MAKING A DIFFERENCE
Home School Hub star O’Neill opens up on her elite sports career and long battle against racism
IT wasn’t long before the comments arrived. Emer O’Neill recognised the type. She has spent a year in the public eye, raising the issue of racism in Ireland and challenging not only racists but the attitudes and some of the presumptions that enable them.
But she has spent a lifetime living through the malignant, exhausting effects of racism.
She has heard the insults. She knows the prejudices. And she understands that every time she takes a stand, the comments will come.
She was part last week of the Don’t Scroll By campaign, launched by the Olympic Federation of Ireland and encouraging members of the public to report instances of discrimination and abuse online.
Part of the launch included a video narrated by O’Neill.
‘I do the voiceover, but the images and the script behind it are so powerful,’ she says.
‘But underneath the video on YouTube, there were negative comments.
‘The whole thing is Don’t Scroll By (and I’m) seeing these kind of harmful and discriminatory comments right underneath a video talking about how not to do that, and why it’s not good to do it.
‘Sure enough there are negative comments. One of them was: “You can’t look anywhere without seeing racism, racism, racism. I’m sick of it”.
‘It makes me laugh,’ she says, but on this subject, the laughter doesn’t reach her eyes.
‘I think of people saying something like that, how sick they are of hearing about racism, and I just wish for a second they’d put themselves in my shoes or of any person of colour in Ireland, and think about how sick of it they would be if they had to live it every day.’
Parts of Emer O’Neill’s story have been told in recent months. She was raised by her mother in 1980s Ireland, a time when a child being born out of wedlock was enough to scandalise.
That she is mixed race, in a society that was practically monochrome for much of her life, made the challenge more daunting still.
It was last year, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, that she emerged as an advocate on the issue of race in Ireland.
Earlier this year, her professional life as a PE teacher, coincided with her public one when she joined the RTÉ Home School Hub.
But there is another compelling story in the life of Emer O’Neill.
She was an outstanding basketball player, good enough to win a scholarship to study and play in the United States, and good enough to be offered the chance to play professionally in Europe after that.
This part of her life is instructive in another relevant topic today, that of women in sport, and the difficulty and importance of keeping adolescent girls involved in sport.
O’Neill’s sporting career started at the very age when girls start leaving organised sport in huge numbers.
‘It was because my best friend at the time had joined the basketball team in Bray, and wasn’t hanging out with me anymore,’ she recalls, really laughing this time.
‘One day I said, “I’m just sick of this. I never see you anymore”. She said, “Why don’t you just join the team? Then you’ll be there with me at training”.
‘I was like, “Fine, I will!” You want to see what I wore on my first day at training. I wore denim kind of short shorts, and a white belly top with a rose on it.
‘That was me, my first session ever, and that’s what I wore. But I’m so thankful that I found it. Then it kicked off from there.’
She was a good footballer, too, representing Wicklow, but she excelled at basketball. Within a year of starting, she was making Ireland underage teams.
At first she wondered if she was good enough, but got called back and when she was given a fitness programme to work on, she remembers that, ‘I didn’t miss a day. Sometimes I might have done it twice a day’.
Sportspeople talk so much about determination and hard work that the words lose their edge. To hear O’Neill recall the effect sport had on her attitude, though, is to have the wonder made new.
‘It showed me how hard work and determination really do pay off,’ she says.
‘I felt I was lacking something. I didn’t have a sense of confidence in myself at that time. I was really struggling with the fact that I was different and wanting to just look like everybody else and be like everybody else, so finding basketball for me, just changed my whole mindset.
‘It gave me something to focus on. It gave me something back. It gave me confidence and pride in myself, and it gave me an identity, which I didn’t feel I had before.’
She had talent, too, and her performances with Ireland got the attention of the American varsity system.
She was flown over to Mississippi and Connecticut as colleges courted her, and she eventually settled on the University of Southern Mississippi.
O’Neill left Ireland as an 18-yearold and spent a decade in the US.
Her recollections of life as an elite athlete on an American campus fit with the stereotype from a hundred Hollywood movies.
‘Everything you see in the movies, is the way it is,’ she chuckles.
‘After matches, there would be a whole line of people waiting for us to sign autographs. I had my own player card, like the football cards, so we signed them, or else we had our team poster and the kids came up and we signed them.
‘I could sign 50 autographs after a session.’
Sporting excellence is a powerful currency in university life, but the demands were extraordinary, too.
‘As an athlete, everybody knows you. There are 16,000 people on that campus, but everyone would know who you are.
‘You wouldn’t have a clue who anyone is, because you don’t have a life. You’re literally just training, eating, sleeping.
‘It’s very (regimented).
‘The years there were some of the toughest of my life,’ she says.
‘For me, coming from an Irish programme, you’d think I’d be topnotch, but I was so behind strength-wise.
‘The girls I was playing with had been lifting for years, whereas I think I started lifting maybe when I was in fifth or sixth year. That would have been a part of their programme from day one.
‘I had thought I had pushed myself or that I’d reached my potential, but I realised there, I was only at 40 per cent. There was so much more work to be done and so much more within me.
‘We only had a Sunday off, and Monday through Saturday we trained, and I’ll give you an idea of my routine.
‘Wake up at 6-6.30am. I had physio at 7am, then as a team we ate breakfast at 8am. At 9pm my classes started, (they ran from) 9.30pm to
People tend not to want to hear it... I have been told any number of times that I was playing the race card
12.30pm. Then we started training at 1pm, and we trained for three hours. Then after that we had strength and conditioning.
‘Then after that, dinner, then study hall, then to bed by 9.30pm, and start it all again the very next day.’
After three years in Mississippi, she moved to Florida Southern College, and after graduating, she started her teaching career and bought a house.
Before building her life in America, there was the chance to move back to Europe and try life as a fulltime athlete.
‘I got offered the chance to play professionally in Germany, but by that time I had had four knee surgeries and one ankle surgery. My body wasn’t doing well. Once you graduate in America, they let you stay for a year without having to get a visa to see if you can find a job.
‘But if you leave the country, you forfeit that. I thought to myself, “I could go over to Germany now and even half-way through the season, have a career-ending knee injury and then I’m back to Ireland and I’ve lost the opportunity I would have had in the States”.
‘So I decided not to go, and instead start teaching. But I played for a semi-pro team in Tampa, and I think it was in our third game, I blew out my knee. So I made the right decision.’
Her body has taken the toll of her career achievements. Knee surgeries total eight, and she has also had an ankle operation.
As well as a cruciate ligament injury, she also had the meniscus replaced in a knee.
‘I have the knee of a 60-year-old,’ she explains.
She sees her love of sport reflected now in her six-year-old son, who wants to be a professional soccer player and thinks Liverpool might be the team he chooses to represent.
But O’Neill wants to spread the good news about sport to as many people as she can.
This includes students in school. ‘Girls start falling off in first, second and third years,’ she says. ‘A lot of the time I’d get it in third years and sixth years, that their parents don’t want them to play basketball because they have too much studying to do.
‘And I say, “No, no, no. You need this. This outlet is positive. You will actually retain more information by exercising, and you will also feel better and be able to engage with your work”.
‘And I say, “Do you want me to tell you what I was doing in third year and sixth year?” I was playing for four different teams, and I trained out in Drimnagh.
‘So I’d get a Dart in and then a bus to Drimnagh, and I’d do that three times a week whilst doing the Leaving Cert.
‘I knew I had an hour and a half for homework, and that was it. Other than that, I was travelling, or training, or playing.
Instead of spending four hours looking at my books, I’d spend a really good hour and a half, because I knew that was all the time I had.’
She is back balancing a plethora of demands, between family, school, broadcasting, and her admirable decision to speak out on the issue of racism, after a lifetime of suffering its effects.
It has taken a toll, she admits – but the invigorating effects drive her on.
‘It is draining, but there is also an aspect to it that has been extremely therapeutic. Because for so long I have kept a lot of things that have happened to me inside, they’ve been kind of pushed down because I’ve had bad experiences trying to express myself about certain racial issues that have occurred.
‘People tend to not want to hear it. I’ve been told plenty of times that I’m pulling the race card, or I’ve been gas-lighted as far as being told, “Just get over it. We’re Irish. We just have a bit of craic”. ‘For me to be talking about it and to be heard, for the first time in my life, at the age of 35, is powerful, and it’s empowering as well.’