'My wife had a stroke at 35 weeks pregnant': Connacht's Paddy McAllister opens up on family trauma
Connacht's Paddy McAllister wife had a stroke at 35 weeks pregnant. Both mother and baby are doing fine, he says. Picture: INPHO/Laszlo Geczo
Paddy McAllister, the Connacht prop, still has scars on his hands from the baby crocodiles he was trying to raise in his bedroom when he was growing up in the Congo, but dealing with the harsh realities of life is nothing new to the 31-year old.
He comes from a missionary family and has seen at first hand in the Congo the devastation of war and health crises.
But there has been trauma at home as well and he goes into Saturday’s clash against Scarlets with his wife Deborah recovering from a stroke suffered at 35 weeks pregnant in August before the birth of their third child Eliana last month.
McAllister, who was only introduced to rugby when he was 14 after he moved from the Congo to Royal School Armagh, takes it all in his stride.
“My wife had a stroke at 35 weeks pregnant and things were pretty tough for about two days and thankfully my wife and the baby both made it through. We are a family of faith and we had a lot of prayer behind us from friends and family.
"Both girls are very healthy and I’m a very lucky man.”
Eliana is a welcome sister to Lucy (4) and Max (3) as McAllister juggles the demands of a professional rugby career with being a father of three young children and an extended family who have spent decades working in some of the most ravaged communities in the world.
His grandfather Bob, after coming back from the Second World War, moved to the Congo from Belfast with his wife Alma back in the 1950s to work as missionaries, and that work has since been continued by Paddy’s parents David and mum Sabine, who was born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France.
Growing up in the Congo for Paddy and older brothers Daniel and Phillip, and younger sister Christina, was a crazy mix of the usual school past-times intertwined with visits to refugee camps and war-torn communities.
“For a young boy like me who was pretty mischievous, I would say Africa was the best place in the world to grow up. I had an unbelievable childhood. I thought life was amazing. I was very blinded by real life in the world and especially in Africa because my parents did such a good job of dealing with everything and having it from their kids.
“It wasn’t until I was older when I realised, that flashbacks of the situations and the places where we stayed and the people we saw, were situations that were actually going on. My parents would go into a refugee camp and I would just go playing on the side of the road with the kids there. They were no different to kids anywhere, you were just delighted to have kids your own age to play with.
“It was a long time afterwards before I appreciated what they and the people in the Congo were going through. With regards to wars and things like, massacres, they have been going on for 20 years in Congo.
McAllister’s passion for animals was fostered from an early age in the Congo and he still bears the scars of some of them.
“Friends of the family who lived in a remote area would visit every so often and the man would regularly bring me back an animal whether it would be a snake or a chameleon or something like that.
“One time he turned up with five new-born crocodiles. I don’t know how he got them, he said ‘can you look after them for me for a few months til I will come back’. I had them in an incubator in my room. To be fair they were out-growing the incubator by the time he picked them up.
“I used to pick them up but sometimes they would jump loose and run around the bedroom. I’d have to crawl under the bed and grab them but sometimes they would have a little nibble on my hands and I get a few little scratches. It is weird, I do have a couple of little scars on my hand and I know where they are from.
"They definitely weren’t like a puppy nibbling in affection or play-fighting, they would have taken my hand off if they were a bit older but they were little babies.”
McAllister made an immediate impact in rugby with the Royal School Armagh and he linked up with the Ulster academy in due course before breakthrough to the senior ranks where he made 44 appearances.
He also went through the age-grades with Ireland, representing the U20s at a Junior World Championship alongside the likes of Peter O’Mahony and Conor Murray in 2009.
McAllister moved to Jeremy Davidson’s Aurillac for a season in the ProD2 before switching to Gloucester where he played 58 times. He’s now in his second season in Galway and is happy to pass on any experience which might help a young player.
“This is a very young squad, not many who are married or have families, so I’m at a bit of a different stage to them and I like being there for some of the younger guys. It is a very young squad here and I can only see things getting better here if they can keep a lot of these young players because in a few years’ time these guys are going to be playing so much rugby. Connacht are going to be a serious team.
“This is my 11th season as a professional and I’m a firm believer that some people have it very lucky where as soon as they become a professional rugby player things become very easy for them," added McAllister.
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