ANTHONY FOLEY
Peter Jackson pays tribute to one of Munster’s favourite sons
“He offered people hope when they felt hopeless, confidence when they were deflated”
Anthony Foley’s funeral brought Killaloe to a standstill on Friday, an outpouring of grief on a scale not witnessed in the small Irish town for ten centuries.
Locals in the ancient Irish capital on the Shannon considered it the biggest event since Killaloe’s most famous son, Brian Boru, the last great High King of Ireland, lost his life in the Battle on Good Friday 1014. One thousand and two years later, another warrior was being laid to rest.
At least this time they had traffic cones, one-way systems, hi-tech gadgetry, extra police and stewards to cope with the mourners flooding in from all over the country and beyond. They loved Foley for his willingness to bust a gut on the rugby field but they loved him, too, for his simple, honest-to-God humanity.
Father Pat Malone, a parish priest and the Foleys’ next-door neighbour in Killaloe, referred to that during the funeral mass at St Flannan’s Church. His words painted a vivid portrayal of the player off the field, Foley the man, born less than 15 miles down the road in Limerick.
“What touched me most in all the statements I heard or read about Anthony was the amount of care he offered to so, so many different people,’’ Fr Malone said.
“He had that great human capacity to sense or notice those who were struggling in one way or another and the ability to reach out and include them in a sensitive and caring way. He offered people hope when they felt hopeless, confidence when they were deflated.’’
In an age when the game’s ethos takes a battering from professionalism, Foley stood up for the old virtues. He had been steeped in the sport from the earliest of initiations into the inner sanctum at the old Thomond Park where his father, the Ireland second row Brendan Foley, locked the Munster scrum with the late Moss Keane the day they beat the All Blacks 38 years ago next week.
Foley was the ultimate team player, a quality which he demonstrated time and again but never more strikingly than on January 14, 1995. His club, Shannon, were playing Blackrock College in Dublin that day when a win would secure them their first all-Ireland League title.
Their 21-year-old No. 8 had been chosen to make his debut for Ireland against England the following Saturday. Tradition decreed that a new cap put his feet up the week before rather than risk injury for his club.
Foley would have none of it. He would be standing shoulderto-shoulder with the lads at Shannon in their hour of need and if that meant tempting fate with a shove between the shoulder blades and missing the international, well so be it.
Shannon with Foley won the League. Back in Dublin seven days later, Ireland with Foley gave Will Carling’s formidable England team a run for their money in gale-force winds at Lansdowne Road and the rugby gods ensured the only Irish try came from the new cap at No.8.
From all-Ireland titles with Shannon to the European Cup with Munster, Foley considered it a privilege to wear the jersey, the blue-andblack of Shannon, the red of Munster, the green of Ireland.
“It’s in our DNA around here,’’ he would say. “To make sure that the jersey is the most important thing and that we represent it properly.’’
So many came to pay their last respects that Keith Wood, probably Killaloe’s most famous native since Brian Boru, enrolled as a steward. He remembered his team-mate as “never the fittest or the fastest but definitely the smartest – invariably wherever the ball was”.
And if all that that makes Foley’s death, in Paris last weekend from heart failure at 42, the harder to bear for those of us who merely stood and watched, words are almost impossible to capture the crushing sense of loss felt by his family, not least sons Tony and Dan.
His wife, Olive, bore that burden with a fortitude typical of the Foleys when she spoke at the funeral. “The show will go on,’’ she said, nodding to yesterday’s champions’ Cup home tie against Glasgow. “I’m going to stick to our plan because Anthony is going to be with us in spirit every step of the way. I’m handing Anthony over to God now. We’ll take it one day at a time.’’
She also tackled, head-on, of course, the hard times of last season when, as head honcho, Foley had to shoulder responsibility for a fading Munster team.
“He took that job and he gave it everything,’’ Olive said. “They were very rough days. He never held a grudge. He’d tell me: ‘I was never as bad as they said I was and I was never as good as they said I was’,”
Of all the smash hit double acts in the game over the last 20 years – Martin Johnson and Leicester, Fabien Pelous and Toulouse, Jonny Wilkinson and Toulon – Foley and Munster was surely the greatest of all.
Unlike the others, Foley played in that first season of European rugby, for Munster against Swansea on November 1, 1995. He, alone of that pioneering team, was still there when they conquered Europe eleven years later, the one constant force in Munster’s rise from a ground-floor base into a monumental, multi-storey operation.
Anthony Gerard ‘Axel’ Foley. Born in Limerick, October 30, 1973. Died in Paris, October 16, 2016.