THE LAST TIME Tom Toole was in Sydney was just over a decade ago when he was playing for the Queensland Schoolboys at the Australian championships.
On Saturday, the Ireland prop will line up for the national anthems as part of the Irish side facing Australia in the country he called home for 10 years of his youth.
27-year-old O’Toole knows it will be a surreal moment standing there in Allianz Stadium in front of a full house of Irish and Aussie folk. Though he is very proudly an Irishman, O’Toole understandably still feels a strong connection to Australia.
Born in Louth and growing up in Ratoath in County Meath, O’Toole’s world was turned upside down when he was six. He was a happy kid, playing hurling and Gaelic football.
One day in 2005, he and his two older brothers, Jack and Joe, were sat down by their parents, Niall and Kay, and told that there was a big change ahead of them.
Niall had been working with the Irish Army, but his career wasn’t progressing the way he wanted, so it was time for a move abroad. The boys were told that America, Israel and Australia were the options.
“All I wanted was a pool,” recalls O’Toole with a laugh.
“I was like, ‘Can we have a pool in the backyard?’ I’d never really been outside Ireland before that, went to Florida for a holiday, but I was five years old. I wasn’t making the decisions.
“But all I asked was for a pool and, yeah, I got a pool in the end!”
Niall took a job with the Australian Army in Brisbane and went on to serve for nearly 12 years, doing a couple of stints in Afghanistan during that time.
The O’Toole boys didn’t have long to get used to the idea of leaving Ireland, with the family making their move just a week after the initial discussion.
“I don’t really remember the friends I had in Ireland, but I remember getting up in class and saying goodbye to everybody, and away I went not really knowing where it was going to lead me to,” says O’Toole.
Life in the army can mean moving families around every few years, but Niall insisted that the O’Tooles would be permanently based in Brisbane, giving them a chance to put down roots.
Tom’s childhood memories in Australia are joyous. It was “unbelievably fun” growing up in a country where the weather meant they could be outdoors all day. They went on exciting holidays – camping trips, skiing in Melbourne, exploring the Great Barrier Reef.
And then there was the sport. Joe and Jack played Aussie rules, partly because they were growing tall. Tom was “going outwards” so rugby made sense. He started at the age of eight and never looked back.
It was when he went to secondary school at Padua College that O’Toole realised he had a real grá for the game. Padua was best known as a rugby league school and had only been playing union for 17 years when he joined.
O'Toole presented his first Ireland jersey to Padua College in 2022. Padua College Old BoysPadua College Old Boys
O’Toole played league as well as union at school, and remembers going up against Lindsay Collins, who is now a big star in the NRL and State of Origin, at a training session in Padua.
“He’d have been 17 or 18, I’d have been 14 or 15, and I started getting exposure to training at the First XV at that age,” says O’Toole, who was inducted into Padua’s hall of fame in 2023.
“I was naturally quite a big guy anyway, but I was still young. I remember him carrying the ball in one session. The coach was screaming at me to go low because I don’t think he thought it was going to happen.
“Big Lindsay running at me, I remember that clearly, and it was a bit of like, ‘I’ve got to do this, or I’m not going to get this opportunity again.’
“Fortunately, he went down. A couple of meters after me maybe, but I still got him down.”
Union suited O’Toole and his frame. He had aims of becoming Padua’s first-ever Australian Schoolboy international in the 15-man code. He says he got great coaching and had good players around him, including out-half Lawson Creighton, who has just signed for the Ospreys.
Schoolboy rugby in Brisbane is of a high quality and tighthead prop O’Toole was good enough to get into the Queensland underage representative mix.
Yet it was that last visit to Sydney in 2015 when things started to change for the young Ireland native. He wasn’t getting picked to start for Queensland, and there were a few pangs for home.
His brother, Jack, had already moved back to Ireland to study journalism in Dublin. That pull had always been there for the lads, who initially thought their dad’s work in Australia would only last for three years.
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“We were still a very Irish family. Our parents made sure we remembered,” says O’Toole.
“Well, my older brothers were fine, but me being so young at the time moving out, they made sure it was instilled in us. I was born in Louth, we lived in Meath, and my dad’s a proud Dub, so he reminded me he was a proud Dub all the time.
“Naturally through the rugby, I wanted to do as well as I could, so I was progressing through the representative stuff, and obviously the aim was to potentially get to Aussie Schoolboys. That would have been the pinnacle to me at the time.
“But growing up, it was always Ireland first, and if Australia were playing someone else, then I’d support Australia.”
One of his coaches in Brisbane was Jonny McMurtry, a native of Bangor in County Down.
McMurty suggested that O’Toole should put his name into the IRFU’s Exiles system, flagging that he was still an Irish-qualified player playing at a high level in schoolboy rugby abroad.
O'Toole playing for Campbell College in 2016. Presseye / Brian Little/INPHO
Presseye / Brian Little/INPHO / Brian Little/INPHO
When the O’Tooles were heading back to Ireland for a holiday in 2015, McMurty said that Tom should go and meet Ulster’s academy manager Kieran Campbell in Belfast. Campbell and Ulster met O’Toole, checked out his footage, and asked him to join their system.
As with the initial move away from Ireland, there was a very quick turnaround for O’Toole. Because it was nearly September and the start of the school year, he had only a week to make up his mind.
“I was initially like, ‘I’m going to finish school in Australia,’ but then my parents said, ‘You probably should go.’”
He took their advice and moved to Campbell College in Belfast as a boarding student.
The journey to Ireland was traumatic as he wrestled with it all. The first night at Campbell, he sat in his room, looking out the window and wondering how he had ended up there. It was overwhelming for a 16-year-old.
But O’Toole put his head down and got on with things. A year later, his parents also moved back to Ireland. And rugby went well from the off. He was soon playing for the Ireland U18s, then the U19s, then the U20s.
Rugby Australia got in touch at one stage to see if O’Toole would be interested in going back over, but he had earned his spot in the Ulster academy and made his debut for the province when he was still only 19. The rest is history.
So it is strange for O’Toole to be back in Australia with Ireland another decade on. He has had lots of people welcoming him back and looking to meet up, but he has been flat out with Ireland’s preparations for the Wallabies.
His partner, Catherine, is due with their first child in August, so Tom has been getting daily updates from home. They don’t know yet if it will be a boy or girl, so there’s lots of excitement.
Before that, O’Toole is keen to build on the impression he made in the Six Nations.
He has been a tighthead prop for virtually all of his career, but Ireland floated the idea of him switching to loosehead in recent years, with O’Toole getting some experience there off the bench against Fiji in November 2024.
With Andrew Porter, Jack Boyle, and Paddy McCarthy all sidelined with injury for this year’s Six Nations, Ireland boss Andy Farrell and scrum coach John Fogarty went all-in on O’Toole becoming a loosehead.
“Fogs and Faz said, ‘Look, we’re going to give you a crack at loosehead. We believe in you,’ and that belief meant the world to me, that kind of trust.
There were, of course, doubts on O’Toole’s part. At first, it was uncomfortable scrummaging on the loosehead side after spending his whole career at tighthead.
O’Toole did some work at loosehead with Ulster, while Fogarty kept telling O’Toole that they believed he could do it.
“And then Faz pulled me aside one day, and he said, “Look, you’re a loosehead now. So your mentality is you’re a loosehead, and just forget about thinking if things go wrong, going back to tighthead would be easier.’
“He said, ‘You’re a loosehead,’ and I went, OK, I’m a loosehead.’
“You just start to talk yourself into believing that way. You think that way and you train that way and then you’ll come to scrumming during the week and that’s how you feel, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’
“So I was kind of talking myself into it a little bit, but the more I trained at it and the more I actually kind of – not to say I’m any world-class loosehead – just the more I’ve got the hang of it, the more I felt confident in the position going, ‘OK, this is something I can do.’”
After coming off the bench and doing well against Italy and England, O’Toole took over as the starter at loosehead against Wales and Scotland, impressing hugely in his new position.
He starts in the number one jersey again on Saturday against Australia, with Porter, Boyle and McCarthy still out injured.
Ulster have just signed two new tighthead props in Eduardo Bello and Keynan Knox, suggesting that they expect O’Toole to feature at loosehead for the province too.
O’Toole says he’s still not sure if he is now permanently a loosehead prop.
“I don’t know. I’ll take it day by day. I know people say that to you a lot, but for me, it worked for me through Six Nations, taking it day by day, not overthinking.
“So I’m taking it day by day and just doing the best performance I can, being the best player, being the best teammate, being the best player I can.
“Ideally, I probably would love to have the conversation at some point to see where things lie, you know, especially going in towards the World Cup in 2027.
“You know. I’ve been playing tighthead for eight years. I’d be interested just to have that conversation, to see where things lie for next year. But as I said, my focus is on this now and I’m just very happy to be here.”
Whatever about the scrummaging, which is obviously important, O’Toole made a big impact around the pitch for Ireland during the Six Nations.
There isn’t a huge amount of difference to his roles at loosehead than at tighthead, apart from one that has caused some confusion.
“In lineouts, you’d be at the front,” he says. “It was actually funny, such a small thing, but you have to go and give the call to the hooker. You can kind of just forget. You get the call and you go to the touchline and the hooker is standing there.
“It happened a couple of times at training, they’re like, ‘Tom,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh!’ You kind of expect the hooker to know. So little things like that, but nothing major around the pitch.”
Last summer, O’Toole sat down and set out goals for his improvement as a rugby player.
O'Toole in Sydney this week. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
Chief among them was simply having more involvements in defence, as well as showing the skillset he has always had since his youth in Australia.
“Definitely this year, I’ve tried to get myself more involved in breakdowns and getting jackals,” he says. “That used to be a big strength of mine when I was younger, and I probably went away from it a bit.
“Especially as a prop, I’m usually around 10 to 40 [the defensive positions close to the ruck] or somewhere in that area, so getting in a collision, a double hit, and then getting in at the back end.
“I think that’s what I wanted to add, just that maybe a bit of secondary work. ‘OK, I’ve made the tackle, what can I do now to kind of get back in? Can I have an influence on the ruck? Can I slow the ball down? Can I kind of maybe counter-ruck?”
On the other side of the ball, O’Toole has enjoyed Ulster attack coach Mark Sexton’s encouragement to use his handling skills more.
“I love to carry, but I love tipping,” says O’Toole. “I love playing ‘out’ balls to the backs, love running pairs lines. I like the open field in attack.
“That kind of brings me back to growing up in Australia, where naturally due to weather, it’s more free-flowing and the skills that you learn at such a young age, the offloading is so encouraged, using your feet and those small little tips at the line – that’s what I kind of grew around.
“Especially being at a traditional league school, they’re so good at taking the ball to the line and pulling those passes back. That influence growing up, I think it’s helped me now in this game.
“Being back here, I get those memories and get those kind of emotions back.”
So Sydney on Saturday will be particularly special for him.
“It’ll be a cool experience standing and hearing both national anthems,” says O’Toole.
“I grew up with both, but wearing the green jersey is the most important thing.”
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'I grew up in Ireland and Australia, but the green jersey is most important'
THE LAST TIME Tom Toole was in Sydney was just over a decade ago when he was playing for the Queensland Schoolboys at the Australian championships.
On Saturday, the Ireland prop will line up for the national anthems as part of the Irish side facing Australia in the country he called home for 10 years of his youth.
27-year-old O’Toole knows it will be a surreal moment standing there in Allianz Stadium in front of a full house of Irish and Aussie folk. Though he is very proudly an Irishman, O’Toole understandably still feels a strong connection to Australia.
Born in Louth and growing up in Ratoath in County Meath, O’Toole’s world was turned upside down when he was six. He was a happy kid, playing hurling and Gaelic football.
One day in 2005, he and his two older brothers, Jack and Joe, were sat down by their parents, Niall and Kay, and told that there was a big change ahead of them.
Niall had been working with the Irish Army, but his career wasn’t progressing the way he wanted, so it was time for a move abroad. The boys were told that America, Israel and Australia were the options.
“All I wanted was a pool,” recalls O’Toole with a laugh.
“I was like, ‘Can we have a pool in the backyard?’ I’d never really been outside Ireland before that, went to Florida for a holiday, but I was five years old. I wasn’t making the decisions.
“But all I asked was for a pool and, yeah, I got a pool in the end!”
Niall took a job with the Australian Army in Brisbane and went on to serve for nearly 12 years, doing a couple of stints in Afghanistan during that time.
The O’Toole boys didn’t have long to get used to the idea of leaving Ireland, with the family making their move just a week after the initial discussion.
“I don’t really remember the friends I had in Ireland, but I remember getting up in class and saying goodbye to everybody, and away I went not really knowing where it was going to lead me to,” says O’Toole.
Life in the army can mean moving families around every few years, but Niall insisted that the O’Tooles would be permanently based in Brisbane, giving them a chance to put down roots.
Tom’s childhood memories in Australia are joyous. It was “unbelievably fun” growing up in a country where the weather meant they could be outdoors all day. They went on exciting holidays – camping trips, skiing in Melbourne, exploring the Great Barrier Reef.
And then there was the sport. Joe and Jack played Aussie rules, partly because they were growing tall. Tom was “going outwards” so rugby made sense. He started at the age of eight and never looked back.
It was when he went to secondary school at Padua College that O’Toole realised he had a real grá for the game. Padua was best known as a rugby league school and had only been playing union for 17 years when he joined.
O’Toole played league as well as union at school, and remembers going up against Lindsay Collins, who is now a big star in the NRL and State of Origin, at a training session in Padua.
“He’d have been 17 or 18, I’d have been 14 or 15, and I started getting exposure to training at the First XV at that age,” says O’Toole, who was inducted into Padua’s hall of fame in 2023.
“I was naturally quite a big guy anyway, but I was still young. I remember him carrying the ball in one session. The coach was screaming at me to go low because I don’t think he thought it was going to happen.
“Big Lindsay running at me, I remember that clearly, and it was a bit of like, ‘I’ve got to do this, or I’m not going to get this opportunity again.’
“Fortunately, he went down. A couple of meters after me maybe, but I still got him down.”
Union suited O’Toole and his frame. He had aims of becoming Padua’s first-ever Australian Schoolboy international in the 15-man code. He says he got great coaching and had good players around him, including out-half Lawson Creighton, who has just signed for the Ospreys.
Schoolboy rugby in Brisbane is of a high quality and tighthead prop O’Toole was good enough to get into the Queensland underage representative mix.
Yet it was that last visit to Sydney in 2015 when things started to change for the young Ireland native. He wasn’t getting picked to start for Queensland, and there were a few pangs for home.
His brother, Jack, had already moved back to Ireland to study journalism in Dublin. That pull had always been there for the lads, who initially thought their dad’s work in Australia would only last for three years.
“We were still a very Irish family. Our parents made sure we remembered,” says O’Toole.
“Well, my older brothers were fine, but me being so young at the time moving out, they made sure it was instilled in us. I was born in Louth, we lived in Meath, and my dad’s a proud Dub, so he reminded me he was a proud Dub all the time.
“Naturally through the rugby, I wanted to do as well as I could, so I was progressing through the representative stuff, and obviously the aim was to potentially get to Aussie Schoolboys. That would have been the pinnacle to me at the time.
“But growing up, it was always Ireland first, and if Australia were playing someone else, then I’d support Australia.”
One of his coaches in Brisbane was Jonny McMurtry, a native of Bangor in County Down.
McMurty suggested that O’Toole should put his name into the IRFU’s Exiles system, flagging that he was still an Irish-qualified player playing at a high level in schoolboy rugby abroad.
When the O’Tooles were heading back to Ireland for a holiday in 2015, McMurty said that Tom should go and meet Ulster’s academy manager Kieran Campbell in Belfast. Campbell and Ulster met O’Toole, checked out his footage, and asked him to join their system.
As with the initial move away from Ireland, there was a very quick turnaround for O’Toole. Because it was nearly September and the start of the school year, he had only a week to make up his mind.
“I was initially like, ‘I’m going to finish school in Australia,’ but then my parents said, ‘You probably should go.’”
He took their advice and moved to Campbell College in Belfast as a boarding student.
The journey to Ireland was traumatic as he wrestled with it all. The first night at Campbell, he sat in his room, looking out the window and wondering how he had ended up there. It was overwhelming for a 16-year-old.
But O’Toole put his head down and got on with things. A year later, his parents also moved back to Ireland. And rugby went well from the off. He was soon playing for the Ireland U18s, then the U19s, then the U20s.
Rugby Australia got in touch at one stage to see if O’Toole would be interested in going back over, but he had earned his spot in the Ulster academy and made his debut for the province when he was still only 19. The rest is history.
So it is strange for O’Toole to be back in Australia with Ireland another decade on. He has had lots of people welcoming him back and looking to meet up, but he has been flat out with Ireland’s preparations for the Wallabies.
His partner, Catherine, is due with their first child in August, so Tom has been getting daily updates from home. They don’t know yet if it will be a boy or girl, so there’s lots of excitement.
Before that, O’Toole is keen to build on the impression he made in the Six Nations.
He has been a tighthead prop for virtually all of his career, but Ireland floated the idea of him switching to loosehead in recent years, with O’Toole getting some experience there off the bench against Fiji in November 2024.
With Andrew Porter, Jack Boyle, and Paddy McCarthy all sidelined with injury for this year’s Six Nations, Ireland boss Andy Farrell and scrum coach John Fogarty went all-in on O’Toole becoming a loosehead.
“Fogs and Faz said, ‘Look, we’re going to give you a crack at loosehead. We believe in you,’ and that belief meant the world to me, that kind of trust.
There were, of course, doubts on O’Toole’s part. At first, it was uncomfortable scrummaging on the loosehead side after spending his whole career at tighthead.
O’Toole did some work at loosehead with Ulster, while Fogarty kept telling O’Toole that they believed he could do it.
“And then Faz pulled me aside one day, and he said, “Look, you’re a loosehead now. So your mentality is you’re a loosehead, and just forget about thinking if things go wrong, going back to tighthead would be easier.’
“He said, ‘You’re a loosehead,’ and I went, OK, I’m a loosehead.’
“You just start to talk yourself into believing that way. You think that way and you train that way and then you’ll come to scrumming during the week and that’s how you feel, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’
“So I was kind of talking myself into it a little bit, but the more I trained at it and the more I actually kind of – not to say I’m any world-class loosehead – just the more I’ve got the hang of it, the more I felt confident in the position going, ‘OK, this is something I can do.’”
After coming off the bench and doing well against Italy and England, O’Toole took over as the starter at loosehead against Wales and Scotland, impressing hugely in his new position.
He starts in the number one jersey again on Saturday against Australia, with Porter, Boyle and McCarthy still out injured.
Ulster have just signed two new tighthead props in Eduardo Bello and Keynan Knox, suggesting that they expect O’Toole to feature at loosehead for the province too.
O’Toole says he’s still not sure if he is now permanently a loosehead prop.
“I don’t know. I’ll take it day by day. I know people say that to you a lot, but for me, it worked for me through Six Nations, taking it day by day, not overthinking.
“So I’m taking it day by day and just doing the best performance I can, being the best player, being the best teammate, being the best player I can.
“Ideally, I probably would love to have the conversation at some point to see where things lie, you know, especially going in towards the World Cup in 2027.
“You know. I’ve been playing tighthead for eight years. I’d be interested just to have that conversation, to see where things lie for next year. But as I said, my focus is on this now and I’m just very happy to be here.”
Whatever about the scrummaging, which is obviously important, O’Toole made a big impact around the pitch for Ireland during the Six Nations.
There isn’t a huge amount of difference to his roles at loosehead than at tighthead, apart from one that has caused some confusion.
“In lineouts, you’d be at the front,” he says. “It was actually funny, such a small thing, but you have to go and give the call to the hooker. You can kind of just forget. You get the call and you go to the touchline and the hooker is standing there.
“It happened a couple of times at training, they’re like, ‘Tom,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh!’ You kind of expect the hooker to know. So little things like that, but nothing major around the pitch.”
Last summer, O’Toole sat down and set out goals for his improvement as a rugby player.
Chief among them was simply having more involvements in defence, as well as showing the skillset he has always had since his youth in Australia.
“Definitely this year, I’ve tried to get myself more involved in breakdowns and getting jackals,” he says. “That used to be a big strength of mine when I was younger, and I probably went away from it a bit.
“Especially as a prop, I’m usually around 10 to 40 [the defensive positions close to the ruck] or somewhere in that area, so getting in a collision, a double hit, and then getting in at the back end.
“I think that’s what I wanted to add, just that maybe a bit of secondary work. ‘OK, I’ve made the tackle, what can I do now to kind of get back in? Can I have an influence on the ruck? Can I slow the ball down? Can I kind of maybe counter-ruck?”
On the other side of the ball, O’Toole has enjoyed Ulster attack coach Mark Sexton’s encouragement to use his handling skills more.
“I love to carry, but I love tipping,” says O’Toole. “I love playing ‘out’ balls to the backs, love running pairs lines. I like the open field in attack.
“That kind of brings me back to growing up in Australia, where naturally due to weather, it’s more free-flowing and the skills that you learn at such a young age, the offloading is so encouraged, using your feet and those small little tips at the line – that’s what I kind of grew around.
“Especially being at a traditional league school, they’re so good at taking the ball to the line and pulling those passes back. That influence growing up, I think it’s helped me now in this game.
“Being back here, I get those memories and get those kind of emotions back.”
So Sydney on Saturday will be particularly special for him.
“It’ll be a cool experience standing and hearing both national anthems,” says O’Toole.
“I grew up with both, but wearing the green jersey is the most important thing.”
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