Niall Cahalane and the toughest battle the great Castlehaven warrior has faced – with cancer
Warrior: Leen To The Sports Available Niall Talks Podcast, Tony Is Cahalane Examiner Which Wednesday On On
By any metric, Niall Cahalane, his wife Ailish and seven children are one of the most remarkable families in the GAA.
Cahalane himself is one of the greats of Cork football, but six of his seven offspring have already represented their county on the senior stage in Gaelic football, Camogie and hurling – and there’s a seventh to be reckoned with soon in the youngest Kate, who is a minor this year.
There isn’t a game where the Cahalanes have ever given less than all they had and when there’s a battle raging, they are invariably in the thick of it.
The then GAA president Larry McCarthy honoured the Cahalanes earlier this year with a special family tribute at the annual President’s Awards.
Niall smiled his way through the night, savouring it all the more after the biggest battle of his life.
“I had a little bit of a problem alright. After having a scan I had sat in front of a consultant who told me I had lung cancer.”
For the sporting heroes who bring a warrior mentality to every challenge, Niall Cahalane didn’t like his odds with this one.
In a special 75-minute Examiner Sports podcast, available Wednesday, Cahalane chokes up as he recalls for the first time: “I didn’t handle it great at the time.
"Things were put on hold for a while, there were different scans at the time and different biopsies and then I got the call to say the tumour had grown ever so slightly.
"So we were off to the races then with surgery.”
What is remarkable – though maybe not so for someone as defiant as Cahalane – is he told no-one, not even his wife, Ailish.
“My whole thought process on this was, 'Shur fuck it, there's a wife and seven kids. It was bad enough me not sleeping, why would I have her the same?'
"I remember one day (Ailish) said it to me alright, that maybe I had a bit of a health issue — I obviously was seen going into someone at the hospital.
“I will never remember the day, I was going in on the Sunday, having the surgery on the Monday, Cork and Mayo were playing in Limerick in the All-Ireland series, so everyone was wondering why I wasn’t actually getting someway prepared to go and I said, 'Look, I have a small, tiny bit of surgery on Monday so I was going to hang around the town.'”
There was one crutch he would use, though. A deadly, reviled rival from his playing days, a Meath warrior himself whose career had taken him down the route of medical speciality — Meath's midfielder from those great battles of the late '80s with Cork, Gerry McEntee.
“I didn’t want to talk to everyone about it, but a man that I can mention and I did ring him and I couldn’t say enough he was so good to me was Gerry McEntee.
"Gerry was excellent, the amount of calls and texts and messages from him to the point where he would be getting annoyed when I wouldn’t ring him back. And then Sean Boylan too. Just top class.”
Don’t miss what is a remarkable insight into a remarkable family, driven by one of the intense competitors the GAA has produced.
It’s available from Wednesday for Irish Examiner subscribers — and yes, there is mention of a certain Cork Premier SFC final this weekend...
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