AMONG THE PHOTOS of Anna McGann with her late father, Mick, that she cherishes most is one of them hugging outside Stade Ernest-Wallon in Toulouse in May 2022.
He passed away about 15 months later after a stubborn fight with liver cancer.
When he was diagnosed in 2020, he was given six months but lived for another three-and-a-half years.
McGann’s parents, Mick and Terry, weren’t supposed to be in Toulouse that weekend for the French leg of the World Sevens Series. Her dad was scheduled for an intensive weekend of chemotherapy, so they couldn’t make the trip.
When Ireland did their jersey presentation on the Friday in Toulouse, McGann’s parents dialled in on Zoom, and her team-mate Eve Higgins’ parents handed over the shirt.
The Irish team reached the quarter-finals for just the second time ever the following day and then beat Canada to make it into the semi-finals. The ecstatic players bounced off the pitch to celebrate with their families and McGann was hugging everyone else’s when one of her team-mates gave her a nudge.
“There’s a surprise for you.”
And there was Mick.
He had cancelled his chemo and got a last-minute flight to Lourdes that morning, a train to Toulouse, a taxi to the stadium, and a priceless hug with his daughter.
“He was like, ‘Fuck the weekend of chemo. I’ve done seven months of it now, one weekend isn’t going to kill me,” says Ireland international McGann with a smile.
“I love that story. I think that describes him to a T. It was always the bigger picture for him. He would just put his kids before everything.
“Now, he had the weekend of his life. He was with Eve’s parents and they were on the piss for the whole weekend. I was like, ‘Dad! You’re supposed to be in chemo,’ but Eve’s parents said they’d look after him.”
It was Mick’s idea for Anna to get into rugby in the first place.
She was a talented hockey player in her teens and the dream was to go to the Olympics with Ireland. Such was the McGanns’ dedication that her parents would drive her from their home in Athlone to Dublin twice a week during her Leaving Cert year to play club hockey, the hope being she would get more exposure to the national team coaches.
Her dad suggested that playing rugby would help her get fitter, stronger, and faster for hockey. She took his advice. McGann went down to Buccaneers RFC in 2016, was almost instantly spotted by a Connacht scout and was suddenly in the Ireland U18 sevens set-up.
“I still didn’t know how to pass the ball at this stage,” says 27-year-old McGann.
She started college at UCD soon after and was selected for an Ireland U18s trip to a tournament in Vichy in France, where she played alongside a host of other current internationals like Brittany Hogan, Emily Lane, and Enya Breen.
It all happened so quickly that her parents said they weren’t able to get time off work with so little notice.
“Then I run out onto the pitch in Vichy, and who do I hear in the stand? The two of them.
“And it was so funny because just that week I had set them up on Snapchat. On Snapchat, you can see people’s locations. They were petrified. They were trying to delete the app because they thought I’d be able to see their locations.”
When she landed back in Ireland, McGann was invited over to Lansdowne rugby club, where the senior sevens team were training. The IRFU offered her a contract on the spot and she signed it.
Initially, Terry wasn’t keen on all the contact involved in rugby, but she was soon converted and now watches more rugby than her daughter, regularly tuning into all four Irish provinces every weekend.
There was about a year-and-a-half where McGann found herself questioning her choice, but she became a key player for the Ireland Sevens thereafter and hasn’t looked back since.
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She has developed into a dual sevens and 15s international for Ireland, most recently ripping it up in the 15-player code in this year’s Six Nations and at the recent World Cup.
McGann sings the national anthem during the World Cup. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
The highlight of her career so far was helping Ireland to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics. McGann has always found the Olympics fascinating and it remains a big ambition of hers to play at the Games.
Her chance in 2024 was ripped away by injury. There was initially the joy and sense of disbelief at achieving qualification in Toulouse in 2023, followed by seven wild nights of celebrating back home.
But just four weeks later, McGann ruptured her ACL. Though she got back training before the Olympics, she never really had a chance to earn a spot at the Games. It was heartbreaking.
Her father’s health had deteriorated badly around that time and McGann describes that whole period as “hell on earth.” The mental toll must have contributed to the injury, she thinks.
Having had her ACL surgery, McGann slipped on the bathroom tiles 10 days later and had to return to the hospital for a clean-up on the knee due to a painful burst blood vessel.
Mick passed away in August 2023 and though being injured was a disaster in rugby terms, McGann is grateful that she got to be with her father in those final stages.
“If I didn’t do my ACL, I wouldn’t have had those three months at home with dad,” she says.
“So I wouldn’t take that back for the world because it’s something that you can only appreciate after it’s happened. It was actually one of my mum’s friends who said to her that if I wasn’t injured, I would have been away for eight out of those 12 weeks.
“The world put me there in order to be at home and be with my family.”
Mick was buried on a Friday and McGann went back to training the following Monday, appreciating that it was a coping mechanism, but also understanding that her father would have wanted her to give getting back fit for the Olympics her very best shot.
It wasn’t to be, with the ACL recovery taking a full year, and McGann had to travel to Paris with her family as a supporter in the summer of 2024.
Frustratingly, her knee issues continued later in 2024 and McGann missed out on the chance to go to the WXV tournament with the Ireland 15s team that autumn, again having to watch on as they excelled.
McGann with her family during the World Cup. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
Mercifully, she returned to the green jersey for this year’s Six Nations and there was a cathartic day when she scored a hat-trick against Italy. McGann had written ‘DAD’ on her wrist strapping and kissed it after each of the scores.
There are several ‘what if?’ moments from the World Cup quarter-final defeat to France in September, with Ireland coming seriously close to an upset against the French.
Yet McGann looks back on the World Cup experience in England fondly. The Irish squad felt the support like never before. When they left their hotel to get on the bus to games, there would be crowds of fans outside, just like there always are for the men’s team.
“That was such a moment where we all went, ‘Whoa, this is something bigger,’” says McGann.
She and her close friend, Eve Higgins, certainly helped to build Ireland’s profile with their ever-growing TikTok fame. McGann has 30,000 followers, with nearly 7,000 more on Instagram. Those numbers keep rising.
It really kicked off during the World Cup when they shared footage of one of the Irish team’s multicoloured Canterbury fleeces. It wasn’t on public sale, so what became known as the ‘Release the Fleece’ campaign quickly built. Canterbury acceded and it has been a big seller.
McGann and Higgins, along with a few others in the squad, enjoy putting TikToks together, and after initially worrying that people might think they weren’t taking their rugby seriously if they were having fun on social media, they have happily shown their personalities online.
“There were a couple of comments from middle-aged men saying, ‘Oh, you should probably focus on the rugby,’ and stuff like this,” says McGann.
“But we had people coming up to us at our games saying they came because of the TikToks. Some of them were actually English fans and they were apologising for wearing an English shirt, but they were still there.
“And I think that’s one difference between women’s and men’s rugby. The actual rugby element is so similar, but the fan element is so different.”
USA superstar Ilona Maher has been an obvious inspiration and there will be no stopping the McGann-Higgins double act from here.
The funny thing is that McGann was very shy only a few years ago.
“Painfully shy,” she says. “The sevens girls used to call me ‘The Mute’ and that only really changed when I was about 22 or 23.”
McGann with her fellow TikToker, Eve Higgins. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
She has well and truly come out of her shell now.
McGann has her own jewellery brand called Chaos The Label, which she began working on during her ACL injury spell. Aoife Lane of Rugby Players Ireland encouraged her to focus on something outside rugby during that period to escape the mundanity of rehab.
McGann has always been into fashion and jewellery, so she took the plunge and Chaos officially launched last December. Her first jewellery collection was dedicated to Terry for the strength she has shown despite losing Mick.
Indeed, Anna was inspired by her mother, who had her own dressmaking business, in starting Chaos. McGann’s sister, Sarah, and two brothers, Eric and Jack, have also been instrumental in helping her to get things off the ground.
“It’s a family-run business because they have such an impact on it,” says McGann.
Her own social media growth has helped the business and she’s currently working on Chaos’ first clothing line, so there’s more expansion ahead.
McGann is realistic about rugby as a full-time ‘professional’ career. The maximum a women’s player can earn in Ireland is around €40,000 a year, although that’s with bonuses involved. Some full-time players are only on €15,000.
She and every other Irish player would love to see those figures rising sooner rather than later, but McGann knows it’s important to keep her own business developing.
She’s excited to get back on the pitch with the Clovers team in the Celtic Challenge, which kicks off next month. The Six Nations in April 2026 isn’t far off either. There’s the first-ever Women’s Lions tour to New Zealand in 2027, which every Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh player is targeting already.
And then there is the hope that Ireland Sevens can still qualify for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. The men’s programme has been canned, but there is still an Ireland Sevens women’s team, albeit a development side no longer on the main circuit.
McGann’s Olympic dream will never fade, so she’ll do all she can to push for Ireland Sevens to chase a spot in 2028 or 2032.
Whatever comes next on the pitch, she feels like she’s in the best place in life that she has been for some time.
McGann kisses the word 'DAD' on her wrist strapping after a try. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
She’s currently looking for a place in Dublin with her partner, Olympic boxer Gráinne Walsh, who she first connected with on Instagram.
And McGann hopes to keep doing the man who was her biggest fan proud.
“Dad and I were best friends,” she says.
“I think from the time he got sick, I was so lost. It was strange because you think it’s when somebody passes and you don’t have them that you’re going to be lost.
“Whereas I think I was so lost from the moment he got sick, that I had nearly found myself by the time he had passed. I had grieved for three-and-a-half years. When dad was gone, I knew he was in a better place.
“I needed to start finding myself again, putting my feet on the ground, knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
“It changes your outlook on life. That’s why I am the person I am today. I don’t care what people think. I don’t give a crap. We could be gone tomorrow.
“Dad was always very much of the opinion, ‘Do what you want to do in life.’
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'I had grieved for three-and-a-half years. I needed to start finding myself'
AMONG THE PHOTOS of Anna McGann with her late father, Mick, that she cherishes most is one of them hugging outside Stade Ernest-Wallon in Toulouse in May 2022.
He passed away about 15 months later after a stubborn fight with liver cancer.
When he was diagnosed in 2020, he was given six months but lived for another three-and-a-half years.
McGann’s parents, Mick and Terry, weren’t supposed to be in Toulouse that weekend for the French leg of the World Sevens Series. Her dad was scheduled for an intensive weekend of chemotherapy, so they couldn’t make the trip.
When Ireland did their jersey presentation on the Friday in Toulouse, McGann’s parents dialled in on Zoom, and her team-mate Eve Higgins’ parents handed over the shirt.
The Irish team reached the quarter-finals for just the second time ever the following day and then beat Canada to make it into the semi-finals. The ecstatic players bounced off the pitch to celebrate with their families and McGann was hugging everyone else’s when one of her team-mates gave her a nudge.
“There’s a surprise for you.”
And there was Mick.
He had cancelled his chemo and got a last-minute flight to Lourdes that morning, a train to Toulouse, a taxi to the stadium, and a priceless hug with his daughter.
“He was like, ‘Fuck the weekend of chemo. I’ve done seven months of it now, one weekend isn’t going to kill me,” says Ireland international McGann with a smile.
“I love that story. I think that describes him to a T. It was always the bigger picture for him. He would just put his kids before everything.
“Now, he had the weekend of his life. He was with Eve’s parents and they were on the piss for the whole weekend. I was like, ‘Dad! You’re supposed to be in chemo,’ but Eve’s parents said they’d look after him.”
It was Mick’s idea for Anna to get into rugby in the first place.
She was a talented hockey player in her teens and the dream was to go to the Olympics with Ireland. Such was the McGanns’ dedication that her parents would drive her from their home in Athlone to Dublin twice a week during her Leaving Cert year to play club hockey, the hope being she would get more exposure to the national team coaches.
Her dad suggested that playing rugby would help her get fitter, stronger, and faster for hockey. She took his advice. McGann went down to Buccaneers RFC in 2016, was almost instantly spotted by a Connacht scout and was suddenly in the Ireland U18 sevens set-up.
“I still didn’t know how to pass the ball at this stage,” says 27-year-old McGann.
She started college at UCD soon after and was selected for an Ireland U18s trip to a tournament in Vichy in France, where she played alongside a host of other current internationals like Brittany Hogan, Emily Lane, and Enya Breen.
It all happened so quickly that her parents said they weren’t able to get time off work with so little notice.
“Then I run out onto the pitch in Vichy, and who do I hear in the stand? The two of them.
“And it was so funny because just that week I had set them up on Snapchat. On Snapchat, you can see people’s locations. They were petrified. They were trying to delete the app because they thought I’d be able to see their locations.”
When she landed back in Ireland, McGann was invited over to Lansdowne rugby club, where the senior sevens team were training. The IRFU offered her a contract on the spot and she signed it.
Initially, Terry wasn’t keen on all the contact involved in rugby, but she was soon converted and now watches more rugby than her daughter, regularly tuning into all four Irish provinces every weekend.
There was about a year-and-a-half where McGann found herself questioning her choice, but she became a key player for the Ireland Sevens thereafter and hasn’t looked back since.
She has developed into a dual sevens and 15s international for Ireland, most recently ripping it up in the 15-player code in this year’s Six Nations and at the recent World Cup.
The highlight of her career so far was helping Ireland to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics. McGann has always found the Olympics fascinating and it remains a big ambition of hers to play at the Games.
Her chance in 2024 was ripped away by injury. There was initially the joy and sense of disbelief at achieving qualification in Toulouse in 2023, followed by seven wild nights of celebrating back home.
But just four weeks later, McGann ruptured her ACL. Though she got back training before the Olympics, she never really had a chance to earn a spot at the Games. It was heartbreaking.
Her father’s health had deteriorated badly around that time and McGann describes that whole period as “hell on earth.” The mental toll must have contributed to the injury, she thinks.
Having had her ACL surgery, McGann slipped on the bathroom tiles 10 days later and had to return to the hospital for a clean-up on the knee due to a painful burst blood vessel.
Mick passed away in August 2023 and though being injured was a disaster in rugby terms, McGann is grateful that she got to be with her father in those final stages.
“If I didn’t do my ACL, I wouldn’t have had those three months at home with dad,” she says.
“So I wouldn’t take that back for the world because it’s something that you can only appreciate after it’s happened. It was actually one of my mum’s friends who said to her that if I wasn’t injured, I would have been away for eight out of those 12 weeks.
“The world put me there in order to be at home and be with my family.”
Mick was buried on a Friday and McGann went back to training the following Monday, appreciating that it was a coping mechanism, but also understanding that her father would have wanted her to give getting back fit for the Olympics her very best shot.
It wasn’t to be, with the ACL recovery taking a full year, and McGann had to travel to Paris with her family as a supporter in the summer of 2024.
Frustratingly, her knee issues continued later in 2024 and McGann missed out on the chance to go to the WXV tournament with the Ireland 15s team that autumn, again having to watch on as they excelled.
Mercifully, she returned to the green jersey for this year’s Six Nations and there was a cathartic day when she scored a hat-trick against Italy. McGann had written ‘DAD’ on her wrist strapping and kissed it after each of the scores.
There are several ‘what if?’ moments from the World Cup quarter-final defeat to France in September, with Ireland coming seriously close to an upset against the French.
Yet McGann looks back on the World Cup experience in England fondly. The Irish squad felt the support like never before. When they left their hotel to get on the bus to games, there would be crowds of fans outside, just like there always are for the men’s team.
“That was such a moment where we all went, ‘Whoa, this is something bigger,’” says McGann.
She and her close friend, Eve Higgins, certainly helped to build Ireland’s profile with their ever-growing TikTok fame. McGann has 30,000 followers, with nearly 7,000 more on Instagram. Those numbers keep rising.
It really kicked off during the World Cup when they shared footage of one of the Irish team’s multicoloured Canterbury fleeces. It wasn’t on public sale, so what became known as the ‘Release the Fleece’ campaign quickly built. Canterbury acceded and it has been a big seller.
McGann and Higgins, along with a few others in the squad, enjoy putting TikToks together, and after initially worrying that people might think they weren’t taking their rugby seriously if they were having fun on social media, they have happily shown their personalities online.
“There were a couple of comments from middle-aged men saying, ‘Oh, you should probably focus on the rugby,’ and stuff like this,” says McGann.
“But we had people coming up to us at our games saying they came because of the TikToks. Some of them were actually English fans and they were apologising for wearing an English shirt, but they were still there.
“And I think that’s one difference between women’s and men’s rugby. The actual rugby element is so similar, but the fan element is so different.”
USA superstar Ilona Maher has been an obvious inspiration and there will be no stopping the McGann-Higgins double act from here.
The funny thing is that McGann was very shy only a few years ago.
“Painfully shy,” she says. “The sevens girls used to call me ‘The Mute’ and that only really changed when I was about 22 or 23.”
She has well and truly come out of her shell now.
McGann has her own jewellery brand called Chaos The Label, which she began working on during her ACL injury spell. Aoife Lane of Rugby Players Ireland encouraged her to focus on something outside rugby during that period to escape the mundanity of rehab.
McGann has always been into fashion and jewellery, so she took the plunge and Chaos officially launched last December. Her first jewellery collection was dedicated to Terry for the strength she has shown despite losing Mick.
Indeed, Anna was inspired by her mother, who had her own dressmaking business, in starting Chaos. McGann’s sister, Sarah, and two brothers, Eric and Jack, have also been instrumental in helping her to get things off the ground.
“It’s a family-run business because they have such an impact on it,” says McGann.
Her own social media growth has helped the business and she’s currently working on Chaos’ first clothing line, so there’s more expansion ahead.
McGann is realistic about rugby as a full-time ‘professional’ career. The maximum a women’s player can earn in Ireland is around €40,000 a year, although that’s with bonuses involved. Some full-time players are only on €15,000.
She and every other Irish player would love to see those figures rising sooner rather than later, but McGann knows it’s important to keep her own business developing.
She’s excited to get back on the pitch with the Clovers team in the Celtic Challenge, which kicks off next month. The Six Nations in April 2026 isn’t far off either. There’s the first-ever Women’s Lions tour to New Zealand in 2027, which every Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh player is targeting already.
And then there is the hope that Ireland Sevens can still qualify for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. The men’s programme has been canned, but there is still an Ireland Sevens women’s team, albeit a development side no longer on the main circuit.
McGann’s Olympic dream will never fade, so she’ll do all she can to push for Ireland Sevens to chase a spot in 2028 or 2032.
Whatever comes next on the pitch, she feels like she’s in the best place in life that she has been for some time.
She’s currently looking for a place in Dublin with her partner, Olympic boxer Gráinne Walsh, who she first connected with on Instagram.
And McGann hopes to keep doing the man who was her biggest fan proud.
“Dad and I were best friends,” she says.
“I think from the time he got sick, I was so lost. It was strange because you think it’s when somebody passes and you don’t have them that you’re going to be lost.
“Whereas I think I was so lost from the moment he got sick, that I had nearly found myself by the time he had passed. I had grieved for three-and-a-half years. When dad was gone, I knew he was in a better place.
“I needed to start finding myself again, putting my feet on the ground, knowing what I wanted to do with my life.
“It changes your outlook on life. That’s why I am the person I am today. I don’t care what people think. I don’t give a crap. We could be gone tomorrow.
“Dad was always very much of the opinion, ‘Do what you want to do in life.’
“Nothing is going to stop you.”
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