A potted history of Cairbre Ó Cairealláin’s journey from West Belfast to a central role with Limerick, perhaps the greatest team in hurling history. It starts, unsurprisingly, with a love of hurling.
“I remember even just to watch the Munster Championship games on RTÉ you’d have to hold the aerial up to get the signal coming in from the South,” smiled the Antrim man. “For us those players were just giants, the Seán Óg Ó hAilpíns, the Ken McGraths, the Ciaran Careys.”
Later, as a talented teenager, Ó Cairealláin got an opportunity to play for the Antrim minors and, funnily enough, they ran into Limerick in an All-Ireland quarter-final in 2005.
Antrim had the likes of Neil McManus and Shane McNaughton, son of joint manager Sambo McNaughton, involved, but Limerick had just a little more and a team including future senior All-Ireland winners Seamus Hickey and Tom Condon won a clinker by a point, 4-12 to 2-17.
“The following year I went to UL to study sports science but mostly to play hurling,” recalled Ó Cairealláin. “I was hurling Freshers and I’d just be going around the college with the hurling stick, looking for a ball wall to puck the ball off. That was my motivation to study sports science.”
Which neatly explains Ó Cairealláin’s arrival in Limerick, and how he ultimately ended up as a strength and conditioning (S&C) expert, though there is a large chunk of time missing in between then and his gig with Limerick.
“I had an opportunity to work with Arsenal Football Club in London for a few years under Des Ryan, who was the head of the academy over there for years,” he said, outlining how he initially started working with Limerick’s underage academy. “[Des is] A Galway man obviously. I was with the youth academy there for a year, from U-16 right down to U-8. That was an eye-opener to see the levels of kids and the effects of long-term development when it starts at such a young age in a set-up with the resources Arsenal have.
“I then spent two years with the women’s team, which was interesting because at the time they were really transitioning to being a full-time professional team from having been semi-pro.”
He returned to Ireland in 2018, and took up an offer to join Liam Sheedy’s Tipperary senior set-up. An All-Ireland win in 2019 was the payout and, since getting involved with Limerick they have won two All-Irelands. Which neatly brings us up to the present day for the 36-year-old.
But where to from here? In an era where peak physical conditioning isn’t so much an advantage as a prerequisite, particularly in the current condensed season format, S&C men like Ó Cairealláin have never had so much responsibility on their shoulders.
The first thing he wants to say about that is that Limerick’s set-up rivals anything he has seen in a professional space. “I couldn’t see teams really being able to train harder than what they already are, in terms of there being only a certain amount of training that you can do in a given week.”
Maybe then it’s in the area of injury prevention that the next big S&C advancement might come. Limerick have certainly endured their fair share of injuries in recent seasons with Declan Hannon, Sean Finn, Richie English and Cian Lynch all being sidelined for extended periods.
“There are constantly big injuries to players every year,” said Ó Cairealláin of top level hurling generally. “It obviously happens naturally as an inherent risk in sport but when players are playing in the Munster Championship on a Sunday and they have to be up at 7.30am the following morning to go to work, the body is not really getting that opportunity to recover from what it’s just been through the day before. That’s a big part of it.”
So what if the game was to go professional, could new levels of performance be reached in that environment?
“As a hurling supporter every year I’m watching the Championship and thinking ‘where can it go from here?’” replied Ó Cairealláin. “But then the next year it just seems to go up another notch. That seems to have been the case for as long as I’ve been following hurling. You’d be hard pushed to say that it wouldn’t have another level to go up again.”
Now based in Ahane, the Limerick side of the Tipperary/Limerick border, Ó Cairealláin is on the cusp of achieving something unique and incredibly special with his adopted county – the five-in-a-row. The countdown to summer will start next Sunday week, January 7th, when Limerick play their first game in the Co-Op Superstores Munster Hurling League, against Cork in Mallow. At present they are in pre-season mode, generally Ó Cairealláin’s busiest period.
“It’s unbelievable to watch it in the heat of Championship,” he said of Limerick’s power and purpose. “They’re so bought into the system. I came into the set-up when they were a few years into their journey so they had already bought into the importance of strength and conditioning and all that kind of physical development. But they really do relish getting stuck into that work.”
