IT’S A DAMP November afternoon when we meet Philly McMahon in Ballymun but not even the weather can affect his mood.
It’s just a few days before Ireland lock horns with Australia in the International Rules at Croke Park and McMahon would go on to cap a remarkable year by claiming glory in the green singlet.
Before that, he’s good enough to give us an hour of his time, a guided tour of the places in Ballymun that mean most to him.
“This is where I hung around, Sillogue Road,” McMahon explains, slowing down in his car.
“Where this field is, you had the eight-storeys. You also had the four-storeys and the tower, which was 14 storeys.
“This used to be flats all the way down, this is where I used to hang around with a gang of 13 or 14 people, the ‘Sillogue gang’, I suppose. Then you would have had a gang up towards Sandy Hill, Poppintree, not a ghetto like America but you would have groups that you’d hang around with in your area.
“It’s not like Compton where you wouldn’t hang around in a different area. You’d have friends from Poppintree, Balcurris or Shangan who would come over and hang around with us but yeah, we had a massive gang and at the back of that (he gestures), a massive field, all those new houses weren’t there.
We had a field with a football pitch beside it, really good memories, some really bad memories as well. Back then, we had a lot of drugs around the area. The area was rampant with drugs and they were very accessible. But now the flats are gone, that’s kind of gone with them.”
McMahon doesn’t drink. “To my peers, I was the opposite,” he explains. “Sport helped me do that.”
McMahon’s never hidden his appreciation and affection for Paddy Christie, the former Dublin captain who teaches in the local area and heavily involved in the underage ranks at Ballymun Kickhams.
Christie was the guy who recognised McMahon’s fledgling talent and pushed him in the right direction. He’d make McMahon and his friends feel “a little bit special” on visits to the Holy Spirit Boys National School.
McMahon also remembers the hot summer days down the back of the flats when people would the sound of music from transistor radios filled the air as local people brought sheets from their houses, whipped their tops off and worked on their tans.
“That was our beach,” he smiles. “That was one of the really big memories I’d have of my area. That house there, that was exactly where my flat would have been, on the first floor.
“When I lost my keys, I was able to climb up the flats into my balcony and get in that way.
“Davey Byrne lives down there, used to live a couple of blocks down from me.
“Davey would come up this avenue here and shout up to my window, and we’d walk the back of the flats up to Poppintree Park where we trained. We’d see these groups and gangs all the way up, as we went up to play football.”
When McMahon steps out onto the field of play for Dublin, he’s representing not only his county, but his local area. Ballymun is a place he’s passionate about and he gives plenty back to the local community.
“It doesn’t have the uniqueness that it used to have,” he tells us. “(It’s) like a normal estate but the community is still strong. The good thing about Ballymun is that we don’t really forget about what we had as a positive, even though we had a lot of negatives.
“It’s still a strong community when there are things on. I did a fundraiser there recently and the whole of Ballymun got behind me. Four or five hundred people were at it, it was amazing.”
The fundraiser McMahon refers to is one dear to his heart, a scheme aimed at helping those less fortunate than himself from the local area. The ‘John Caffrey’ scholarship is named after his late brother, who died in 2012.
“We raised a good bit of money,” Philly says. “We just came short of our target, we’ve a lot of money to raise.
“We’re hoping to get this up and running in June 2016. I did a pilot scheme in 2012, Kaizen evolution or continuous improvement.
The objective was to get 20 18-24-year-olds from the Ballymun/Whitehall area off social welfare. We sent out letters to 550 people odd that met the criteria, tried to entice as many of them as we could to an interview process, which probably turned a lot of them away from it but we had 50 applications, 40 for interview and picked 20 to do it.
“13 of them went on to succeed. The objective was to onto employment, self-employment or further education. Seven of them went to employment, six to further education.
“There was a massive success rate from it. We had planned to continue it for the next year but the funding wasn’t there.
I don’t want this to end. This has been successful and I’m not going to let funding be the issue of not trying to help people. I’m going to have to do this myself and the objective is to setup a private company, a fitness course, for somebody that comes in that wants to be a qualified fitness instructor or set up a fitness business.
“They would pay their fees, on average around €2,000, and part of that money goes to the John Caffrey scholarship, which would fund an 18-24-year-old coming off the social welfare.
“So it’s self-funded. The money we need now is to get that institute up and running. I want to start off as a fitness course and then see if we can look at other courses.
“I don’t want to narrow it down to people based around fitness but because that industry is booming, that’s where I know, that’s where I wanted to start off. Hopefully in 2016 we get enough money to get that going.
“A couple of people are looking at coming in to support it, Government departments are looking at proposals and things are looking good for it.”
We drive on and the conversation switches back to Ballymun and what the place means to McMahon.
“It’s a great area, a really, really good area. And when people talk bad about it, you kind of go ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’.
“There’s a massive stigma around this area but I haven’t seen any other community as tight as Ballymun.
“See the houses there? That’s Glasnevin. Imagine those new houses not being there?
“There’s a massive wall that separates Ballymun and Glasnevin. We used to call is the poshy wall because when you go over the wall you’re a poshy!”
We pass by what Philly describes as a “three-storey duplex”, where his parents live now.
A green ‘FitFood‘ van is parked outside, another addition to his burgeoning business CV.
More on that anon.
“The field in front of you is Setanta, I used to do a bit of training there, my kicking and stuff like that. Setanta are very good as well, they’re a hurling club and we’re a football club but they wouldn’t have a problem with me going down there kicking ball.
“See over there? The little hill? (he points to a grass-covered hill).
“At Christmas we’d put water up on the hill, it would freeze over and we’d use it as a slide. I used to walk regularly through that gap. Imagine my flats were there, walk straight through there, through this gap and that leads me to the Tower.
“The Tower was massive, and the shops…this is an area where I used to hang around.
We ask Philly about his brother John, the legacy he’s left behind, and how the memory of his late brother motivates him.
“Spiritually he does, he’s always in my head. That’s how he motivates me.
“I’m trying to help people based on his legacy. I know he would have been the type of person that would have helped anybody if he had the opportunity.
“He was 31 when he passed away in 2012. It’s just the regrets you’d have…in 2011, when we won the All-Ireland, he was going through rehab at that stage.
“He had planned, then, whenever we were back in the All-Ireland to come over and watch it. In 2012, we got to the semi-final. He had planned to come over for the final but we got beaten and he passed away on 7 September.
“It was tough because I wanted him to experience a better life, a life that I’m leading, I suppose.
“I’m really lucky, I wanted him to celebrate that with me, as most brothers would.
“Any of the Dublin lads would bring their brother along wherever they’re going, whatever they do. He was my only brother, I have three sisters and I have to look after them now.
He was the one who looked after us all. That’s the biggest disappointment, that he had such a, I wouldn’t say poor life, but there was a part of his life that he had a massive struggle with.”
When he was a young boy growing up himself, Philly admits that he found his brother’s drug problem difficult to deal with.
“It would have been hard to speak about when I was young because I was very embarrassed.
My brother would have hung around with a group of his own age, they would have struggled with drugs, that would have been the era of heroin, ecstasy and these hard drugs.
“They were rampant in Ballymun. John was always a little bit younger with that group, he was led and peer pressured into it a little bit but he made his own choices as well,that’s the way it was.
“When that older group disbanded and went whatever way they went, John connected with my friends. It was embarrassing because John would have been on the blocks, on drugs around me and my friends.
“They would have noticed it and I would have been embarrassed.
But if I was to do it all over again, the big learning curve for me was I would have been one of the siblings with the tough love approach to it, and shy away from it. ‘Ah, if he’s over that side of Ballymun, at least I don’t have to worry about it.’
“I was probably too young but when I got a little older, I spoke to him an awful lot about it. I came a little bit closer to him when he moved away from England. He became clean two years before he passed away.
It was a strange thing because I’d seen him for so many years on drugs that when I saw him clean, I was like ‘this is strange, I don’t recognise him being clean.’
“It was good, a really good place when I saw him clean but now I feel comfortable speaking about it because I did it the wrong way.
“When I spoke to other people that come up to me and say ‘do you know what, thanks very much for speaking about addicts that way, or doing this for addicts, I always say to them: what way to you treat them? Do you do the tough love kind of thing?
“They say, yeah, but for me it’s probably not the right way to do it. We need to not punish people for being addicts, we need to help them. I think the Government are starting to look at that, putting proper things in place, setting up needle exchange places and stuff like that.
“That’s important because then we actually gather people up with problems and try to work with them, make them feel a part of society, that we’re there to help them and not push them away.
“Essentially what we’ve been saying is ‘you’re a drug addict, I don’t want to know you’ so how do they ever get back into society? My Mam never did, probably I did a lot, I was unaware and uneducated.
It’s hard for young people to accept that one of their family members is looked on as an outsider in society. Everybody in Ireland, I’m sure, is looking for the perfect family. It doesn’t exist and the quicker and sooner we realise that, the sooner we accept people with problems and addictions.
“The group of fellas I hung around with, some of them are in prison, three of them OD’d and died, really good friends of mine.
Even the fellas in prison at the minute, I still go and see them. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at them. I’d look at them and say ‘right, listen, you’ve made the mistake but when you come out, when you’ve done the punishment, I’ll try and help you any way that I can. If you don’t accept that, and if you go back to your old ways, at least I’ve tried to help you.”
Having seen what his brother went through, and accepting now that he could have been more sympathetic to John, Philly has taken on board the ‘role model’ tag, after some initial reservations.
“The big thing for me is everybody has a moment.
“Every day you have these moments. It’s as easy as cooking a cake, you want to eat that cake and you go, hold on a second, that’s not actually right, it doesn’t taste right.
“Hold on a second, I’m going to make it a different way and you taste it and you go, Jesus, that’s how I make it.
“That moment, that’s the way I treat life. For me, I play Gaelic Football because I love it, but also that my moment for Gaelic Football is that I can help people.
“I wouldn’t have realised that when I started playing Gaelic Football. For me, playing the sport I play at the minute means a lot more than just playing sport. So if my profile can get me out there to help others, I like that, that gives me a buzz.”
And so he’ll pop into the BRYR (Ballymun Regional Youth Resource) and talk to kids there.
“The kids around where I live know I play for Dublin.
“After winning the All-Ireland, they were at me a little bit more. The thing that kicked it off was I walked into the house one day with the Sam Maguire and it was like the Batman sign, they all ran straight towards me.
“I was coming out of the house and walking down the road to do a talk in a youth centre, this kid comes up to me, ‘oh you’re the famous footballer.’
“For me and most GAA players, we don’t think that way, we go ‘uhm, not really’ but I’m looking at this kid and going, ‘I have to say I am.’ ‘Ah, but you can’t be famous because you’re from Ballymun.’
“I actually sat down on the path with this kid for about ten minutes, I was late for the talk.
“I was explaining to him that you can be successful and you can do this.
It’s the stigma around school, friends, people around the area. He might play for a football team and get stick. I remember playing (soccer) for Belvedere and I’d go down and they’d slag the flats.
“That would degrade me a little bit, ‘ah Ballymun rob our runners’, this kind of stuff.
“Why are they saying this to me? Why am I different to them? But that kid will hopefully have a bit more of an education around why he CAN do it, even if he thinks a little bit differently.
“The thing is, my moment was that path. Now my thinking is, how can I get a bigger path? How can I fit as many people as possible on that path, and tell the same story?
“If I can tell the same story, that’s my path, my moment. Put me on the stage and let me help these people, if I can. But I have other things that I need to balance – sport, life, family, business. I’m hoping that the scholarship I’m setting up in the name of my brother will probably do that for the older generation, the 18-24-year-olds that are being pushed away from society a little bit.”
On and off the pitch, McMahon dreams big. Teammate Jack McCaffrey may have earned the individual accolade in 2015 but in many people’s eyes, McMahon was Footballer of the Year.
Based in Ballymun Kickhams GAA clubhouse, BK Fitness is ‘dedicated to providing the best training and service around as we help you achieve goals you didn’t even think you could.’
It started off with a handful of women attending a boot-camp but now BK Fitness has four Dublin outlets.
After finishing school early, McMahon was surrounded by other kids chatting about Leaving Cert points and third-level studies.
So he went and completed a PLC course at Coláiste Íde.
“It was the best thing I ever did, amazing.
“Two years in between school and college, amazing course and college.
“In my first year, one of the lecturers there said there’s a job opportunity to do some lifeguarding out in Malahide, do you want to do it?
“I said, yeah. So I was driving from college to Malahide and I was tired and felt I couldn’t do it any more.
“I was in with the Dublin U21s and a friend of mine who I went over on trials to Nottingham Forest with worked in Northwood (gym in Santry).
“He got me a job in Northwood, earning a decent wage. I bought an Audi A4, really stupid, but it was fine, I was working at the time and everything was going grand.
“Then I got into the Dublin senior squad in 2008 and at that stage I needed a job to facilitate my training. Northwood wasn’t the job for me.
“I went to DCU, in the gym down there, and they looked after me, changed my shift around for training. I was surrounded by people in the University and a lot of them were talking to me about doing my degree. The likes of Paddy Christie and Ian Robertson pushed me, people that had been there and done that.
“And I had that bit of thickness, none of my mates went to college, none of them have degrees, I had nieces that I wanted to be a role model for so I went back and repeated my Leaving Cert.
“That’s where the hassle happened financially – big car, had to give up work, I struggled.
“I had to save up a few quid before I gave up a job, that was paying a loan, my parents were feeding me and I had about €2 a day to live off.
“So I used to get a long pan and a packed of ham every week, made my sandwiches and had €2 to buy a drink.
“I knew that would get me to where I am today. I knew I’d struggle but it would be worth it.
“So I went and did my degree (Education and Training) and the space in Ballymun Kickhams became available.
“Teams were using it for a gym and someone approached me to train their kids. I trained them up there before starting to train women. I started off with four and in a matter of months it was 60 odd, packed, a boot-camp style gym. It went from that to four gyms now, it’s crazy. That’s what DCU did for me, got me into the fitness industry.
“I don’t know how I have a girlfriend!” McMahon smiles.
“I get up at 6am and teach a few classes, I like teaching still, I’ve been doing the gyms nearly 10 years now.
“I do a couple of hours there throughout the day and in the afternoon, I look after the FitFood thing.
“Then I look at doing things like hobbies, to make sure I have a balance throughout the day.
“Sometimes you can do too much of something, go bonkers and not enjoy it any more.
That was the big difference between my football this year and last year, to have the balance right between football, family, business and hobbies, the four components.
“It’s not simple, business and football are the two big ones, I probably neglect the family too much. I’d like to spend more time with the family, you’d take it for granted.”
We drive a little further into Poppintree, where Philly used to train.
“This is all new, there’s a big pond that would have been a football pitch where we used to play.
“None of this was here, no playground or anything like that.
“When I got a little bit older, I developed friends up this end.
“I played soccer at a really young age. When we had the flats, you wouldn’t really play Gaelic Football because kicking the ball at the flats, you could hit someone’s window.
“As you walked into the complex, you’d walk into the lift shaft and up the stairs, to go into wherever your flat was, they used to be the goalposts.
“But they were lateral because the flats were going laterally. We used to have a goal this way, and this was (gestures), instead of facing each other, we used to play in between the cars, going lateral.
“That’s where it started off. As I got older, I kicked the ball at the tower, to see how high you could kick it.
“Myself and Davey Byrne used to try kicking the ball over the four storeys, he’d stand over the opposite side. It would be a risk because if the ball goes on top of the flats, you wouldn’t get it back for weeks. You’d have to wait until the Corporation came, they’d climb up on top, get the balls and throw them down.”
Soon, we get chatting about FitFood and how that business came about.
“It’s a little bit different, the idea is that it’s bad food made healthy. You know the spice bags? We do a healthy version of that. This week, we launched a ‘Megabox’ with Singapore noodles made from courgettes, chicken goujons crusted in almond flour, thai green curry sauce, chicken wings with our own seasoning, sweet potato chips, that’s what it’s about.
“How can you get people to enjoy healthy food? Yes, you can eat a salad and it’s healthy and sometimes it’s tasty but your brain doesn’t really want it, it wants bad food.
“We’ve got protein doughnuts, snickers bars, fudge bars, we make our own Oreos, it’s a really good concept, making healthy eating interesting. We’re up and running a year and it’s going really well. Hopefully, in 2016, you’ll see a FitFood retail store.”
As Dublin celebrated All-Ireland glory in September, McMahon cut short the festivities.
“I was back in work on the Tuesday after. I’d find it very hard to take a week off work, I’m a bit of a workaholic.
“While lads were able to do that, owning your own business, it wouldn’t really appeal to me to over-celebrate too much.
At the same time, the lads have every right to celebrate, given the amount of effort and sacrifice they put in to the All-Ireland. I’d do it a little bit different.”
As for football, McMahon describes 2015 as an “enjoyable year.” He found himself at the centre of a couple of storms but insists that he won’t be changing his uncompromising style any time soon.
“The big one was the (Mayo) semi-final, the two games. You felt that was a good game, for the stage of the season you’re in, how we adapted to adversity with the Mayo comeback.
“That was a good standard, a good level, I really enjoyed that.
Other standards were different, still as challenging. You’d find playing in a semi-final and a final as another level, just because it’s the semi-final and final, not because of the opponents or teams we played before that.
“So many people are trying to talk you up, how you’re so much better, who are they? You can’t think of that, opponents are the exact same. Conor McGregor does it really well, he sees a blank face no matter who he’s fighting. His mindset stuff is very good.”
Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is one of McMahon’s hobbies, and he credits them with improved footwork and tackling.
“I do MMA in the off-season, hoping to get three months this year, got back five weeks ago.
“I haven’t got much of a chance to get stuck into it but I love it. I find it interesting that you have to know so much.”
We wonder if MMA has improved McMahon’s mental toughness, or whether he needed to be mentally tough in the first place to take it on, a chicken and egg thing.
“It might have, never really thought of it. Definitely to compete in it, you have to be mentally tough.”
Would he be good enough to make a career for himself in MMA?
“I’m not good enough, technically, I haven’t done it enough.
“I started doing it in 2009 when I was dropped off the Dublin team. I used to do thai boxing and boxing when I was very young but I always wanted to do MMA.
“Owen Roddy, who potentially could have been a UFC fighter but had to retire, set up an MMA gym in my studio in Ballymun Kickhams.
“He gave me the chance to do an MMA session and the attributes I had from football stood out. I was strong and powerful but when I went back up there a couple of weeks ago, the same fellas I used to spar with back then are now technically brilliant.
“Who knows? In a couple of years time he’ll probably have a few fighters in the UFC. He’ McGregor’s pad man and set up SBG (Straight Blast Gym) Charlestown.
“He’s a brilliant coach and I love having to think, like in Gaelic Football. You have to think a lot but this is totally different. Say, for example, you’re standing toe to toe with someone, you have to be thinking what’s the next move or else I’m going to get a smack here, or else I’m going to get tapped out or potentially knocked out.
“In Gaelic Football, you don’t really have that. You don’t have that fear of being knocked out or punched, although sometimes you might!
“But there’s a similar fear of dropping a ball, if you’re a defender, or missing a tackle in front of goal, your man getting the ball and turning you. There are similarities in that way.
“It was the footwork, the stand up stuff, learning how to get into positions where it gives you a bit of an advantage. As a defender, all you’re doing is following somebody, like ‘chase’ when you’re a kid. It’s hard, isn’t it? Because so many kids don’t want to be the one that’s chasing somebody, they want to be the ones getting chased. You understand why so many kids want to be forwards!”
We ask McMahon how he dealt with some of the more negative elements of attention that came his way in the latter stages of the season, the kind of attention that wouldn’t tally with the reality that for all of his on-field abrasiveness, he’s a hell of a nice guy first and foremost.
You would have people coming up to you and talking about it, a couple of people, but you can’t hide from that. You deal with it. It’s just the way I play, it’s the way I express myself as a player, I like making sure I play on the line and there’s been plenty of players like that.
“Every team has them, players that play on the edge…but it’s probably more players that don’t play on the edge, that’s probably why it’s looked upon a little bit. It’s just something that if I was doing in any other other sport, it’s the way I’d be.”
He won’t compromise his philosophies and beliefs for anybody else and it’s difficult to disagree.
“I like GAA in that you can walk down the street, somebody might notice you, the majority won’t. That’s what I love about it. I don’t think I’d like the fame that the soccer players get, or Conor McGregor, not being able to walk into a shop, I don’t like that, that’s not me.
“But at the end of the day, we have an obligation as Dublin footballers to represent a brand, I suppose, and we have people to represent, the Dublin people and culture.
“There’s a part that we have to do the media stuff, some of it we like doing, some we don’t like doing but we’re very lucky that we have a very good media manager and if we don’t want to do anything, we don’t have to.
“We’re supported really well (but) I don’t have a problem with doing media stuff.
“I don’t like attention in terms of fame attention but media stuff is fine. If I think it’s going to support something I’m doing, why not? And especially in terms of helping people.”
And so Philly McMahon will continue doing what he’s doing, honouring John’s memory and making his family, friends and neighbours proud.
“They live in that house down there, I owe a lot to them,” he says of his parents, Dad Phil and mum Valerie.
“My Dad is from Belfast, my Mam from Crumlin originally and they moved out here years and years ago, and have been here ever since.
There’s a big bit of when you win that medal, you can see how proud they are. My Dad is a very proud man, a big, hard man and you wouldn’t see him cry but he shed a few tears after the All-Ireland final. It’s magic, a dream, to see your Dad crying and realise how much it means to your family.
“That’s the regret of not having your brother there, you know he’d be the same but hopefully I can live his legacy on.”
