Action man O’Malley is showing no signs of slowing down
IT came as no great surprise that Diarmuid O’Malley was after climbing Strickeen Mountain when he was contacted for this interview. After all, this was a man who has completed over 30 marathons, and ultra-marathons, in the last number of years. The next day, he told me, he was going to climb Ireland’s highest mountain, Carrauntoohill, with some of his children. He speaks of the morning climb as if it’s like going to the shop for an ice cream. Years of playing high level rugby has ensured that Diarmuid retains the discipline to stay fit, and with the McGillycuddy Reeks on his doorstep, a climb up the famed mountain range is a regular occurrence.
Beaufort is where Diarmuid calls home now, and he is happy to do so. In 2017, after fourteen years in Abu Dhabi, he and his wife decided to leave with their four young children (who were all born in Abu Dhabi), and they knew that it was the right time to come back home. Abu Dhabi had been good to them, but the grá was there to rear the family back in the emerald isle, where Diarmuid and Claire could be a stone’s throw away from their own parents. Diarmuid’s wife, Claire O’Brien, is a native of Killarney, her father Kieran is a well known Maths teacher from Aghadoe, and it came down to a toss up between Beaufort’s beauty, and Diarmuid’s home town Limerick city. In the finish, the Kingdom won the day.
O’Malley, who works in the pharmaceutical industry, is intently proud of his Limerick heritage though, and his voice fills with pride as he recalls his youth there. He got involved in rugby from a young age, a natural thing to do in a city where the oval ball is like a religion, and his family had traditionally been involved in the game as well.
After finishing primary school he attended Crescent Comprehensive in Dooradoyle. Diarmuid’s father Tim, and his cousin Dessie (both former TDs), also attended the school in their day.
Diarmuid enjoyed enormous success on the rugby field in whilst at Crescent and they won two Munster Senior Schools Cups in 1989 and 1990. The talent was rich at the Crescent during this time, and Diarmuid packed down with the likes of Paul Wallace, who went on to represent Ireland and the British and Irish Lions.
Diarmuid’s club was Old Crescent, and he progressed to the senior side when he finished school. Old Crescent were very much the poor relation of Limerick rugby and had to compete against the powerhouses of Shannon, Young Munster and Garryowen at the top table, but they more than held their own at a time when the club scene in Munster and Ireland was at an all time high, as Diarmuid recalled.
“I played 13 years of senior rugby with Old Crescent. We were always up and down from the second division to the first as we were in the shadow of the bigger Limerick clubs. AIL (All Ireland League) was great at the time, the quality was amazing. At local derbies you’d have ten or fifteen thousand people at the games. It was brilliant. It’s a pity that the club scene has died down so much.”
Old Crescent gained promotion from Division Two to Division One in 2000.
“There was a lot of retirements at Old Crescent at the time,” Diarmuid said. “We basically had to get the ship back sailing and we got players in, a guy called Billy Treacy and a couple of foreign lads. We brought over a fellow called Glen Gelderbloom, a 32 year old South African that had played provincial rugby over there. He played with us for one year and then went on to Leicester in England as a utility back and ended up winning two Heineken Cup medals! A beautiful player and a guy that would have commanded a backline.
“We drew against Blackrock in the last game of the league to go up to Division One. Leo Cullen was the captain of Blackrock, and Brian O’Driscoll would have played most of their games that season. Eoin Reddan was only eighteen, just out of school, and he was awesome for us, he actually scored a try that day.
“Eoin went on to win four Heineken Cup medals with Wasps and Leinster and his story is phenomenal. He won 71 Irish caps as well. A brilliant player. He is a lesson in perseverance. The likes of Stringer and O’Gara stayed at Munster and did the great things that they did, but Eoin had to do it the real hard way to achieve all that he did. He was a hugely intelligent player, and any time he came on for Ireland, most of his caps were off the bench, he did well. He had a brilliant pass and was a great guy behind the backline as well.”
A work opportunity presented itself to Diarmuid in Abu Dhabi in 2003, so Claire and himself packed their bags to head out there. Naturally, the first thing that Diarmuid did was to check out where the local rugby club was, and although he was now in his thirties, he enjoyed some of the best years of his playing career, which he looks back at with great fondness.
“I went over to Dubai and didn’t know anyone, so I joined the rugby club. It was a great way of meeting people. It was totally different because you’d have to fly to places like Kuwait and Quatar to play games. It was multicultural. The players over there were phenomenal, Kiwi’s, Aussies and South Africans, who were used to a really high level of rugby as well.
“In my first year over there, the
Dubai Rugby Sevens was on in December, it’s a massive two day event, a bit of a glorified party in a lot of ways I suppose.
“You’d have 30,000 people in the stadium watching it. It’s obviously for the pros that play on the Sevens circuit but what happens is that all of the other teams play a competition on the peripheral field, and then if you get to your final you get to play in the front field on the Saturday.
“The first year we got to the final we were beaten, but the second year we won it. On both days we got to play in front of 30,000 people so that was something special. A totally different experience”.
The O’Malley’s were settling in nicely in Abu Dhabi. Diarmuid was enjoying the rugby, and the family were well attuned to the change of lifestyle. He was now 34 years of age and still playing away with his club, Dubai Dragons, when he got a call to play international rugby with Arabian Gulf. Whilst his selection didn’t come as a huge surprise as he was in great form, it was a massive honour to get capped at this veteran stage of his career, as he recalled.
“You have to be three years in the country before you get international clearance. My first cap was in the second row against Sri Lanka, the mighty Sri Lanka rugby team,” he laughed.
“I was captain of the side and I played two years of international rugby over there. They were trying to replicate what the 6 Nations is, obviously on a smaller scale, so HSBC got behind it for a couple of years, and the first year it was marketed as the Asian 5 Nations. We were in the top tier with Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, and Hong Kong. We were known as the Arabian Gulf at the time.
“Now they have separate unions, so you have the UAE, Oman and Abu Dhabi. I played international rugby for two years before I hung up the boots. It was a brilliant. We played Japan over there as well and went 3-0 up but conceded a lot of points after that! They were coached by former All Black great John Kirwan at the time, and were fully professional, but for a fellow like me to get that type of experience was phenomenal”.
With six international caps to his credit Diarmuid felt that the time had come to hang up his boots. Running was taking up a solid amount of his time, and he even completed the Artic Marathon along with a friend Neil Munro, raising US$53,000 for the Christina Noble Foundation’s Sunshine School in Vietnam in the process. The aim was US$50,000, the annual budget to run the school but the two lads exceeded their target.
“The summer temperature was 50 degrees in Abu Dhabi, so in order to acclimatise to the minus 25 degrees in Greenland, they would do treadmill sessions in stand up freezers.
Training sessions in large freezers may sound a little eccentric, but it worked a treat, and the two lads completed the Artic Marathon. Their supreme effort had been worth it, and they proudly handed over the USD 53,000 to Christina Noble’s children. The charity had