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Irish Daily Mirror
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Daily Mirror
David Clifford relationship with girlfriend Shauna, son Oigi and day job
It was the year 2018 when David Clifford burst onto the inter-county scene, and since making his debut for Kerry, he's been hailed as "a once in a generation" talent, with comparisons drawn to international icons like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. These accolades, coupled with his on-field success, including an All-Ireland Senior Football Championship, five Munster titles, and three National Leagues, hold immense value for the 26-year-old. Yet, he remains humble and grounded. His list of individual honors includes the Young Footballer of the Year award in 2018 and the Footballer of the Year award in both 2022 and 2023. In an interview with RSVP Live. the Fossa clubman delved into the highs and lows of his sporting career, life beyond GAA with his girlfriend Shauna O'Connor and their three-and-a-half year old son Óigí, and the importance of finding balance. There was a viral picture of you with Kerry performance coach Tony Griffin after losing the All-Ireland Football Final against Dublin. Can you recall how you felt in that moment? There was a lot of disappointment and regret, I suppose. Croke Park is the best place to be when you win and the worst place to be when you lose. To have somebody like Tony and to have such close friends on the team shows how lucky you are. You survive through the bad days together. You must move on from it too, your life can't revolve around whether you win or lose a game. It would make for a long career for you, because you're going to have more losses than wins. Is it hard not to overthink things? We're all guilty of that. You need to be well settled off the field and have plenty going on away from sport. It's very easy to think about football all the time, but then there would be no enjoyment in it anymore. Off the field, for you, is it hard to get the balance right? It can be at times. The people around us make a lot of sacrifices so we can go out and train so many evenings a week. I try to be settled and relaxed, and I try to enjoy my life as much as I can. That allows me to put everything into the game. Does your son Óigí recognise you on TV and know what the green and gold jersey means? Yeah, he's gone mad for sport at the moment. He's wearing jerseys and he loves it. But he's not too happy with me going out training because I'm going to be gone for a couple of hours. He loves coming along with me to watch the Fossa games at the weekend. He's great craic. Does that add an extra level of enjoyment for you, seeing him loving it as well? I hadn't thought about it like that until you said it. He's also copying the celebrations of the soccer players he sees. He's getting to that age now where I've an extra reason to go out there and play. Óigí is clearly gearing up for the All-Ireland! The structure of the championship has changed. The national league, provincial championship, round robin series and knock-out games are condensed into the first seven months of the year. How are you finding it? When you're stuck in the middle of it and you're going to work, training and matches, you don't think about that kind of stuff. It's great to have games and the structure at the moment is great because you've got a game, then a week off and then another game. You're recovering for a week and then preparing for a week. The four or five week gaps in the old system used to be long. I like that element of it. We're getting a lot of good competitive games, and there's very few negatives to that. Kildare legend Johnny Doyle won a club championship at 45 years old last year. Would you like to do something similar? It's hard to know. I want to play for as long as I can anyway. The day you're inside in the full-forward line and some young fella beats you out to the first couple of balls, that's probably when it's time to move on [laughs]. There has been talk of a return to September All-Ireland finals again. What do you think of that? I'm very happy with the split season. From a selfish point of view, as a teacher anyway. Nobody wants to hear about teachers and their holidays, but we get to have a month of summer holidays after the All-Ireland. That's very enjoyable, being able to go away. On the other side of it, when I was in primary school the build-up to an All-Ireland final in September was brilliant. There are pros and cons. What's your own schedule like? Much has been made about how busy you are with Fossa, East Kerry and Kerry. We're very lucky with our three managers, there's no problem if we need breaks here and there. We're conscious that winning doesn't last forever. East Kerry hadn't won the county championship for 20 years and Fossa has never won the junior. We have to milk it while we have it. It's important to get the breaks as well. It's not just tough physically, it's mentally draining as well. You have to deal with the highs and lows and the build-up to games. How do you deal with the pressure of being David Clifford in a football-mad county? The main thing is trying not to think about it like that. I have different targets for myself or different targets for the team. You always hear [Manchester City manager] Pep Guardiola saying that having targets takes the emotion out of the game. As boring as it sounds, that tends to work a lot of the time. You're big into other sports and you're a Celtic fan. How important is that, having interests away from GAA? That's my approach anyway, I try to have interests in other things. For other people, their interests may not be sports. At the moment, it's impossible to keep up with all the sports. You'd nearly want two or three TVs on the go [laughs]. You've been compared to Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and been called a 'once in a generation' talent. What's that like? There's an uncomfortable nature to it. I learned from my parents to be humble and not to appear arrogant. You don't want to be talking about yourself in that light, you want to let it brush off you. The Pittsburgh Steelers were in Dublin last April. Would you ever try your hand at playing in the NFL? It hasn't really crossed my mind. I'm a relatively safe person in that I'm settled in a job and settled in life. To turn that upside down to try something new isn't something that would appeal to me too much. It's class to see the Irish players that have joined the NFL. We're looking forward to seeing if some of them can get on the pitch. How does it feel to be settled so young? You've made your career in football at an early age, you've a child and a good job. Maybe it will all turn upside down at some stage [jokes]. It's fine, that's just the way things have happened for me. Things fell into place nicely. I'm far from perfect, let that be known. I enjoy life and I feel like I've a great life. I'm very lucky with the people I have around me. You were one of the youngest players when you joined the Kerry panel in 2018 and now you're one of the most experienced in the dressing room. It's hard to believe. A lot of us came into the panel together in 2018 and 2019, so we've gone through the years together. Without even noticing it, we've had some incredible life experiences with trips away and big wins and defeats. Every year before you commit to another season you have to make sure you're still enjoying it – thankfully, I still am. If you finished your career with one All-Ireland win, how would you accept that? You'd like to win the All-Ireland every year, but that's not the reality of it. If I was to retire I wouldn't be going around telling people that I've an All-Ireland medal or don't have an All-Ireland medal. While they're great to win and you do everything in your power to win them, you just have to get over it. Hopefully, that won't be the case! This interview appeared in the July 2024 issue of RSVP Magazine
Irish Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Non Habemus Librum: Frank McNally on Flann O'Brien's unwritten epic about the election of an Irish pope
The news that an Irishman is overseeing the Vatican pending the election of a new pope would have been of great interest to Brian O'Nolan, aka Flann O'Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, formerly of this parish. Before he wrote any of the books or columns that made his name, O'Nolan conceived a plan for the Great Irish Novel – still to be written by the 1930s, he thought, despite Joyce 's best efforts – which would include the election of a first-ever Irish pope. It would be a three-generation saga, following emigrants across the Atlantic and back, a framework adopted by later blockbusters. And with further contemporary relevance, it was also to culminate in the death of a pope, albeit in rather unusual circumstances: from a stress-induced heart attack while attending an All-Ireland Football Final. READ MORE Like many unwritten masterpieces, the book was born and died in a Dublin pub: the since defunct Grogan's on Leeson Street (not to be confused with the still thriving Grogan's of Castle Market, although as we've pointed out here before , that pub's website does indeed confuse the two). There, in the late 1930s, O'Nolan used to drink with old college friends including Niall Sheridan, later to be a racing tipster for The Irish Times, as well as Donagh McDonagh, who became a judge, and Denis Devlin, the poet and diplomat. All were supposed to contribute to what O'Nolan envisaged as a revolutionary, collaborative exercise. But the acronym of the Great Irish Novel is perhaps apt (even if gin was never one of O'Nolan's favoured drinks). And in this case, the sheer cynicism of the project may also have doomed it from the start. As recalled by Sheridan in an essay for the 1973 anthology Portraits of Brian O'Nolan, the novel had the working title Children of Destiny. It was to follow the fortunes of an Irish family over almost a century, starting in 1840, with themes including 'the Famine years, faction fights, evictions, lecherous landlords and modest maidens, emigration, the horrors of the coffin ships, etc'. In America, the family would rise though ward politics, eventually producing the first Catholic to win the presidency. This seems to have anticipated JFK , except that in Children of Destiny, the family's first potential US president would take time out to return home and fight in the GPO in 1916, where he would be the last man to leave the burning ruins, before dying gloriously. On his sacrifice, another son would rise to take the White House. The book's religious sub-theme, which O'Nolan himself was to write, involved a different son of the family who, going where not even the Kennedys had, would become a clergyman and, breaking the Italians' long stranglehold on the job, be elected supreme pontiff. With great foresight, O'Nolan also planned to have an Irish cleric in charge of the Vatican's famous smoke signals . But comedy getting the better of him, as usual, he envisioned this patriotic monsignor smuggling two sods of turf into the Sistine Chapel, so that as the world outside watched the white smoke rising, 'the unmistakable tang of the bog, wafting out over the Bernini colonnades, [told] his waiting countrymen that a decision (and the right one) had been reached'. According to Sheridan, O'Nolan foresaw a vast potential market for the novel on both sides of the Atlantic, because: 'Compulsory education had produced millions of semi-literates, who were partial to 'a good read'.' [ Flann O'Brien: Man of (many) letters, man of many masks Opens in new window ] So the book had to be big, 'weighing at least two-and-a-half pounds' and offer 'length without depth, splendour without style'. Anticipating AI, almost a century in advance, O'Nolan proposed that 'existing works would be plundered wholesale for material' to produce a potboiler full of 'violence, patriotism, sex, religion, politics, and the pursuit of money and power'. All of this would nevertheless be revolutionary, inaugurating a new literary movement: 'the first masterpiece of the Ready-Made or Reach-Me-Down' school of literature. The book's sporting climax, which Sheridan was detailed to write, was to centre on an All-Ireland Football Final between Cavan and Kildare (that part was a lot more plausible in the 1930s). For this, the now 87-year-old pontiff would return to his native land, where the papal flag flew proudly next to the Tricolour in Croke Park. [ How Flann O'Brien can help you get a better social life Opens in new window ] Alas, the game would be a heart-straining thriller, with Cavan leading by a point before a Kildare player launched a 'high, dropping ball across the bar from 40 yards out for the equalizing point'. The excitement causes the pope to die, literally in the arms of his countrymen, an event that inspires the singing of Faith of our Fathers from '80,000 Irish Throats'. If this was indeed the plot, it is no surprise the book was never finished. The surprise is that it was ever begun. Sheridan insists it was: 'There was a short period of hectic activity, but the Great Irish Novel never materialized.' Instead, soon afterwards, O'Nolan told him he had started to write a book on his own. That one was to have the postmodern plot of an author writing about characters who in turn were writing about him. The finished novel became Flann O'Brien's real debut, At Swim-Two-Birds. [ At Swim-Two-Bobs – Frank McNally on the mysteries of numerology in the work of Bob Dylan and Flann O'Brien Opens in new window ]
