‘A 90-minute training session wouldn’t compare to 12 hours a day on the farm at 15 years of age’

WORKING on a farm helps create leadership qualities from a young age, leading sports psychologist Enda McNulty has said.

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believes farming provides children with a unique work ethic and sense of responsibility that is considered invaluable to employers.

“If someone has worked on a farm they know how to work,” he says.

“There are no days off; they are willing to roll up their sleeves and muck in whether its sheering sheep, baling hay, covering silage, calving a cow.”

Although sport was always his first love, from a young age, Enda, had to prioritise chores on his uncle Patsy’s beef and dairy farm in Lislea, Co Armagh, before getting out to training and matches.

“No matter what the match was on the next day, we’d get a knock in the middle of the night to say there is a cow calving,” he adds.

“At the time, I didn’t realise it but the character development of that, even the strength development, carrying two tyres, one under each arm and running up on top of the pit and running back down because you want to get it finished before training time, was amazing,” he says. Being instructed to screw-drive a ring through a bull’s nose at the age of 14, taught him about courage.

“A 90-minute training session might be hard but it wouldn’t compare to 12 hours on a farm at 15 years of age,” he adds.

Although he is no longer directly involved in the farm, he has great respect for the lands that helped shape him

“A lot of my own physical training now would still be about running on the farm, through the forest and the fields where we would have worked as children,” he says.