Five years on, Foley’s Reds influence has never been stronger

ss with Belinda Carlyle blaring out of an old school iPod, never spoke a word.”

It is easy to forget just how important Murphy was to Foley’s captaining Munster to their first Heineken Cup win in 2006.

He was Man of the Match against Sale in the last pool game, one where Munster needed to take all five match points and deny the English side anything.

Cruelly Murphy would miss the 2006 final, with Anthony Foley as captain, though injury.

“Axel was so close to his father Brendan, his love for the game came from sitting in the dressing room with him and my connection with rugby came from the same place, sitting in the Bohemians dressing room with my dad Mick.

“Working down from there I knew Anthony’s boys would have that same connection with their dad.

“I feel very connected with that but as soon as I began to try and write I felt this weight.”

Player

The player turned musician had, he feels, initially set himself up for a fall.

There is a lot more than plastic and packaging when it comes to making a cri-decoeur.

“To be brutally honest with you, it has taken me a year from first words to recordings and a the song makes me very sad,” he says flatly, almost abstractly.

“It is hard to sing and be in t that space all the time and while I know a lot of good comes from expressing sadness and emotion when you are writing something like that, it is a hard space to live in and it does bring you down. It can bring you down for weeks at a time.

“I don’t mean to come across in any kind of weird way but that’s why it has taken me so long to do it because I find it hard to face into the song that has such emotional pulls.

“Long story short it has taken me a year to complete and it was only last week I got there with Phil McGee who is Hermitage Green’s producer and the one person I know can get the best out of me and get the best out of the song.”

The sadness for the Foley is f family will remain, nobody s should bury a child, siblings will always miss a parallel thinker, children’s fathers are irreplaceable.

Events

“It seems like less than five years to me,” says Orla of events in a faraway hotel on the banks of the Seine in 2016.

“More like two years because it is still raw, there is pain in your chest with the grief.

“We got two years of living, then I got to go to Japan for the Rugby World Cup which had all its rugby and Anthony associations and then the pandemic hit.

“I am really past that now and have come to stage where I celebrate the fact he lived because, did you know, he nearly died so many times before.

“He nearly died at four years of age from drinking weedkiller; when he was around 10