AS THE Beatles once sang “she was just 17, you know what I mean”, but Gráinne Murphy is quite unlike any other teenager in the country.
She arrived back in Ireland on a flight from Gatwick airport with her parents Brendan and Mary and sister Niamh yesterday afternoon to a blizzard of flash bulbs and a joyous reception from her family.
Maybe it was the artificial light of the arrivals hall at Dublin airport, but the silver medal she won in the 1,500m at the European Swimming Championships in Budapest looked more gold than silver.
The extended Murphy clan, many of them sporting Wexford jerseys, were on hand to greet the returning heroine.
Her first cousins, the Porters, Bardons and Murphys crowded around her as she posed for photographs, first with a Wexford flag and then with a Tricolour.
Her grandmother Mary Colfer keeps the first press cutting about her granddaughter in her handbag. It dates from 1999 and shows the elfin-like Murphy with a bronze medal from the Community Games which she won as a six-year-old competing in the under-eights.
A delegation from New Ross Town Council was also on hand to welcome home a young person who is already a famous citizen.
“She will definitely be coming home with gold in 2012,” said Cllr Kevin Dwyer, chairman of the local swimming pool in New Ross, referring to the London Olympics.
The teenager herself seems preternaturally self-possessed amidst all the fuss. Expectations, she said, are what other people have. She prefers “goals”.
“I don’t have any expectation of myself. I’m just really here to swim to the best of my ability and enjoy the sport. I just keep going with the flow,” she said.
When asked, not for the first time, about her chances of a medal at the next Olympics, she cautioned: “It is way too early to be thinking about that.”
She thanked Swim Ireland and her school, Castletroy College in Co Limerick, which is allowing her to sit her Leaving Certificate over two years and hoped that her success could inspire others to take up sport.
Yesterday afternoon, the party continued at the family pub and hotel The Horse and Hound in Ballinaboola outside New Ross. There may be many more days like this.
