YOU FEEL LIKE you’re opening yourself like a flower. You’re becoming you and you’re allowed to.
Gay or straight, it doesn’t make a difference. Everyone’s on the same team playing rugby.
It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.
Listening to three of the Emerald Warriors’ star players chat away as they prepare for next weekend’s Union Cup in Dublin is a pretty refreshing experience.
The rainbow-painted Guinness Gates had just been unveiled ahead of Europe’s biggest LGBT+ and inclusive rugby tournament, and excitement is well and truly building among the host club.
Fully locked and loaded, kitted out from head-to-toe in their green and navy Warriors gear, the three young men are generous with their time and enthusiastic in conversation as they discuss a wide range of topics.
Rugby, sexuality, Isreal Folau, the tournament itself; that’s all on the agenda. But the more personal stories, they’re always the highlight.
Richie Fagan is the club’s president and chair of the 2019 Union Cup. Out of the trio present, he’s the longest-serving club member. A few years back, he needed a new challenge.
“I had seen the club out and about socially,” he smiles, reeling in the years. “It’s funny, I hadn’t played a team sport since I was in school and I thought, ‘Ok, I need to get back involved playing something. This is a new challenge’. I came through the pathway programme with the club, never looked back.
From the outset of what I thought I was going to get from joining the Warriors to what I have got, I couldn’t have wrote the script.
“I’m always encouraging [people to join]. Even when we’re out, you always feel in a subtle way you’re on a recruitment drive for people within our community.”
He tells a brilliant story about a night on the town one Christmas. The team, and a few unknown stragglers, landed back to an after party.
“One of the guys had just gone through a really rough time, had been married, had gone through a divorce, had kids… and I said ‘Listen, get down, come join us’.”
His team-mate Oran Sweeney, whose apartment they gathered at at the time, jumps in:
“He’s almost our head of recruitment now! He’s so nice, he’ll go up and speak to anybody. I have that shyness about speaking to anyone but he’s like ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ It’s incredible.”
“His game is phenomenal,” Fagan picks up.
What he has put in on the pitch in terms of the dedication to training, it’s given him a whole new outlook and a whole new focus and it’s been driven by what we do for the health and well-being side and that’s very encouraging.
“He’s a leader in the club now. We had an AGM recently and just looking at how he handles himself, he’s a different person from the person I would have spoken to that night.”
Sweeney adds: “It’s a real success story for someone who had never played a team sport before to now being a really important player in the club. And he’s just one example of a large membership of success stories.”
“There’s just so many case studies,” John Noone pipes up.
He’s another of those.
The Dubliner comes from a GAA background. He played hurling for a pretty lengthy period, he says, and dabbled in rugby too — but nothing major before linking up with the Warriors.
“The only problem with sport, and certain sport, is at the moment it’s not very inclusive,” he frowns. “I stopped playing. I focused on myself, and education and studies and that kind of thing.
Then I heard about the Warriors. I was thinking, ‘This is the right time for me now, to join this team and be me’.
One decision, one shot, as he puts it.
Here, there’s the Warriors club. This might help you…
And that was all it took.
“I came down to training one day and really haven’t looked back. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.
“The guys are just so amazing. You have different people from different [backgrounds]. Some would have played really highly competitive sport and people who have never played sport before, mixed together.
You’ve just got a really inclusive team. They’re gay or they’re straight, it doesn’t really make a difference. Everyone’s on the same team playing rugby. It’s just fantastic.
Unlike Noone, Sweeney had never played rugby before joining the Dublin-based side. But similarly, his background is in GAA.
Originally from Derry, he made the move to The Big Smoke two-and-a-half years ago. Like many who do so, he continued to play Gaelic football with his club back home. He’d travel up and down, returning to the homeland every weekend for matches.
Just like anyone in a new city, he found it quite tricky to settle in at first. But he soon found the perfect way to do so.
“I was driving to work one day and I heard the Emerald Warriors being promoted on the radio,” Sweeney recalls. “They were selling a calendar at the time and I heard the club being spoken about.
“For me, it was like, ‘Yeah, you know what, it sounds like a really interesting club. I’d really love to be part of it’.
I wanted to make new friends in Dublin, I wanted to meet gay people and kind of merge into a city almost as quickly as possible.
“I joined up and it’s been history ever since. The GAA background has been great. It’s really, really transferable.”
But then he remembers, with a giggle, how he was thrown into a match a little over a week after joining up.
He was a bit of a fish out of water running around, oblivious to the rules and finding it difficult to get used to playing behind the ball — but now the side’s captain, he got the hang of it fairly quickly.
His first Union Cup experience saw the team go on tour to Madrid and from there, Sweeney knew it was definitely for him.
“I’ve been hooked ever since,” he beams. “Obviously I was travelling back to play Gaelic, but rugby has just completely taken over my life now instead.
“It’s been a great, eye-opening experience. I guess at the start, I was almost just using it as something to keep fit for Gaelic but that has completely changed.
“You realise that it’s not just a rugby team, you meet some of your best friends. A lot of my close circle of friends are from the rugby team. I’ve brought people back home with me to watch me play Gaelic.
It’s really a great community-feel club. You ask anybody that’s part of the club; there’s a great sense of community and team spirit with the team which, coming from a GAA background, can be quite different.
Honing in on the GAA community, there was super news last week as it was confirmed that for the first time in its history, the association is set to take part in the annual Dublin Pride festival.
David Gough, the GAA’s first openly gay top-level match official, shared that an invitation was accepted for the first time in the 36-year history of Pride.
Donal Óg Cusack is regarded as the first openly gay elite Irish sportsman after he came out in 2009 — while his brother Conor also spoke out in 2014, but there is no active inter-county-playing openly gay GAA player out there right now, and that’s a worry.
Dublin star Nicole Owens delved deeper into that with The42 recently, and explored how and why the GAA is a heteronormative environment for men but being gay is accepted in the women’s game.
"For the first time in 36 year history of Pride, the GAA has accepted an invitation to walk in the Pride Parade" #LateLate live now pic.twitter.com/BE5F5aAiYZ
— The Late Late Show (@RTELateLateShow) May 24, 2019
Fear is a big factor, she feels. It’s physically impossible that there are no gay players, so it’s thought that people hide their sexuality.
When Noone and Sweeney are asked more about their past, they’d prefer not disclose whether they masked their sexuality in the GAA or not, but rather, how they’re happily open about it now with the Warriors
“It’s obviously a very individual thing,” Noone offers, “and it depends on the club and lots of other situations but the one thing that is unique to this club is that you don’t have to do that.
You feel like you’re opening yourself like a flower, you’re becoming you and you’re allowed to do that.
“I’m not saying that other associations like the GAA don’t allow that, I’m saying that you have got more opportunities to do that and I think that’s what’s very unique about this club.”
“What the club does is it transforms you beyond belief in a really good way,” Fagan adds. “It’s tough and I think that’s what makes it so special because it is so incredibly tough, in the training, matchdays.”
They’re keen to dispel the myths about gay and inclusive rugby. It’s 15s rugby, it’s hard-hitting, it’s intense. It’s not all fun and games; it’s ridiculously competitive and winning is extremely important. You’ll see that if you head along to DCU next weekend.
“When we say it’s great craic and stuff… the training’s hard and the matches are hard,” Noone assures. “It’s not like we’re going and tapping around, we’re working hard every time. When I joined, I said I’d play to keep fit and then you realise it’s so intense.
“Not just from a physical perspective but also from a mental health perspective. I think that’s one of the massive things as well about the Warriors, there’s this mental-social benefit from it and that’s something that we really need to hammer home.”
Sweeney echoes his words: “It’s definitely serious, we do take it serious but where I come from and that GAA background, if you lose a match you have to be upset for a week.
“If you lose, everybody heads home in their own direction, there’s no community feel along with that really strong team bond. Here, we’re training hard but we’re also having a lot of fun along the way which is something quite special in rugby.”
Bouncing off each other, they offer more and more insights into the club. How they won bronze at that Union Cup in Madrid, how it’s biennial and they contest the Bingham Cup every other year, how they’ve struggled down the divisions in the Leinster Metro League in the past, but how the good times are rolling at the minute.
“It’s important to note that we do have members that don’t play,” Fagan stresses. “Those members are the backbone to our club in many ways.
“It is a bit of a machine at the moment. We’ve gone from 40 members to 150 members but managing all of that and bringing them through, whether it’s the pathway programme or fundraising or the job we do within our community, there’s so much to it.
It’s not just the rugby. As one of our founding members would have said, it’s the big R and the little g in rugby, that’s what we do.
Perhaps a fitting way to round off the conversation is putting the sport, as a whole, in this country under the microscope.
Irish rugby has come a long way in terms of being inclusive and welcoming the LGBT+ community, Fagan emphasises. But considering the fact that there’s no openly gay professional rugby player on these shores, there’s much more to be done.
We refer back to an article with former international Tommy Bowe in The Sunday Independent earlier this year in which he said, “I think if an Irish man did come out as gay he’d be welcomed with open arms”.
The trio all nod in agreement when they’re asked if they feel that would be the case.
And they believe the time is near.
“Absolutely, without a doubt,” Fagan concludes.
I’ll never forget opening up the paper and seeing [that interview] and thinking ‘Yes! Thank you,’ because we need this. We’re not trying by any means to out any professional rugby player, we’re just trying to normalise what we do.
“It’s totally okay.. well at least it should be considered totally okay. And it says a lot that the IRFU are behind us [the Union Cup], it says a lot that we launched in the home of Irish rugby.
“That alone should just instill confidence.”
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