Brothers in Sport (22 page)

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Darragh Ó Sé reflects on the many changes he has seen since he first pulled on the Kerry jersey way back when the county was struggling to regain its status as a football paradise. Some of those changes are good, some are not so good. ‘I always regarded it as a privilege to play for Kerry. I loved winning. And losing from time to time made you appreciate the good days even more. It was tough at times but there was a great social side to it all – team holidays, All Star tours where you would meet with other players from other counties. You would often hear things about me not getting on with the Cork lads and we would have a good laugh about it when we would meet on tour.

‘Back in the mid-1990s the media coverage wasn’t as big. The increase in coverage was obviously good for the game but it also had a downside. It became very tabloidy and intrusive. They forgot this was still an amateur game. You see people getting in the papers for all the wrong reasons.

‘Inter-county football has become a very serious business. The good old days of playing a game and going for a few pints afterwards are nearly gone; they are certainly curtailed. I’m glad I experienced that side of it; meeting lads from the other counties and getting to know them. That is gone to some extent. You don’t socialise with other players as much any more and I think that is a poor reflection on us. That should be encouraged in some way. I know and understand the need for discipline and that the demands are greater now. I don’t even have the answers as to how you make it work both ways, but it is sad to see it going. I was brought up to play the game hard and fair. You took knocks and you gave them and at the end of the game you shook hands. I think it’s a pity that lads don’t mix now. I have made great friends with lads from other counties that I still meet up with from time to time.

‘The game has definitely speeded up. There has been tinkering with the rules and I understand that there is a constant need to make improvements. But by and large the rules are okay. It is the application of the rules and consistency in application that is the problem. We have too many variables. I also don’t think the referees are given enough respect; they need to be treated better across the board by County Boards and at national level. Pay them well, look after them, because they are a crucial part of our game. I was no angel myself in the way I behaved with referees. We all need to play our part. This is a major part of our game that is flawed at the minute. Referees need greater recognition. Referees need an incentive scheme, something for them to aim at. And I would reward them; incorporate them when awards are being given out. We need to make them feel part of the whole thing. We need to create an environment where referees are encouraged to improve their own standards. The inconsistency causes so many problems. No one knows what is right and that frustrates players and then the referees get frustrated.

‘The GAA has grown so much. Croke Park has made a huge difference. It’s a fantastic stadium and now it has been opened to other sports. We can be very proud of it. It is a fantastic time to be a GAA player. For a lot of the younger guys coming through they are getting a high profile and that is good for them.’

He feels strongly that his friend Paul
Galvin has been the victim of some unfair media coverage. He knows footballers are not saints. He has been in his fair share of scrapes during his long career and accepts without rancour the times he has been disciplined. But he feels the treatment of
Galvin has been unjust. He explains: ‘A lot of our so-called broadsheets have a tabloid mentality. More and more the papers have focused on the private lives of our top players because they believe it sells papers. Paul
Galvin sells papers. No one takes into account the effect it has on these lads as individuals, on their families and the communities in which they live. The way things are reported gives a false impression of what these people are really like.

‘Paul
Galvin plays on the edge. That is what makes him so exciting to watch. But any incident in which he is involved is blown up, when most of them are innocuous. The coverage is not consistent. You are never told that he is always the first to training, that he puts in the hours and that he is so committed and dedicated. I read some of the stuff and get frustrated because I think “that is nothing like the guy I know”. I know that what I’m reading is misleading but some guy in another county might read it and you could forgive them for thinking “what’s this headbanger at now?” I would be afraid that there will be major problems down the line because this coverage has gone too far. The media is crucial in terms of creating a profile. That profile helps bring in funding which is important. And young guys can get jobs – even in this economic climate – because of their profile. But the media has to act responsibly and at times it doesn’t.’

From Fiji to Na Piarsaigh: Seán Óg, Setanta and Aisake Ó hAilpín celebrate Na Piarsaigh’s success in the Cork senior hurling championship in 2004.
© Matt Browne/SPORTSFILE

‘Is fada an turas é ó Fiji go Corcaigh …
’
The remainder of the opening line of Seán Óg Ó hAilpín’s victory speech on the steps of the Hogan Stand in Croke Park on 11 September 2005 was drowned out by the appreciative roar from the tens of thousands of Cork hurling supporters who had poured onto the hallowed surface to celebrate the county’s thirtieth All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship success.

With an eloquence few could muster in such a cauldron of emotion, the Cork captain spoke
as Gaeilge
for almost four minutes before raising the Liam McCarthy Cup to the skies in triumph. It had indeed been a long journey from his birthplace in the Fiji Islands to Cork and on to Croke Park, but in that moment all the pain, the sacrifice, the life adjustment and the hard work had been made worthwhile.

Seán and Emile Ó hAilpín could never have imagined way back in 1987 when they decided the future for their young family lay in Ireland that their eldest son would become one of the country’s most popular sporting heroes and that the name Ó hAilpín would become synonymous with sporting achievement. The exotic looks, the equally exotic names – Teu, Setanta and Aisake being the other brothers – added to the aura, but it was their athleticism, dedication and modesty that endeared the boys to a nation.

It could not have been foretold either that the eldest son would become involved in some of the greatest controversies in Irish sport; that he would find himself at the centre of a very public and acrimonious debate involving some of the most powerful figures in the GAA that would help define the future of the GAA and its players.

In between the various controversies Setanta would enjoy a year of extraordinary adulation alongside his big brother before embarking on a professional football career back in the land of his birth, Australia. The youngest brother, Aisake, also wore the colours of Cork and tried a professional career, while the second oldest, Teu, would earn many awards at club level.

The story of the Ó hAilpín brothers is packed with drama on and off the field. It is a story of survival, adventure, despair and ultimately triumph. Acted out on two sides of the world, it is heroic without any loss of humility. And it all began on a little island in the Pacific Ocean that few in Ireland had heard of until the very last decade of the twentieth century.

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The volcanic island of Rotuma lies almost 400 miles north of Fiji’s capital Suva. It is a tiny, 24-square mile speck in the ocean that is home to about 2,000 people, with many more Rotumans spread throughout Fiji, Polynesia, Australia and New Zealand. It was there, on 22 May 1977, that Seán and Emile Ó hAilpín’s first son, Seán Óg, was born and would spend the first eighteen months of his life. His father was a native of Fermanagh who had met Emile while working for an oil company on the island.

Emile bore four more children after the family moved to Sydney. Teu (pronounced Deo) was followed by the eldest girl Sarote, then Setanta and Aisake. The sixth and youngest of the clan, Étaoin, was born when the family moved to Cork. Seán Óg recalls a lifestyle in Sydney that was idyllic. His Irish heritage was acknowledged within the family but did not impinge on the life they lived.

He did play a little Gaelic football and all the children attended the annual St Patrick’s Day parade in Sydney. Otherwise, they lived like Australians and places like Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Semple Stadium and Croke Park were alien to these sports-mad youngsters. But Seán Óg’s dreams of becoming a top rugby league player in Sydney were dashed without warning one evening in late 1987, when his parents informed the family that they were moving to Ireland.

‘It broke my heart leaving Sydney,’ Seán Óg recalls with candour. ‘I was eleven years old then and I already had a life out there. At primary school there was a huge emphasis on sport and I always had a football or a rugby league ball with me when I was on my way to and from school or just out playing. I loved the sunshine, the Australian way of life and I had lots of friends out there.

‘We knew there was an Irish connection in the family; that Dad was from Ireland. But Ireland could have been on Mars or Jupiter as far as we were concerned as kids. I used to go with my father to the Gaelic club in Sydney and played some Gaelic football with the other kids around there, but my sports were rugby league and cross-country running. The only time that we recognised the Irish thing really was on Paddy’s Day when we would dress up and join the parade in Sydney marching behind the Fermanagh banner. Apart from that we lived a pure Aussie lifestyle.

‘In 1987 when my parents announced we were moving to Ireland it ripped my heart. I was leaving behind my sport, the weather, my friends. I was being transported to this foreign place on the other side of the world and I really didn’t know what was happening.

‘Do I remember my first day? Of course I do. It was a wet miserable February day in 1988, landing in Dublin; we stayed in Dublin overnight and got a train down to Cork. Any rain we had experienced in Australia was a tropical downpour and a couple of hours later the rain had evaporated and the sun was beating down again. Then we came here and it was our first experience of the light drizzle that can go on for a day. And the cold. It was unreal.’

There were other complexities for the children, as Seán Óg explains: ‘Cork was a different city then to what it is now. I mean this with the greatest respect, but Cork was a white city. The Ó hAilpín kids had inherited my mother’s Fijian features. We were different and it was very obvious to us that we were different in the early days. I don’t know how we would have integrated, if we would have been able to integrate, if it wasn’t for the GAA.’

Seán and Emile initially set up home in Fair Hill on the north side of the city. Though they later moved to Blarney, the influence of Fair Hill and the GAA community in the area would be profound. The boys attended North Monastery school and joined the Na Piarsaigh GAA club; within both institutions they found a new family and a new sense of identity.

‘We are a close family,’ Seán Óg recalls. ‘When we left Sydney to come here we had no one but ourselves, no relatives or anything like that. We looked for support from each other. When you move a family of five children from one side of the world to the other it is not easy; mentally and emotionally it is a huge thing for young kids. It was hard and the first initial years were torture, getting used to the school system, new kids, a new culture. You felt straight away you were different. Our attitude was “what won’t break you will make you” and that was the life. We got used to it. Being different went by the wayside when we started playing for the GAA club and people began to accept us. After a few years we could walk down the street like every other Joe Soap. Only for sport I don’t know how we would have integrated as well as we did.’

Sean Óg Ó hAilpín on championship duty for Cork.
© Brendan Moran/ SPORTSFILE

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‘The Mon’, as the North Monastery school is popularly known on the north side of Cork city, was founded in the early part of the nineteenth century by the Christian Brothers. It encapsulated all the ideals of the CBS tradition, stoutly Catholic and nationalist, in which the playing of Gaelic games was central to the ethos. Through its history the North Monastery produced many of Cork’s greatest hurlers and footballers, most notably Jack Lynch. And it was a group of former pupils who decided during the 1940s to form a new GAA club in the area which they named Na Piarsaigh in honour of Pádraig Pearse.

It was this school, where the curriculum is taught in Irish, that the young Ó hAilpín boys attended when they arrived in Cork in the spring of 1988. From the school they were directed to the club, where a variety of teachers and coaches provided the guidance, encouragement and coaching that allowed Seán Óg and Teu to find their feet in this new land. Setanta and Aisake were six and seven years younger and their transition was less traumatic.

Seán Óg felt comfortable playing Gaelic football. He was naturally athletic and had experienced the game before. His rugby league skills in terms of handling and running also helped. Hurling was much different. ‘I didn’t have the skills at all and I was embarrassed to take it up,’ he recalls. Although he was fully immersed with football, he was idle during the months when hurling was prominent. One of his first mentors and a man who became a father figure to the youngster,
Abie Allen, was persistent. He quietly but effectively cajoled the kid for almost a year before eventually convincing him to give hurling a go.

‘Jesus, I was pretty raw at first,’ he laughs now in re-collection. ‘The lads still remind me to this day about when I started. I was hacking people, double swings and all that. Myself and the hurley didn’t go well together. But I was young and willing, and between the school and the club I was exposed to a lot of hurling, I played with a lot of good hurlers and I had a lot of good coaches.’

People like
Donal O’Grady,
Nicky Barry, Gerry Kelly, Christy Kidney and Billy Clifford, along with
Abie Allen, worked with the youngsters. ‘I suppose I was a project from the start. My football was flying but my hurling needed an awful lot of work and a lot of patience.’ Teu, a year younger, was also learning and in the evenings when they got home they would go straight out to the yard and start pucking the ball around – ‘hurling till the lights went out’.

Soon they were fully assimilated into the GAA way of life. Cork football and hurling were the dominant subjects of conversation in the family home. They would watch
Tony O’Sullivan from Na Piarsaigh play with Cork in front of 60,000 in Páirc Uí Chaoimh or 70,000 in Croke Park and meet him the following day at the club. It was inspiring. ‘It gave us our dreams watching the likes of
Tony, Ger
Cunningham,
Denis Walsh,
Jim Cashman and
Teddy McCarthy.’

Their father and mother recognised very quickly the value of the games and the GAA for their young family. ‘My parents altered their lives to accommodate our hurling. It must have been hard on the girls because our hurling was so important in the house. I don’t remember partying or girls from that time. It was all hurling.’

Less than six years after arriving in Ireland Seán Óg was a member of the North Monastery team that won the Munster Colleges (Dr Harty Cup) title and the All-Ireland Colleges title in 1994. That brought him to the attention of the Cork minor selectors. Bringing home a Cork jersey was a very special occasion for the family. He won his first Munster inter-county title that year with the minors and played in Croke Park for the first time. Cork lost, but it was the start of something very big. A year later he won his first All-Ireland medal with the minors on a team that included
Donal Óg Cusack,
Timmy McCarthy,
Mickey O’Connell and
Joe Deane.

Two summers later, in 1997, they were joined on the Cork under-21 team by
Wayne Sherlock and
Diarmuid O’Sullivan, and two consecutive Munster and All-Ireland titles were captured. Seán Óg had become a part of the Cork senior hurling team in 1996 and at the end of 1998 he was called into the Cork senior football squad. At the same time he was a student in Dublin City University, where he was involved in both the Fitzgibbon Cup and Sigerson Cup teams. It was a roller coaster ride and his brothers lent enthusiastic support. Teu was having an outstanding under-age career with Na Piarsaigh and made Cork minor and under-21 football squads. ‘He never got the breakthrough he deserved,’ says Seán Óg, ‘because he was as good as the rest of us.’ Teu continued to play football and hurling, and enjoyed playing in Clare with the Eire Óg club in Ennis and later in London.