‘A lot of Irish people come into the pub as well. We’ve already met so many people coming into the pub that we can connect with from home as well’
BY DAIRE WALSH
AFTER being a regular fixture for Tipperary throughout last year’s championship, 2025 will see Emer McCarthy playing summer football in the colours of another county.
A business studies student at the University of Limerick with a focus on human resources, McCarthy has opted to do a college placement in London and currently finds herself working for the recruitment agency Class 1 Personnel in Hounslow. She arrived across the water in January of this year and officially transferred from Galtee Rovers in Tipperary to the Greenford-based Tir Chonaill Gaels club in the same month.
While joining the London panel wasn’t necessarily on her radar when she moved over to the English capital, she subsequently completed another transfer – this time a county one – at the end of February. Although they didn’t participate in the Lidl National Football League, McCarthy could be in line to make her debut for the Exiles when they begin a new adventure in the Ulster junior football championship against Antrim next Saturday.
“I wasn’t really too sure coming over here how it worked with the London LGFA and if the trials had already been started. The club (Tir Chonaill Gaels), they told us all of the dates. Encouraged us all to head on and try the trials. From there, after we did a few trials, we said that we’d definitely love to be part of the panel if they’d have us on it,” McCarthy said.
“The first game is on the 3rd of May against Antrim, which is an away game. There are two matches. We’ll be playing Derry the week after that and then hopefully if we win them, we’ll be onto the Ulster final. We’ll have to play the first game and see how it goes.”
There is an interesting story behind McCarthy’s journey over to London with her college friends Clodagh Fanning and Aoibhe Molloy – the latter of whom has made the exact same double transfer as her Galtee Rovers compatriot.
During the early part of her childhood, McCarthy lived in Whitton, a village situated in the London Borough of Richmond. It was in this area of the English capital that her mother had grown up, albeit McCarthy’s maternal grandparents originally hailed from Donegal and Fermanagh.
Her father, on the other hand, is a native of Bansha in Tipperary and it is to this part of the Premier County that the family relocated when Emer was just 10 years of age.
Moving from a major European city to the Irish countryside was a significant culture shock at the time and it was a similar scenario for McCarthy upon her return to London at the beginning of this year.
“Where we are in Bansha, it’s completely countryside. Whereas coming over here, it’s not the countryside at all where we are. Say when I was growing up when I was 10, I would have been on buses and trains, but that was going back 10 years. Coming over here, getting familiar with the trains, the buses, not having a car, it’s a very different adjustment.
“Even my Mum was saying, we went to Budapest two weeks ago. I was the one looking up where to go on the trains, the buses and they were like ‘you’re a new woman after being in London and finding out the transport and everything!’
“Even for training and stuff, Tir Chonaill Gaels in Greenford, it’s a train to get there as well. It’s completely different to Ireland.”
During those early days in Whitton, McCarthy lived across the road from The Prince Albert Pub that her father ran. Despite primarily moving back to his home village many years ago, he remains heavily involved in The Prince Albert and regularly returns there to keep an eye on business.
Now that she is back in Whitton along with her two friends, McCarthy is very often called upon to work behind the bar in her father’s pub. Given it is within a stone’s throw of Twickenham Stadium, The Prince Albert can often be packed to the rafters on the day of a Six Nations Championship game and Emer has no choice but to lend a helping hand to the regular staff.
“He’ll come back to Ireland and then go back to England every few weeks, just to check up on the pub. During the Six Nations, he had us all working behind the bar. He had us in with the roster, just to make sure that the bar wasn’t too busy. He has his own workers as well, so at least we could fill in and help out. Collect all the glasses.
“Even for the girls coming over here, Aoibhe and Clodagh, my two friends, they didn’t have any experience behind the bar moving over. It was nice for them to come in and work. They’re well able to work behind the bar now, which is good.
“Also, a lot of Irish people come into the pub as well. We’ve already met so many people coming into the pub that we can connect with from home as well.”
Although she is enjoying her time back over in London, McCarthy will be returning to Ireland later this year to finish out her degree course at the University of Limerick.
She is planning on lining out for Galtee Rovers in the near future and while it isn’t entirely under her control, McCarthy would dearly love to link up once again with Tipperary – for whom she made her senior debut during the 2020 edition of the Lidl NFL.
“We’re over here for, I think it’s nine months. We finish at the end of August. When we finish in August then, we’ll still have one more year left of university with UL. We’ll be back in college in September in UL for our final year,” McCarthy added.
“Obviously being over here, I’m not going to be in Tipperary playing. When we leave here then, I’ll be back playing with Galtee Rovers. Obviously once you leave the Tipperary panel, it’s not as easy to get back on it, but hopefully if I perform with my club when we’re back, I can head back on the Tipperary team as well.”
Emma Duggan of Meath in action against Emer McCarthy of Tipperary during their TG4 All-Ireland Ladies Football Senior Championship Round 3 match at Páirc Tailteann in Navan, Meath (Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile)
