and more tuned in.”
Johnny Keane, a fellow Craughwell native, was one of two selectors under Tony Ward for the ‘96 triumph. He was killed in a car accident the following year. It formed part of Denise’s motivation to one day become a paramedic.
Long based in London, she enrolled at St George’s University towards the end of the last decade and has been working as a first responder since 2020.
Once again, her hearing impairment was no barrier to her chosen life path.
“It’s not an issue because I don’t allow it to be an issue. The same as I played camogie because I loved the game. I just happened to be someone who had to wear a hearing aid while doing it.”
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