TWO NENAGH MEN in La Rochelle. Who would have thought it?
Well, Nenagh RFC legend Pat Whelan is one person who did predict that Ben Healy and Donnacha Ryan could make it to the top in professional rugby.
Whelan was the man who spotted Ryan’s raw talent and became his mentor, while he also saw that out-half Healy had something special. But even the prescient Whelan couldn’t have guessed that his protégés would end up working together on the west coast of France.
Healy, who joined La Rochelle on a two-year deal last summer, recalls how Whelan set him up for a chat with Ryan when the out-half was still in third or fourth year at Glenstal Abbey School.
“I went to Donners’ house when he was back in Nenagh,” recalls 27-year-old Healy now.
“I went up there around 6 or 7 pm, and I didn’t leave until about 10 or 11 that night, and we were just chatting about everything.
“If you said to me then, ‘By the way, you’ll be working together in La Rochelle,’ he probably would have laughed just as much as I would have.”
Ryan has been La Rochelle’s forwards coach since 2021, having finished his playing career with four seasons at Racing 92, so he is fully embedded in life in France and speaks perfect French.
Of course, there is another very familiar face at the club for Healy in head coach Ronan O’Gara, the man who brought him to France.
Again, Healy has an early memory of first linking up with O’Gara, back in the latter’s final season as a Munster and Ireland player.
In 2012, when Healy was in first year at school, someone organised for him to do a kicking session with the great ROG. The young Tipperary man travelled to Musgrave Park in Cork for what was an amazing opportunity.
There wasn’t any regular contact between them in the many years since, although Healy obviously followed O’Gara’s subsequent coaching career with great interest.
And then came a call from ROG last season to enquire if Healy was interested in moving to La Rochelle.
“It was the most out-of-the-blue thing I’ve had to do with contracts or offers or anything like that,” says Healy.
“ROG just reached out to me directly, and he said, ‘Do you want to come or not?’”
Healy with Munster's Alex Kendellen and Mike Haley after their pre-season friendly. Nick Elliott / INPHO
Nick Elliott / INPHO / INPHO
Healy was still an Edinburgh player at that point, and he had been of a mind to keep trying to make things work out with the Scottish club.
He had fallen out of selection favour in his third season with Edinburgh, who he joined from Munster in 2023, but Healy hadn’t been willing to give up on the ambition of making things work out in the Scottish capital.
“Throughout that season, I was kind of thinking, ‘I’ve come to Edinburgh for a reason, and I’m not leaving until we’re successful.’
“Even though it might have been heading in a totally opposite direction, not necessarily the club, but maybe how the club viewed my role there or whatever, it can be hard to take a step back.
“Maybe my biggest strength, and biggest weakness, is how stubborn I can be. And I was kind of going, ‘No, I’m not leaving; I came here with a purpose.’”
Healy says the advice of the people closest to him gave him some perspective but in truth, once the unexpected offer arrived from O’Gara and La Rochelle, he began to see things differently.
“When you get a club like La Rochelle making an offer, you kind of step back and kind of go, ‘OK, I should have to consider this,’” says Healy.
“It was obviously very unique in the fact that it’s La Rochelle, the club’s history and working with ROG, so it wasn’t quite a yes straight away, but you think about it for a while, and then actually go, ‘Yeah, absolutely this is what I want to do.’”
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Healy spent the closing few months of last season on loan at Newcastle, allowing him to finally get some game time after a frustrating period on the sidelines at Edinburgh, while he also got to work preparing for his move to France.
He started French lessons as soon as he signed with Stade Rochelais and has continued learning since his move during the summer. Healy says it’s eye-opening to see that some foreign players who have been in France for years still don’t have the language, so he’s eager to learn.
He struck fortune by accepting an offer from the club of accommodation in a lovely village called Nieul-sur-Mer, just north of La Rochelle.
“I was chatting to ROG’s wife, Jess, and she was like, ‘Where are you living?’” says Healy.
“When I told her, she goes, ‘God, how did you know to live there?’ But it was just the luck of the draw.”
Healy is a rugby obsessive and has always been interested in how the game is played and discussed in different places. He says there is a uniformity in approach in Ireland and the UK, but things are different in France.
The stereotype of French rugby being chaotic and totally unstructured is false, he says, but Healy is enjoying how players instinctively bounce out of structure to play what they see.
Healy has won 10 caps for Scotland. Craig Watson / INPHO
Craig Watson / INPHO / INPHO
“We do have a shape,” says Healy. “Most teams in the world now run not an identical shape, and they all have a rough understanding of what they’re trying to do, particularly with the forwards in the midfield.
“So we’re no different to that. But there are more unstructured moments in games. Someone will get an offload away and because of that, two other players will naturally resource the breakdown or three players will support a half-break.
“And then following up from that, you end up like playing a lot more of an unstructured game.”
Healy is loving the initial experiences of seeing the French stadiums, which include La Rochelle’s own impressive Stade Marcel-Deflandre, which holds 18,000 fans. It sells out for every game, including the pre-season friendly visit of Munster in August.
His competitive debut for Stade Rochelais came in the number 10 shirt away to Pau at the 15,000-capacity Stade du Hameau, home to lots of fervent supporters.
“It was a baptism of fire for me,” says Healy, whose former Munster attack coach Mike Prendergast had told him all about the ‘razzmatazz’ in French rugby.
“There’s probably not really other places like that in the URC or in the Prem. You will get that maybe on Champions Cup weekends for away games, but for a regular weekend Top 14 game like it was, it was incredible.”
Healy has a challenge on his hands to get more game time, with French international Antoine Hastoy still first-choice out-half at La Rochelle for now.
There is also a top-class goal-kicking scrum-half at the club in Nolann le Garrec, but Healy sees all of this as a challenge for him to get better as a player.
Healy has always been an ambitious young man, right from when he led Glenstal to their first-ever Munster Schools Senior Cup title in 2018 under the tutelage of Sean Skehan.
And his ambition remains fierce today. He wants to win trophies with La Rochelle and get back into the Scotland squad, having won the most recent of his 10 caps during the summer of 2024.
His switch of allegiance from Ireland to Scotland saw Healy debut during the 2023 Six Nations while still at Munster before he was included in the 2023 World Cup squad. But Healy hasn’t been capped again by Gregor Townsend since the end of the 2023/24 campaign.
He wants to get back into the blue jersey and has no thoughts of returning to the Irish rugby route.
“My ambition is to get back playing international rugby as soon as possible, and I want to play for Scotland,” says Healy.
“Obviously, it’s a benefit of playing for a country like Scotland that you can play elsewhere and still play in international tournaments.”
Healy celebrates the 2023 URC title success in Cape Town. Laszlo Geczo / INPHO
Laszlo Geczo / INPHO / INPHO
Healy was part of the Ireland U20s side that won a Grand Slam in 2019 and naturally grew up aiming to wear the green jersey at Test level.
However, he had a genuine connection to Scotland through his mother’s side of the family. The Scots first came calling in 2020 with an offer to join Glasgow, but Healy decided to stay with Munster. But when there was a second approach ahead of the 2023/24 season, this time involving Edinburgh, Healy was more receptive.
Jack Crowley had come through as Munster’s main man at number 10, while Healy hadn’t featured for Ireland at senior level. It was still a very difficult call to make.
“It was a lot of thought over a number of weeks,” says Healy of the decision. “It definitely wasn’t straightforward.
“Obviously there was the ambition to play for Scotland, but I also had strong roots in Munster, and I loved playing for Munster.”
Healy spoke to Ireland boss Andy Farrell at the time, keen to learn if he figured in the Irish national team’s plans.
“I spoke to Andy and it didn’t change too much, to be honest,” says Healy.
“Obviously, when you’re making a decision, you want to take in all the information you can before you make the decision.
“I don’t regret having that conversation. It was good to have it. If I were to go back, I don’t think I would change too much because with the information I had at hand, that’s the decision I made.
“I viewed going to Edinburgh like an enormous project that I was going to be a part of and that hugely excited me. Something that always sticks with me is being the first team to win the Senior Cup with Glenstal. That was so hard, and to be the first ones, the pioneers, was a really special feeling. I kind of had that mindset going to Edinburgh.”
Healy’s time with Munster finished with their surprise 2023 URC success, with the Tipp man playing a prominent role in that title.
Healy started the semi-final win away to Leinster at out-half, with Crowley moving to inside centre, while he also came off the bench in the quarter-final and final wins.
“That was like a hell of an achievement and a hell of a feeling to win something like that,” he says, although the tinge of disappointment about his time with his native province is that they couldn’t go all the way in the Champions Cup.
He played for Munster 56 times, and while he never quite became the dominant figure at out-half for the province that he would have aimed to be, he loved wearing the red jersey.
He hasn’t looked back on his time in Irish rugby much since leaving, and he is the kind of person who is all-in on the challenge in front of him.
Healy is ready to kick his career on with Stade Rochelais. Nick Elliott / INPHO
Nick Elliott / INPHO / INPHO
Healy is thankful to have had a mentor like Whelan at Nenagh. Whelan had him working on things like his spiral kicking from a very early stage and remains an honest, blunt assessor of his game to this day.
Healy cites the influence of his dad, Fergal, who had played with Nenagh and Young Munster, as crucial in developing his love for the sport.
He appreciated the guidance of Skehan at Glenstal and enjoyed deep rugby conversations with Stephen Larkham when the Australian legend was with Munster. The aforementioned Prendergast is someone he still chats with regularly.
And now Healy is enjoying working with O’Gara, someone he always admired.
“Probably how versatile he is,” says Healy of what has stood out to him about ROG as a coach.
“In my experience with head coaches, if they’re not a director of rugby, they’ll be right next door to it in that they’ll oversee everything.
“Or they’ll be the opposite, which is a traditional head coach where their blueprint will be all over the game plan. They’ll review, preview and do meetings.
“But with ROG, he will probably dip in and out and do both. Sometimes he’ll sit back and let the other coaches run everything. Other times, you’ll see him at half-time talking to someone about a specific thing he wants in the second half.”
Healy is determined to figure out exactly what O’Gara needs from him at out-half as he gets this latest chapter of his fascinating career properly up and running.
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'It was the most out-of-the-blue offer. It's La Rochelle, the club's history'
TWO NENAGH MEN in La Rochelle. Who would have thought it?
Well, Nenagh RFC legend Pat Whelan is one person who did predict that Ben Healy and Donnacha Ryan could make it to the top in professional rugby.
Whelan was the man who spotted Ryan’s raw talent and became his mentor, while he also saw that out-half Healy had something special. But even the prescient Whelan couldn’t have guessed that his protégés would end up working together on the west coast of France.
Healy, who joined La Rochelle on a two-year deal last summer, recalls how Whelan set him up for a chat with Ryan when the out-half was still in third or fourth year at Glenstal Abbey School.
“I went to Donners’ house when he was back in Nenagh,” recalls 27-year-old Healy now.
“I went up there around 6 or 7 pm, and I didn’t leave until about 10 or 11 that night, and we were just chatting about everything.
“If you said to me then, ‘By the way, you’ll be working together in La Rochelle,’ he probably would have laughed just as much as I would have.”
Ryan has been La Rochelle’s forwards coach since 2021, having finished his playing career with four seasons at Racing 92, so he is fully embedded in life in France and speaks perfect French.
Of course, there is another very familiar face at the club for Healy in head coach Ronan O’Gara, the man who brought him to France.
Again, Healy has an early memory of first linking up with O’Gara, back in the latter’s final season as a Munster and Ireland player.
In 2012, when Healy was in first year at school, someone organised for him to do a kicking session with the great ROG. The young Tipperary man travelled to Musgrave Park in Cork for what was an amazing opportunity.
There wasn’t any regular contact between them in the many years since, although Healy obviously followed O’Gara’s subsequent coaching career with great interest.
And then came a call from ROG last season to enquire if Healy was interested in moving to La Rochelle.
“It was the most out-of-the-blue thing I’ve had to do with contracts or offers or anything like that,” says Healy.
“ROG just reached out to me directly, and he said, ‘Do you want to come or not?’”
Healy was still an Edinburgh player at that point, and he had been of a mind to keep trying to make things work out with the Scottish club.
He had fallen out of selection favour in his third season with Edinburgh, who he joined from Munster in 2023, but Healy hadn’t been willing to give up on the ambition of making things work out in the Scottish capital.
“Throughout that season, I was kind of thinking, ‘I’ve come to Edinburgh for a reason, and I’m not leaving until we’re successful.’
“Even though it might have been heading in a totally opposite direction, not necessarily the club, but maybe how the club viewed my role there or whatever, it can be hard to take a step back.
“Maybe my biggest strength, and biggest weakness, is how stubborn I can be. And I was kind of going, ‘No, I’m not leaving; I came here with a purpose.’”
Healy says the advice of the people closest to him gave him some perspective but in truth, once the unexpected offer arrived from O’Gara and La Rochelle, he began to see things differently.
“When you get a club like La Rochelle making an offer, you kind of step back and kind of go, ‘OK, I should have to consider this,’” says Healy.
“It was obviously very unique in the fact that it’s La Rochelle, the club’s history and working with ROG, so it wasn’t quite a yes straight away, but you think about it for a while, and then actually go, ‘Yeah, absolutely this is what I want to do.’”
Healy spent the closing few months of last season on loan at Newcastle, allowing him to finally get some game time after a frustrating period on the sidelines at Edinburgh, while he also got to work preparing for his move to France.
He started French lessons as soon as he signed with Stade Rochelais and has continued learning since his move during the summer. Healy says it’s eye-opening to see that some foreign players who have been in France for years still don’t have the language, so he’s eager to learn.
He struck fortune by accepting an offer from the club of accommodation in a lovely village called Nieul-sur-Mer, just north of La Rochelle.
“I was chatting to ROG’s wife, Jess, and she was like, ‘Where are you living?’” says Healy.
“When I told her, she goes, ‘God, how did you know to live there?’ But it was just the luck of the draw.”
Healy is a rugby obsessive and has always been interested in how the game is played and discussed in different places. He says there is a uniformity in approach in Ireland and the UK, but things are different in France.
The stereotype of French rugby being chaotic and totally unstructured is false, he says, but Healy is enjoying how players instinctively bounce out of structure to play what they see.
“We do have a shape,” says Healy. “Most teams in the world now run not an identical shape, and they all have a rough understanding of what they’re trying to do, particularly with the forwards in the midfield.
“So we’re no different to that. But there are more unstructured moments in games. Someone will get an offload away and because of that, two other players will naturally resource the breakdown or three players will support a half-break.
“And then following up from that, you end up like playing a lot more of an unstructured game.”
Healy is loving the initial experiences of seeing the French stadiums, which include La Rochelle’s own impressive Stade Marcel-Deflandre, which holds 18,000 fans. It sells out for every game, including the pre-season friendly visit of Munster in August.
His competitive debut for Stade Rochelais came in the number 10 shirt away to Pau at the 15,000-capacity Stade du Hameau, home to lots of fervent supporters.
“It was a baptism of fire for me,” says Healy, whose former Munster attack coach Mike Prendergast had told him all about the ‘razzmatazz’ in French rugby.
“There’s probably not really other places like that in the URC or in the Prem. You will get that maybe on Champions Cup weekends for away games, but for a regular weekend Top 14 game like it was, it was incredible.”
Healy has a challenge on his hands to get more game time, with French international Antoine Hastoy still first-choice out-half at La Rochelle for now.
There is also a top-class goal-kicking scrum-half at the club in Nolann le Garrec, but Healy sees all of this as a challenge for him to get better as a player.
Healy has always been an ambitious young man, right from when he led Glenstal to their first-ever Munster Schools Senior Cup title in 2018 under the tutelage of Sean Skehan.
And his ambition remains fierce today. He wants to win trophies with La Rochelle and get back into the Scotland squad, having won the most recent of his 10 caps during the summer of 2024.
His switch of allegiance from Ireland to Scotland saw Healy debut during the 2023 Six Nations while still at Munster before he was included in the 2023 World Cup squad. But Healy hasn’t been capped again by Gregor Townsend since the end of the 2023/24 campaign.
He wants to get back into the blue jersey and has no thoughts of returning to the Irish rugby route.
“My ambition is to get back playing international rugby as soon as possible, and I want to play for Scotland,” says Healy.
“Obviously, it’s a benefit of playing for a country like Scotland that you can play elsewhere and still play in international tournaments.”
Healy was part of the Ireland U20s side that won a Grand Slam in 2019 and naturally grew up aiming to wear the green jersey at Test level.
However, he had a genuine connection to Scotland through his mother’s side of the family. The Scots first came calling in 2020 with an offer to join Glasgow, but Healy decided to stay with Munster. But when there was a second approach ahead of the 2023/24 season, this time involving Edinburgh, Healy was more receptive.
Jack Crowley had come through as Munster’s main man at number 10, while Healy hadn’t featured for Ireland at senior level. It was still a very difficult call to make.
“It was a lot of thought over a number of weeks,” says Healy of the decision. “It definitely wasn’t straightforward.
“Obviously there was the ambition to play for Scotland, but I also had strong roots in Munster, and I loved playing for Munster.”
Healy spoke to Ireland boss Andy Farrell at the time, keen to learn if he figured in the Irish national team’s plans.
“I spoke to Andy and it didn’t change too much, to be honest,” says Healy.
“Obviously, when you’re making a decision, you want to take in all the information you can before you make the decision.
“I don’t regret having that conversation. It was good to have it. If I were to go back, I don’t think I would change too much because with the information I had at hand, that’s the decision I made.
“I viewed going to Edinburgh like an enormous project that I was going to be a part of and that hugely excited me. Something that always sticks with me is being the first team to win the Senior Cup with Glenstal. That was so hard, and to be the first ones, the pioneers, was a really special feeling. I kind of had that mindset going to Edinburgh.”
Healy’s time with Munster finished with their surprise 2023 URC success, with the Tipp man playing a prominent role in that title.
Healy started the semi-final win away to Leinster at out-half, with Crowley moving to inside centre, while he also came off the bench in the quarter-final and final wins.
“That was like a hell of an achievement and a hell of a feeling to win something like that,” he says, although the tinge of disappointment about his time with his native province is that they couldn’t go all the way in the Champions Cup.
He played for Munster 56 times, and while he never quite became the dominant figure at out-half for the province that he would have aimed to be, he loved wearing the red jersey.
He hasn’t looked back on his time in Irish rugby much since leaving, and he is the kind of person who is all-in on the challenge in front of him.
Healy is thankful to have had a mentor like Whelan at Nenagh. Whelan had him working on things like his spiral kicking from a very early stage and remains an honest, blunt assessor of his game to this day.
Healy cites the influence of his dad, Fergal, who had played with Nenagh and Young Munster, as crucial in developing his love for the sport.
He appreciated the guidance of Skehan at Glenstal and enjoyed deep rugby conversations with Stephen Larkham when the Australian legend was with Munster. The aforementioned Prendergast is someone he still chats with regularly.
And now Healy is enjoying working with O’Gara, someone he always admired.
“Probably how versatile he is,” says Healy of what has stood out to him about ROG as a coach.
“In my experience with head coaches, if they’re not a director of rugby, they’ll be right next door to it in that they’ll oversee everything.
“Or they’ll be the opposite, which is a traditional head coach where their blueprint will be all over the game plan. They’ll review, preview and do meetings.
“But with ROG, he will probably dip in and out and do both. Sometimes he’ll sit back and let the other coaches run everything. Other times, you’ll see him at half-time talking to someone about a specific thing he wants in the second half.”
Healy is determined to figure out exactly what O’Gara needs from him at out-half as he gets this latest chapter of his fascinating career properly up and running.
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Ben Healy Irish Abroad la rochelle Nenagh October ROG Tipp