Does the Central Statistics Office keep figures on the number of plans that fall victim to the GAA scheduling gods each year? If not, it should.
Between the club and county seasons, it’s an almost year-round affair which often sees travel forced to take a back seat. Many a planned odyssey has been laid to ruin by a team getting further than anticipated in the championship.
And what if Gaelic games are both your job and your hobby? Must you forever resign yourself to a life in Ireland, reconciled to only catching glimpses of the wider world between gaps in the master fixtures schedule?
In that regard, Clare’s Cian O’Dea is somewhat of an anomaly. He’s one of a growing number employed by the GAA to grow and develop our national sports. The oddity being that he’s employed in New York.
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Having been a part of the Clare set-up during Colm Collins’s tenure, O’Dea was part of a squad that made significant headway. During the time from his senior debut, coming against Cork in 2015, to his last game for the Banner against Donegal in the 2023 All-Ireland group stages, Clare won a Division Three league title in 2016, going on to reach the All-Ireland quarter-finals that July. In 2022, they found themselves back in an All-Ireland quarter-final, and a Munster final the following year.
“Winning the Division Three league and getting to lift the cup in the Hogan Stand with my brother, that was definitely a high point,” the 28-year-old recalls of his time with Clare.
“I used to love the league. We were Division Two, playing some top teams, so close to getting promoted to Division One.” But Clare never managed to reach the top flight, and 2023 saw them relegated back to Division Three. “It’s disappointing that we couldn’t push on, because the quality was there and the belief was there, but we didn’t get to achieve our full potential.”
And the potential was there. Under Collins, Clare were a reinvigorated outfit. The regard in which Collins is held is evident when speaking to those who played under him; O’Dea credits him with shaking the team out of a long-held “also-ran” mindset.
“He changed the mentality of Clare football. We weren’t happy to settle for moral victories, losing by one point to good teams, we wanted to be at the top table.”
That sense of being part of a team that’s going places is what encourages many players, club and county alike, to stay in Ireland. But when Collins called time on his decade-long management of Clare at the end of the county’s championship run in 2023, O’Dea had decided to make his own departure.
“The season was later in the year, and we were always making the last round of the qualifiers or the quarter-finals, so by the time you got knocked out of the championship we had gotten too far to go abroad or to go on a J1, so I never got to go anywhere. When Colm was leaving, I said, ‘You know what, it sounds like the right time to try something new.’”
Something new, and somewhere new.
New York GAA were looking for a games development officer. For O’Dea, a sports and exercise science graduate from University of Limerick who had been plying his trade coaching Gaelic games in schools around Co Clare, it was a no-brainer.
“I never really had any grá to move to places like Canada or Australia, it was always America,” he says, adding that the job was key to him taking the leap. “Because I was going to be working with the GAA, it was such a good opportunity I couldn’t turn it down.”
While his work is similar to what it had been at home – teaching children the fundamental skills, focusing on participation rather than competition – the promotion aspect of the role was new to him.
“In Ireland, everyone knows what the GAA is; it’s in the schools, it’s in the community, but over here, a big part of the job is to make people aware of it.”
While it’s “rare enough that you’d get someone with no bit of an Irish connection in them”, he says they’re glad to see people of all abilities and backgrounds coming along to their workshops and clinics to give it a go.
And of the children who do come – O’Dea estimates there are about 1,500 boys and 400 girls playing Gaelic games in New York GAA’s catchment – they bring with them the skills of the sports that feel more native to them.
“The football out here is a lot different to how football is played at home. Even the way the American kids hop the ball, it’s more like a basketball bounce … it’s nearly like a different sport. They’re so athletic too - there’s a lot of running, a lot of taking on the player, it’s almost like old-school football.”
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And he hasn’t hung up his own boots. Another tick in New York’s favour was that he would still have the opportunity to play intercounty. And so he has. As well as lining out for his new club, Queens-based Shannon Gaels, O’Dea also plays football and hurling for New York, and featured in their Connacht hurling league campaign earlier this year which saw them claim the title for the first time with a win over Mayo in the final.
“I moved out here with the GAA, working for the GAA, but when you move to a new country you still feel kind of lonesome and you kind of don’t know what to do.
“[But] since the first day of joining [Shannon Gaels and New York], I just felt right at home. It just made the transition from Ireland to America so much easier, because it’s the same craic, the same characters you have in the dressing rooms.
“The GAA is great for that – no matter where you go, there’s a community.”
For those who go away, there’s often the inevitable draw of home. Sometimes that sense of what you’re missing feels like a gentle strain, other times a ferocious heave. Funnily, O’Dea felt that pull more acutely in April when the Clare footballers played Kerry in the Munster final, staged at Cusack Park in Ennis for the first time since 1919, than he did when the Clare hurlers won the county’s fifth All-Ireland title.
“It was harder to watch the Munster final than the hurling All-Ireland because I felt like I should have been at the football, like I should have been playing,” he says. “The hurling, I could watch it on TV and still appreciate how hard they had worked and how good it was for the county, but the football was more of a killer.
“Not being in that match in Ennis, especially it being on in Ennis, was a bit of a killer … It’s not a regret, but I wish I was there.”
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