IT STARTED WITH a bribe.
Ultan Dillane was 13 when a neighbour suggested that he and his brother Cian head down to training at the local rugby club, Tralee RFC, some Saturday morning.
Ultan had grown up in Paris until he was seven, when he and Cian relocated with their mother, Ellen, to her homeland of Co. Kerry. The brothers had dabbled in a variety of sports in their new community over the intervening years, but they remained extremely shy.
So shy, in fact, that the notion of taking up rugby didn’t appeal to them at all — notwithstanding the fact that half of the faces down at Tralee RFC would have been familiar to them from school. Indeed, that might have been the problem.
Ellen, though, was hellbent on luring her sons out of their respective shells. She offered them both €5 to give rugby one go. Off they went.
Ellen would later describe it as the best fiver she ever spent.
Those who played alongside Ultan Dillane for Munster’s underage teams at the turn of the last decade speak of an Adonis of a youngfella whose dominance in the collision was occasionally chilling. Equally, though, Dillane was a teammate that few of them ever truly got to know.
Most of those young players at the time were schools standouts from Christians and Pres in Cork, Rockwell in Tipp, and the several leading Limerick schools. There were naturally cliques and, to an extent, a kind of universal rugby-school language that created an intersection in the Venn diagram.
Dillane, hailing from Tralee, was scarcely treated like an outsider but could have been forgiven for feeling like one.
He was still a quiet kid, even on the pitch where virtually the only noise he made was the crunching of opposition bones.
It was at least partly for this reason that he would eventually slip through Munster’s net.
It was a time in which the southern province felt it best practice to turn young leaders into athletes rather than the other way around, and Dillane was the archetypal example of a young player who was built the other way around. He was offered only a sub-academy contract in 2012.
Thankfully, Connacht had already spotted something in Dillane that Munster couldn’t quite make head nor tail of.
A year earlier, Ireland Youths boss Greg Lynch had asked his forwards coach, Jimmy Duffy, to take in an U18 interpro between Munster and Leinster at Dooradoyle.
Duffy, who was also a player development officer with Connacht at the time, travelled armed with a list of players whom Lynch had preliminarily nominated for international selection, and was tasked with focusing on one Munster player in particular.
It wasn’t Dillane. He wasn’t even on the list.
“But he was the best player on the park that day,” recalls Duffy, now an assistant coach with Western Force in Super Rugby.
“Running around with a mad afro”, he laughs, “straight away you could see there was a massive engine in him. He didn’t have a lot of meat on the bones at that time but he liked to hit, he liked to carry…
“There was a lot of latent power there, y’know? Any time he went into contact, he’d win that contact. Both sides of the ball, he was looking to empty somebody.”
Dillane starred for Greg Lynch’s Youths in 2011, and continued his international ascendancy the following year for Ireland 19s, who were coached by Connacht academy manager Nigel Carolan.
“I suppose, when he wasn’t picked up in Munster and we had the opportunity”, Duffy says, “Nigel was like, ‘Yeah, 100% — we’ll go get him.’”
Dillane, keen to support his hard-working single mother by any means necessary, turned down a half-offer from his native province and headed west for the real thing.
In Galway, he instantly felt both wanted and needed.
Dillane began to come into his own, and became a Connacht legend within the space of about four years.
“When I first started playing rugby, it was the likes of Ulty I was looking up to,” says current Connacht lock Niall Murray, who came up under Dillane and was recently named in the URC Team of the Season for 2022/23.
“I wanted a white scum cap just because Ulty wore one.
“I leaned on Ulty in my academy days,” Murray adds. “He struggled to put on weight too, so our nutritionist linked us together and he gave me every trick in his book to help me improve — which goes to show what a good guy he really is. And that’s only scraping the surface.
“Growing up, I wanted to be like Ulty. In the academy, we would do video analysis and one clip I remember watching was a Connacht defensive lineout (against Grenoble in the 2015/2016 Challenge Cup quarter-finals)…
“The opposition turned it into a running maul with Connacht bodies splitting out left, right, and centre, and Ulty ran around and stopped a full eight-man running maul by himself.” (Incidentally, then-Grenoble head coach Bernard Jackman describes that specific maul, as well as Dillane’s role in stopping it, as “insane”, and like nothing he’s ever seen before on a rugby pitch).
Jimmy Duffy adds of Dillane the man: “There are guys who lead out loud — but Ultan is more subtle. He leads behind the scenes.
“He’s a very, very good mood regulator within the group. He’s a wee bit shy on the exterior but not when you get to know him — certainly not. He would regulate the group internally.
“He’d be very good in the social aspects, just making sure everything is connected. And very, very emotionally intelligent as well: he’d be very much on top of what people are feeling, and being able to lighten the mood when needs be. He puts a lot of effort into the people around him.”
Lock Murray, who will seek to emulate Dillane’s success at Connacht over the coming years, says: “A memory that I’ll never forget is making my debut in 2019 in a European Champions Cup game.
I was behind the goals, warming up with everyone else before kick-off, and Ulty came over and gave me a hug and said, ‘Don’t worry, man, we got you! Just go out there and express yourself’ — which completely got rid of all the nerves I had.
“I came on that game, Ulty called a lineout on me at the back and Del (Shane Delahunt) scored a phase or two later.
“After the game, he asked me to hop in a photo with himself and Joe (Maksymiw). It was so surreal: he was the type of guy that made everyone feel comfortable and included everyone.”
Duffy admits to receiving a “massive kick” when Dillane received his first Ireland call-up from Joe Schmidt in the spring of 2016. Dillane went on to earn 19 caps for his country.
During this time, his mum, Ellen Dillane, began to receive in the post letters that were intended for Ultan.
One, addressed in a child’s handwriting to ‘Ultan Dillane, Connacht and Ireland rugby player,’ let Ellen know her son had made it.
The best fiver she ever spent.
In 2018, however, Dillane’s world was turned on its axis. Ellen passed away suddenly.
Dillane had never shied away from the reality that impressing his mum was one of his primary purposes for playing rugby. In her absence, the game might not have felt quite as fun for a few years.
“Like anybody, you just have to be there for them and get people around them that need to be around them,” Duffy says, explaining how Connacht navigated Dillane’s loss.
“The thing is: Ultan’s very, very much his own man.
“He’s a strong, strong individual,” adds Duffy after some pause for thought. “Highly ambitious, highly driven. It might not seem like that on the exterior sometimes, but he is.
“And it’s like… you could could actually transfer what he has on-field to off-field: he’s extremely tough. Almost laid horizontal sometimes, you’d feel, but at the same time always delivered. And always more interested in the people around him.
“These are very, very subtle leadership qualities that he has, but they’ve been a huge part of any team that he’s been a part of, that I’ve been involved with.”
“Just an all-round good guy”, adds Niall Murray of his idol. “He could chat to anybody for any amount of time. He always had a smile on his face. He was always laughing or telling a story. He was a massive part of the squad.
“He was a great leader, and loved a pint too.”
Duffy says he was “delighted” to watch Dillane lift the Champions Cup with Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle, a final in which the Tralee man was “exceptional” when he came off the bench at blindside against Leinster.
Dillane’s move to La Rochelle a couple of years ago was partly informed by a promise he made to his mother the year before she died: that he would return to France to play professional ball there one day.
When he announced his impending departure from Connacht on Instagram in December 2021, the comments section under the post wasn’t long for filling up with both provincial and international teammates wishing him well.
There was a universal theme to the messages from colleagues at Connacht: the goat emoji, which is used in the internet age to describe somebody as being the ‘Greatest of all Time, or GOAT.
“I suppose the reason everyone was doing that”, Niall Murray says, “is because they were expressing their love for him, how much he meant to us at the club. And it just goes to show how much of a GOAT he is: a Connacht legend.”
The 29-year-old Dillane will make his 31st appearance of a legendary La Rochelle season during Saturday’s eagerly anticipated French Top 14 final, as Ronan O’Gara’s side seek to complete a famous double and finally get one over on their bogey team, Toulouse.
Under the keen eyes of ROG, Donnacha Ryan and co, he has become a second row-back row hybrid, playing some of his career-best ball in the latter role of late.
His former Connacht forwards coach Jimmy Duffy laughs at the concept being novel — but it’s a rueful laugh at that.
We actually selected Ultan, I don’t know how many times, at six when we were at Connacht… and for whatever reason there was always an injury and he’d wind up back in the second row.
“One of the lads told me it was my jinx! I liked that South African idea of three locks, a Pieter-Steph [du Toit]-type player, and having a huge lineout option as well as your two second rows.
“If I’m not wrong, I think it was five or six times we selected him at blindside over the years — and not once did he play there. But that’s just coaching sometimes…
“What I’m seeing from the TV”, Duffy adds, “is that Ultan looks so comfortable in his skin and he’s starting to produce some great football.
“Hopefully they can get over the line, now, on Saturday.
“As a coach, you’re supposed to keep favourites to a minimum — but Ultan Dillane is right up there for me.”
