It’s like genocide for small firms
The astonishing claim of the wife of Munster rugby legend Peter Clohessy after her husband’s sports bar has to close
ANNA Gibson-Steel could not be more different from the WAG stereotype as she sits in her family pub, holding forth about business instead of designer brands and Triple Crowns. She’s just written a biography of her husband, Peter ‘Claw’ Clohessy, and she has plenty to say about rugby and the surrounding lifestyle – but here, so soon after the failure of Clohessy’s Bar and Sin Bin nightclub in Limerick city, she is passionate about the plight of entrepreneurs.
‘I saw the toll it was taking on Peter’s health for the last 18 months,’ says Anna. ‘He never complained, he never said a word – he doesn’t do that. But he was not well in himself.
‘His health, I knew, couldn’t have sustained that level of pressure for too much longer. It’s a huge strain and I feel great compassion for the thousands of business people in Ireland who are going through the same. Luckily Peter is strong enough and a great oul’ character but there are plenty of people who haven’t withstood it. It’s a genocide, it really is,’ she adds, of the pressure that has led, all too often, to suicide.
‘There’s still stuff to be sorted out but at least Peter is not having to go and face that every day any more.’
When I arrive to meet Anna at Crokers in Murroe, about 13km outside Limerick, Peter is sitting on the windowsill outside, puffing away.
I wonder how he is feeling since his bar and nightclub on Howley’s Quay closed last month after 13 years in business.
‘I can sleep now for the first time in two years,’ he replies.
‘Business was down €1m on the previous year – we lost 80% of our customers. They were redeveloping the quays so it was like a building site – you couldn’t even get to the bar in a taxi. It looks well now with the new boardwalk but it crucified my business.’
I ask him when they opened Crokers and he replies ruefully, ‘In 2007. At the height of it.’
Anna has a separate career as a reiki master and runs the nearby Holistic Centre of Excellence, a private college offering diplomas in holistic therapies such as Indian head massage, aromatherapy, angel therapy and neurolinguistic programming.
She had worked in banking for years until a car crash at 27 left her with chronic back pain that she believes was finally cured through reiki.
Anna admits that she and her husband are ‘incredibly different’ and muses in her book, A Life With Claw, that had they not met so young, they might never have become a couple.
‘He loves danger – I don’t even do rollercoasters at the amusement park. He’s a real people person, he revels in a crowd whereas I would be a little more introverted,’ she adds.
She met Peter aged 14 and married him at 21, when rugby was an amateur sport and its players less covetable. Once the cash arrived, everything changed.
On one occasion detailed in the book, Anna could scarcely believe her eyes. Had that brazen young woman really sauntered over to her husband and handed him a scrap of paper with her name and phone number on it?
Peter had the good sense to ball it up and throw it on the floor of the pub where the Munster team were enjoying post-match pints. But Anna was not satisfied.
Charging over to Peter, she asked: ‘ Do you know her?’ ‘No,’ replied her husband. ‘But were you chatting her up earlier on?’ she persisted. ‘No. I’ve never seen her before!’ he insisted.
‘I couldn’t hide my horror that it had come to this,’ she writes in her hilarious book.
‘There was definitely a shift when rugby went professional in 1995,’ she tells me. ‘Star status did come into it and people’s perception of rugby players changed. They tended to put them on a pedestal. But I think we should never give anybody special status. For me, everyone is the same. That’s something that I’ve always felt, that perhaps girls should think about it a little bit. I mean, why behave that way?’
She writes: ‘The attention that they were receiving off the pitch was a big culture shock, especially to us partners. The guys of course generally enjoyed it, especially if they had won a game. When I would regularly witness girls throwing themselves at the lads just because they wore blazers, I would often have a quiet word with them and say, “Look girls, they just play rugby, they still have sweaty socks and smelly jocks like every other guy.”’
As a ‘thick-skinned seasoned partner’ she could handle the jealousy and competition, ‘ but there were occasions when I had to console some of the younger WAGS as the pressure of the female attention on their partners became too much for them.’
All the same, she recalls another evening and ‘a girl shoving me to one side as she looked at me and said, “Where’s my Peter?”’
Now she adds, with a dismissive wave, ‘ People do daft thing when they’ve drink on board. It’s just par for the course.’
Anna decided to write the book when she realised the couple’s youngest son, Harry, eight, had never seen his father play.
She also wanted the older two, Luke, 21, and Jane, 15, to discover details about his career that ‘weren’t on Google’. She wanted to ‘capture the essence of the man’ and his ‘intriguing character’.
Unlike today’s mostly clean-living sportsmen, Peter was old-school, refusing to give up alcohol, cigarettes and McDonalds or to darken the door of a gym when he was Ireland’s prop for 10 years until he retired in 2002.
He got away with it too, leading kicker Ronan O’Gara to coin the phrase, ‘Claw is the law’.
‘He never did fitness. He liked the training where it was the lads having a match or something. But he had a natural fitness about him. In fact I really think what made him such an extraordinary player was his ability to use mind over matter,’ says Anna. ‘Because he wasn’t the fittest, he wasn’t the biggest, he didn’t look the strongest, he smoked, he drank – he did all the things that professional players shouldn’t do – and he was still top of his game. So the main difference was his mental game. His ability to be fully present on the pitch.’ He was a 15-yearold seasoned smoker when Anna met him. His chat-up line was: ‘Do you want a drag?’ The couple live on a farm and keep Angus cattle but Anna does not tend to the animals.
‘Inside the house is my domain, outside is Peter’s. There are some cows there somewhere, that’s as much as I know and I do not intend learning,’ she says, with her trademark ‘foghorn’ laugh, as her husband christened it. ‘Not that I’ve anything
His health couldn’t have sustained that pressure too much longer
I haven’t mellowed him. I wouldn’t want him to mellow. He’s an oul’ dote. He’d make fun in a bucket.
against farming – I just don’t have time. My dear sister Aileen, God rest her, used to say – she was a teenager and Mum was talking about ironing – “I’m not learning how to do that. If I don’t know how to do it, I won’t be asked.” I said, “I’m remembering that!” So, I don’t know how to do cows.’
Aileen, a psychology student, was just 24 when she was strangled to death in her London flat by a 28-year-old friend, Lawrence Hughes, from Waterford. Aileen was Anna’s only sister, two years her junior and ‘a darling’.
In the book, Anna describes how she got the dreadful news after returning with Peter from a rugby tour of Australia in 1994.
What is remarkable is how the couple have coped with such an unspeakable tragedy. While keeping Aileen’s memory very much alive in their minds, both Peter and Anna had forgotten her murderer’s name by the time police phoned to let them know he was on the run from England’s Hollesley Bay Prison in 2002. He murdered another man and is currently serving a life sentence.
‘His name didn’t matter. Focusing on him was never going to bring her back. So what was the point? That’s the line I took with it,’ she shrugs.
‘The “why it happened” isn’t really important. There had to be an acceptance – I can’t change it, unfortunately. I wish I could but I can’t. That was the best way to move forward. That makes it sound like it was very easy – it was not. It is a neverending journey.’
With his stubborn refusal to mull over defeats and disappointments in his sporting life, the ‘greatest lesson’ Peter has taught his wife is the benefit of moving on and not dwelling on the past. She also relies on holistic therapies to help her through.
‘If you want to feel good, think happy memories. Go into the happiness and don’t allow your mind to trick you by saying, “But you don’t have that any more”. That’s what happens people. The voice in their head stops them, “They’re not there any more; you’ll never have that again”. You’ve to control that. You’ve to stop it from robbing your joy. It can’t be done in a day but it’s like getting fit, you won’t get fit in a day. The more you practise the better at it you’ll get.’
When Anna thinks of Aileen now she sees ‘a picture of the two of us smiling as kids, holiday photo-
They have sweaty socks and smelly jocks just like every other guy
graphs that we’d have had. I see her smile. I can actually feel that love and happiness if I want to.’
Anna is a great believer in having a laugh despite life’s trials and says Peter is ‘tremendous fun’.
Sometimes it went too far – as a younger man his hair-raising drinking escapades with former Ireland captain Mick Galwey once saw him fall asleep on the pavement outside Jury’s hotel in Dublin. Another time he conked out while sitting on the loo during a lunch and Anna had to hammer on the door to wake him. In the days before mobile phones, she spent many nights out looking for him and had the patience of a saint.
‘Was I happy about it at the time? I bloomin’ well wasn’t. We had plenty of rows,’ she admits. ‘But as you mature you get a different perspective and you can laugh.’
What she wanted to get across was that far from being glamorous, the life of a WAG can be lonely and difficult. With Peter away from home for over 30 weeks one year, she was left minding the kids, keeping their home and attending weddings and other events solo.
‘It may appear that the wives and girlfriends show up looking beautiful at the ball but the fact is they could have left a screaming, colicky baby in the hotel room 20 minutes beforehand, just like any other mother. It’s tough, particularly with small kids,’ she says.
By the time Harry was born, Peter had retired and Anna handed him the baby and quipped, ‘He’s all yours.’
‘Peter missed a lot of the day-today stuff with the other two. The commitment is huge when they’re professional and there’s a huge amount of travel involved. But he has made up for it with Harry,’ she says.
On the plus side, she was introduced to many ‘shopping paradises’ through her WAGdom.
‘I love France and try to go shopping there once a year,’ she whispers, admitting that she got practically all of today’s outfit in Paris. ‘Give me anywhere in France and I’ll tell you the shops.’
The controversial stamp on France’s Olivier Roumat that earned Peter a 26-week ban in 1996 – though Roumat was uninjured – clearly hasn’t put her off.
And though Peter may have argued his case with her back in the day while he disappeared boozing with pals, it is obvious now that he defers to his trouser-wearing wife.
‘He actually wanted to call the book, She Was Right! But the publishers didn’t think it would work. I said, “I was only 25 years trying to convince you I was right”,’ says Anna, unleashing that foghorn laugh again.
So, has she finally mellowed one of Ireland’s most ferocious rugby players?
‘I wouldn’t want him to mellow,’ she says, visibly melting. ‘He’s an oul dote. And he’d make fun in a bucket.’