Ireland's rugby codebreakers owe plenty to their GAA past

SOLO ACT: Cliodhna Moloney-MacDonald pucking around at Towcestrians Sports Club, Northampton, Pic: ©INPHO/Ben Brady

The roads will be quiet when the bus carrying the Ireland women’s team leaves their hotel on Sunday morning and drives up Whittlebury High Street, onto Cowpasture Lane, before joining the A43 motorway for Northampton and a World Cup opener against Japan.

It’s nothing more than a half-an-hour jaunt through the English countryside. Straightforward. Pleasant, apart from the butterflies on the inside. The hardest, most complicated leg of this journey for so many of the 32 players on board will have been covered many years before, long before this stage was constructed in their minds.

Some of Scott Bemand’s squad found rugby early and have enjoyed an all-but-unbroken love affair with a sport that was more or less within arm’s reach at all times. They are the exceptions rather than the rule.

For the majority this weekend, the path has been one of blind spots, boreens and dead ends that required luck, ingenuity or sheer stubbornness to overcome. Sometimes a combination of two or all three.

Take Siobhán McCarthy.

Born and brought up in Clooney, due east of Ennis, the 29-year-old knew rugby. Her dad was a Munster fan and she had attended games herself, but it was only when the province’s women’s interpo-winning team was paraded before a Celtic League game in Thomond Park over a decade ago when the penny dropped that this wasn’t just a game for men.

In her mid-teens at the time, she would one day end up turning out for Shannon, whose clubhouse is a half-hour from home, but only after starting her own rugby journey for at college in UCC, almost 200 kilometres from her home place. Unlike now, there just wasn’t a starting bloc for her at Ennis RFC then.

If this is typical enough of the hoops through which so many of Ireland’s players have had to jump, then so is McCarthy’s early years playing Gaelic games before a migration to the oval ball later in life.

Edel McMahon found the other 15-a-side game only because a few rugby players asked her where the changing rooms were one night as they were going their way and she was going hers. An intermediate title winner with Kilmihil as a 13-year-old, she was already in uni by the time of that chance encounter.

At least 20 of Ireland’s 32-strong squad could add a line about a GAA background to their sporting CVs. Some dipped in and out as they sampled hungrily any sport that caught their eye, others were well down the road to making it the centrepiece of their diet.

Centre Aoife Dalton, with GAA roots on both sides of the family tree, was embedded deeper than most in the national pastimes. Her father Tony played minor and U21 football for Offaly in the 90s and won three senior county titles with Clara. Her brother Marcus was a sub on the Offaly U20 side that won a hurling All-Ireland last year and is a handy footballer.

Aoife won an All-Ireland Post Primary Junior ‘B’ final with Moate CS in 2019, and then, an ‘A’ equivalent the following year before gravitating to rugby with Tullamore RFC as a 15-year old. Another late starter.

Sam Monaghan, co-captain at this World Cup with McMahon, won an All-Ireland U16 Ladies football title with Meath. Alongside her were Vikki Wall, Marie O’Shaughnessy and Monica McGuirk who would win a senior version under the same manager, Eamonn Murray. Monaghan had to move to Brighton for college before she discovered rugby.

On it goes.

BALLER: Stacey Flood getting her touch right. Pic: ©INPHO/Ben Brady

GAA hasn’t been the only springboard. There is a strong hockey influence in the group, Eimear Corri-Fallon and Fiona Tuite were promising athletes, Nicole Fowley and Brittany Hogan were making strides as soccer players, basketball was chief among Enya Breen’s pursuits, and at least one, Molly Scuffil-McCabe, could have gone down the equestrian route.

But Gaelic football and camogie’s imprint is unmatchable, undeniable. Ireland’s kicking coach Gareth Steenson found as much when he returned home to Armagh after almost two decades in the UK, most of it spent playing with Exeter Chiefs.

“The GAA players, the skill level right across the board, the high-ball skills, all those elements… It’s fantastic to have that in the locker and a lot of the girls actually have that,” he said during the warm-up phase earlier this month.

Sadhbh McGrath had watched rugby for years, but camogie and football were “her thing” until she finally gave in to her dad’s urging and pitched up for a ‘Give It A Try’ day at City of Derry RFC. Something clicked and she had no doubt looking back that the ‘something’ owed more than a bit to the transferable skills she had carried over from the GAA.

Same goes for Brittany Hogan who juggled hockey with the football she played for Downpatrick RGU, Carryduff and the Down Ladies before she followed a friend down to Ballynahinch RFC at the age of 16.

“I would always talk about my mother for putting me into all these different sports, and for my dad for driving me. It's the ability to have those soft skills, like your hand-eye coordination… I don’t kick [now] but I did in GAA so having that ability to know space and decision-making and stuff, that really, really helps 

“You look at Dannah [O’Brien] and Nicole - I also played soccer as well - Stacey Flood in the backfield as well, she played GAA. Lots of the girls, alongside rugby, have been playing high levels in other sports and that all plays a part.

“It’s like all of those little pieces that the girls have been involved with around the country before they hit rugby, and before they were shown into rugby, really pays off. I'd always give people advice not to stick to one sport. Always just try and widen your horizons.” 

Rugby is now making inroads at earlier intervals. Neve Jones was six when she started, Ruth Campbell was 11 when she played minis for Naas at half-time of a Leinster Chanpions Cup game at the RDS. Even Enya Breen, who has a Cork junior football medal to her name, and whose father Ian was man of the match in 1993 when O’Donovan Rossa won a club football All-Ireland title, got her first taste of rugby aged six at Carrigaline RFC.

Head coach Scott Bemand spoke this month about the night and day difference between the IRFU’s pathways for female players now when compared to his arrival from England just two years ago. That will continue but the GAA influence on Ireland at this World Cup will keep feeding into the next four-year cycle and beyond.