Waves of optimism
- Coldplay, Yellow
Even in the water, even out there in the midst of that choppy sea trying to pull off swimming’s Mount Everest, Rosie Foley couldn’t help thinking rugby. Actually she reckons rugby was one of the things that most sustained her last weekend getting from one end of the English Channel to the other.
On the side of the pilot boat were a couple of Munster flags sporting red, yellow and blue that she would sometimes zone in on, especially the one with the motto ‘To the brave and the faithful nothing is impossible’; how often her brother Anthony and his friends had shown that through the years.
She had the all-English crew sporting Munster t-shirts along with her husband Pat and friend Fionnuala Walsh. Just the sight of all that red drove her on too.
And she thought of the green of Ireland too. Of the girls who’d be wearing that shirt in the women’s rugby World Cup, of the girls who that very same weekend would be flying over to France for that very tournament.
“That was also part of it,” she says. “I wanted to get to France before they did. Just to show: girls, if I can get to France by swimming, by Jesus you can go and win the World Cup!”
Think they can’t? Don’t you know who they know? The journey she and they have had? That to the brave and faithful nothing is impossible? She was there before them in every way. For the past dozen or so years UL Bohemian have dominated and shaped women’s Irish rugby, winning nearly every national title in sight. Yet only a few years before the start of that domination they didn’t even exist until a certain Rosie Foley saw to it they did.
She’d always wanted to play rugby. Her father, Brendan, had played for Munster, including that famous day in 1978 against the All Blacks, and for Ireland too. Her brother Anthony would as well. She’d see them even on sunny summer days have the curtains drawn and watching and studying classic rugby video tapes, noting the patterns, nuances, replicating the skills. There was nothing natural about Axel’s exceptional reading of the game; it was honed in Scariff with his dad in the back garden and that living room. And on the school field of St Munchin’s. Anthony played for them, dad coached them and Rosie watched them.
“I was going to St Mary’s just down the road so I’d go and watch and it would be terribly frustrating. I’d be there thinking ‘That’s where I want to be, out there; that’s what I want to be doing’. At the time dad thought I was only there to spot the fellas. It was only years later he realised that I wanted to train with them, that I wanted to play.”
It wasn’t that Brendan Foley wouldn’t let her play. He let her try everything.
“My parents didn’t show any distinction between us being boys and girls. We got to do everything we wanted to do and a lot of the time our parents did it with us. If we were learning how to windsurf in the activity centre in Killaloe mum and dad were out in a kayak watching on. We played a thing called crazy football in Killaloe where you played Gaelic football with a rugby ball for charity. The girls could catch and kick but the boys could only kick the ball along the ground.”
She even met her husband through sport. Back in her late teens the local club, Smith O’Briens, were playing deadly rivals Scariff in a minor hurling final. Lining out at centre-forward for Smith O’Briens was one Anthony Foley. Lining out at centre-forward for Scariff was one Pat Minogue, the standout player of the Clare minor team that would reach the 1989 All-Ireland final.
“They beat the crap out of one another,” Rosie recalls “and Scariff won.” That meant drinks that night were in Mike Mac’s. Brendan Foley had known the Scariff mentor and later Clare trainer back in his days playing rugby with Waterpark and being a fellow publican, Foley not only gave Mike his custom that night but his daughter Rosie would give a dig out behind the bar just as she would in Foley’s back home. The following Tuesday the phone rang in the Foley household, there being no mobile phones in them days. And as she started chatting away to Pat Minogue, she could hear her baffled brother Anthony in the background saying to her dad, “What’s he doing ringing here?!”
So now you know: Mike Mac’s and the killing fields of East Clare – where romances begin.
She would go on to win a junior All-Ireland ladies football medal with Clare, win a senior camogie title for Bodyke. Yet as joyous as those games and moments were, there was something about rugby and how you had to immerse yourself totally in its physicality and team ethos that trumped them all.
In college she would finally get to play it. She would make sure they would get to play it. As a PE teacher now in Killaloe she encourages all her students to try out new and different activities when they enter third level. She did. She signed up for the orienteering club and it brought her entirely out of her comfort zone.
“We had to do this trust exercise where you fall back into someone’s arms. I had difficulty at the start with that. I’d never had to fully trust someone else to catch me. But when you decide you’re going to let go it just opens up so much. At the end of first year I approached the sports officer at the time and asked about starting up a women’s rugby team. My attitude was ‘Sure if I don’t make that leap and at least try, we’ll never know so let’s just go and do it’. By the time we came back for second year we had a coach and our team and we’ve never looked back.”
Games were hard to get back then. You had Cooke up in Belfast, Blackrock up in Dublin and precious little else; Shannon would only kick off that year as well. UL’s first game was against DCU up in Dublin. They went up thinking it would be more seven-a-side tag rugby but DCU wanted full-out contact and full-out 15-a-side so she and the team coach Ian Costello, now her brother’s assistant with Munster, had to inform the girls that was the way it had to be.
It suited them just fine: they would win well. Then they would win an international colleges seven-a-side tournament in Paris. Off the field they were determined to impress as well.
“There could have been a perception of how a women’s rugby team might behave but our motto was ‘You play hard on the pitch and you are ladies off it’. There was to be no snogging a guy in the corner at some function representing the college and club.”
They were all about standards. Most of them were studying sport science or PE like she was so they were all about gaining an edge and being on the cutting edge. The likes of herself, Sarah-Jane Belton and Jean Lonergan saw to it and that tradition would be maintained and enhanced by the likes of Fiona Steed, Fiona Coghlan and Lynne Cantwell through the years with either UL or Munster and then Ireland.
There would be growing pains for Irish women’s rugby. At the 2002 World Cup in Barcelona they trained too hard too close to their games. By 2004 they had progressed to being the curtain-raiser to the men’s Six Nation game in Twickenham but not enough to be allocated 30 tickets by the IRFU; instead Rosie and her team-mates had to watch her brother win his 50th cap and the match from Rugby House across the road with the English girls. You wouldn’t get that now. Now the women’s association has been incorporated into the IRFU. The girls aren’t paid but they’re looked after like professionals. They prepare like professionals. It’s why they won the Grand Slam last year.
Foley had long departed by then; her last game was at the 2006 World Cup when Ireland launched a stirring but too late of a comeback against Australia in the fifth and sixth play-off in Canada. By then she was 33 and a mother to little Óisín. But she had played her part. She was also coached by Philip ‘Goose’ Doyle just as the girls are now. She saw how he demanded certain standards. He wouldn’t start her as a second row until she could learn to jump. So she had to go off and learn.
he’d look in mirrors studying if her two feet were springing and landing together; she’d go down to beaches like Castlegregory with friends and team-mates like Fiona Steed and Ruth Farrell who would lift her as she honed that jump. She would get her start. She would earn her start. And all these years on she’s content to have been there at the start; proud to have established an ethos and tradition rather than lamenting she wasn’t there to inherit one. When Ireland won the Grand Slam last year Foley was covering the game for RTÉ radio and instantly broke into tears, purely of joy, not one drop of regret.
Next Tuesday she will cover their game against the All Blacks on Sky. Again she can see herself welling up with pride. Ireland are in a tough group, but they started with a win against the USA yesterday, and she has visions of the whole country stopping to watch them play a World Cup semi-final in a few weeks’ time, maybe even better.
“I can see that,” she beams in that bubbly manner of hers (it would be fair to say she’s a bit more gregarious than her more guarded brother). “That’s my dream and that’s what they’re out there to do.”
And if you know Rosie Foley, dreams of hers have a habit of coming true.
Growing up in Killaloe she had another aspiration other than being a girl who wanted to play rugby. When she was 11 or so she watched an old black and white movie about Gertrude Ederle, an American woman who in 1926 became the first woman to swim the English Channel. “I remember thinking, ‘You know what, I’d love to do that some day’.”
Water was literally everywhere around her. As kids they grew up on Lough Derg and in Lough Derg, an elderly man called Peter Lacey teaching them like all the local kids how to swim up by the pier head and outdoor pool. She would never go on to become a formal competitive swimmer but a few years ago after her rugby career had wound up she joined the Limerick Masters club and soon befriended some open-water swimmers such as Andrea Newport and Fionnuala Walsh. Before she knew it she was swimming down by Valentia Island, the Sandycove Swim in Kinsale and the Lee swim in Cork. It rekindled a childhood dream so about 18 months ago she started gearing herself towards swimming the Channel like Fionnuala just had.
Last month she swam the length of Loch Derg because the 38km was almost the same distance as the Channel. That was a highlight in itself, seeing all the locals and friends on the pier head welcoming her in, including Anthony who smiled in that laconic style of his, “You do know there are easier ways to get from one side of that lake to the other?”
At the time he didn’t know she was gearing towards something else, something bigger; she wouldn’t tell anyone about the Channel until only a few days before she left for Dover. “We just decided that we were going to keep it to ourselves, that this was a personal thing that I wanted to do. It was my dream. And I wanted to keep that anxiousness away from my parents and sibling.”
She wouldn’t even tell her three children until she’d crossed the Channel, fearful that the image of mommy and daddy swimming in the middle of the ocean would frighten them unduly.
Actually that was probably the scariest part of the entire swim, she reckons; when four hours in Pat could join in and swim just behind her. But that was only momentarily. Pretty soon she could tell Pat was in his element. And pretty much for all of it, so was she. The experiences and sensations she had and the things she saw was like something from out of The Life of Pi, only without the danger and the tiger Richard Parker.
hat might have been because she instead had the pilot Paul Foreman for company. Always she got the sense he was looking out for her. She first arrived in Dover on the Wednesday night and a more casual pilot might have let her out on the Thursday but his reading of the forecast was that it would be too choppy; Friday morning would be better. He was caring and he was upbeat.
The name of the boat said everything about him and everything about her: The Optimist.
There was also the Observer: not the paper, but the supervisor from the Channel Swimming and Pilot Association. He was supportive – even donning that red Munster T-shirt – but also stern, insisting she had to start behind the waterline; not even her toes could be in the water before she could commence her run and dive into the Channel at Shakespeare’s beach. By 7.52 though her toes and every other part of her was in the water and the English Channel.
What was it like? It was warm. Lovely. Pleasant. Magical. “It was like ‘I’m here. I’m swimming the English Channel. This is unbelievable’. When I stopped every half hour or so for some food during the first four or five hours you were looking at the beautiful, beautiful white cliffs of Dover. I’m sorry but it is just spectacular.”
There would be more testing times. The initial scare when Pat joined in with her and the image of little Óisín, Brendan and Siofra at home. Swimming against the tide which prevented them landing on the Cap and lengthened the swim by another couple of hours. But never did she think she wasn’t going to finish it. All the way through she kept saying to herself: “This ends today. Whatever happens this ends today.”
Other little thoughts and triggers kept her going. She would sing to herself. There Is An Isle got a blast in her head. So did Stand Up and Fight. My Lovely Rose of Clare.
She would also think of people at home. The kids. One of the kids at school. This past school year in St Anne’s Community College they lost a 16-year-old called Ben Kikker through cancer. He was their own Donal Walsh, someone who committed to spending his final months with friends and family and embracing all of life; now she could honour him by fully living and driving on here.
She would practically avoid jellyfish, just the one who stung her under arm; otherwise it was like she had this energy bubble that shielded her away from such deterrents. She would see tankers and ferries and fishing boats. Then at night she could start seeing the coast of France.
And the streetlights in the distance. And the stars. Oh the stars! At that point Coldplay started playing in her internal jukebox.
And then she entered The Blue. Paul had spoken about this beforehand: about 90 minutes out and you’d be entering French waters. She could feel The Blue. It was warmer and she was closer, nearly here. Then Paul shone the spotlight to the shore; that’s where she was to swim. A couple of hundred metres out, Fionnaula and Pat joined in, her home team in the home stretch.
Her feet kicked faster until they were suddenly on sand, land. She’d done it. Thirty years after watching that old film about an exceptional pioneering woman, another such woman from Killaloe had just done the same. Only 14 people this year have managed to do so.
“It was fantastic. For the five minutes we had on the beach, the hugs, the tears, calling the kids and home right away once we’d swam back to the boat. The bond with Paul and the trust we formed.”
As The Optimist has learned, good things happen when you trust and make that leap. Where she’s led Ireland can follow.
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