Caroline Currid joins Paul O'Connell's Irish rugby management set-up

'Phenomenal' sports psychologist was not involved with Limerick hurlers this year but has been snapped up by IRFU for two-game tour of Georgia and Portugal - and perhaps beyond

WINNER: Limerick performance psychologist Caroline Currid lifts the Liam MacCarthy Cup in Croke Park. Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

Renowned sports psychologist Caroline Currid has been drafted into the Irish men’s national team’s management setup by interim head coach Paul O’Connell for their two-game mini-summer tour of Georgia and Portugal.

Currid has built up a remarkable body of work, not least in GAA circles, having been involved with All-Ireland football winning sides in Tyrone and Dublin, and with Tipperary when the Munster county captured a Liam MacCarthy title.

A key part of the enormously successful Limerick hurling project under John Kiely, it has been noted since the county’s quarter-final loss to Dublin last Sunday that Currid has now been absent the last three times Limerick failed to go all the way, in 2019, ’24 and ‘25.

Former Limerick hurler Niall Moran and ex-Dublin star Ryan O’Dwyer are just a couple to have mentioned that correlation this week while numerous players from various counties have praised her contribution down the years.

Limerick’s Declan Hannon has labelled her work as “pheonomenal”.

Currid, who has been working in the performance/psychology sector for two decades now, has also worked with Kenyan Olympic 800m champion David Rudisha, Celtic Football Club and across the business world.

Irish rugby has landed a major coup in co-opting her onto their summer staff, though this isn’t her first foray into the sport: there was a year spent in a consultancy role with Johan van Graan’s Munster during the 2021/22 season.

Currid will be working with an inexperienced Ireland group in the absence of so many regulars who are on tour with the British and Irish Lions. Jacob Stockdale has 38 caps but he is only one of six players with more than ten appearances to his name.

A dozen have yet to play a single minute of Test rugby at the highest standard.

A former Gaelic footballer who won a Junior All-Ireland title with Sligo, Currid goes back a long way with O’Connell whom she interviewed 17 years ago for a study she was compiling on mental preparation among high-performance athletes.

Currid has since admitted that she was shocked by his preparation at the time with O’Connell subsequently writing about the meeting in his autobiography and how he felt a nomination for World Player of the year in 2006 was undeserved.

The pair were soon working together and would do for years, O’Connell’s renowned attention to detail and obsessiveness evident in how he ate through whatever books Currid would send his way.

The IRFU has had high-profile experts in similar roles in the past. Former Armagh footballer Enda McNulty worked as a mental skills coach with the national team from 2013 for seven years and Gary Keegan is currently part of the operation.

Keegan, who revolutionised Irish elite amateur boxing, spent over four years with Jim Gavin’s all-conquering side. Now a performance coach with the IRFU, he is currently in Australia with Andy Farrell’s Lions tourists.