I’d be coming home from a game on a Sunday evening, typing out my column at the back of the bus,” says Colin Regan. “I’d head straight into the office when I got back to Carrick-on-Shannon. We went to print on a Monday to be out on a Tuesday morning.”

Colin Regan is the GAA’s community and health manager and he is describing the period of his life where he balanced being editor of the Leitrim Post with his other career as a Leitrim inter-county footballer – a spell which lasted 15 years no less (“I bridge three decades – 1995 to 2010.”).

He says it was an “enormous challenge”, particularly trying to make deadlines on the occasions he was travelling home from London after a game

But the balancing act came to an end in 2010 when he dislocated his knee in a game, and was told he wouldn’t play again. Given he was just about to turn 35, Irish Country Living proffers that his inter-county career must have been drawing near a close anyway, but Colin is having none of it.

“I was probably as fit as I ever was. I would definitely have given it another couple of years,” he says, crediting his longevity on the GAA field to his interest in yoga from a young age – which might seem an unusual choice for a GAA player in rural Ireland in the mid-noughties, but apparently there’s a slightly “alternative culture” around north Leitrim.

Colin was laid up for six months with his knee injury, though he did return to football again – to club rather than county, coming away with a senior county championship and intermediate county championship in 2012 and 2014 respectively.. He couldn’t drive “couldn’t do anything” so he decided that if he wasn’t going to be “playing at that level”, he would look at moving his career into sport. He had lived the inter-county dream and now he has a career which many would envy – not least because he calls his office Croke Park. His passport to this career was a Master’s in Sports Management in UCD. He handed his thesis in on a Friday and was successful in an interview with the GAA the following week for a role as national coordinator of the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention programme. That has since evolved into his current position of community and health manager, a role which sees him oversee not just what the GAA can do for its players, but for the community it serves at large – and not just from a sporting perspective, but from an overall, holistic approach to physical, mental, emotional and social health.

Colin has a great passion for what he does and for the games from which he has derived so much joy. But he wasn’t reared in a GAA house. He hails from “a small suckler farm holding in rural, rural north Leitrim … we did all the hay, silage, the turf and the contracting for the majority of the locale up there. We’re kind of a contradiction in that we’re a Church of Ireland family.”

Colin is number 11 of 12 children (“so all the signs would scream Catholic”). He didn’t go to primary school locally and his secondary education was in a Protestant boarding school in Raphoe in Donegal. “In terms of identity for me, the GAA played a significant role because it was my in to my local community.

“I’d be standing at the bottom of the lane at the house with my brothers Gordon and Stewart, waiting for the school bus to transport us into Ballyshannon … and our neighbours would all be flying past on the local mini bus heading down to the Catholic school, so we were taken out of our community for our education because of our religion. There’s pros and cons to that; it broadens your horizons. Boarding school isn’t for everybody but I actually loved it. But then the club allowed me to play, socialise, identify and represent my community in my locale and really get to know my neighbours and my friends.”

Hockey was the No 1 game in Colin’s secondary school – he played to Ulster School’s level – while the other big sports were soccer, athletics and badminton. There was no GAA in the school and Colin says this is why he was probably a slightly later developer. “It was really only U16 when I started coming into my own as a footballer, but I think that’s a good thing because a lot of sports science today recommends that young people experience as broad a range of sports as they possibly can,” he says.

Colin feels one particular transferable skill he brought from these other sports to GAA was an ability to read a game. “It was the ability to be in the middle of the mayhem but to be able to take a bit of a step back at the same time … you weren’t always just thinking with a GAA mind or a hockey mind or a soccer mind, you were bringing a broader perspective of how games ebb and flow and develop as entities in themselves.”

Irish identity

GAA has deep roots in the nationalist tradition and Colin has personal connections to republican atrocities. He had family living in Enniskillen who were directly affected by the bombing there and he also had family living in Mullaghmore that were among the first on the scene when Lord Mountbatten was murdered.

“My father was mowing a meadow on the hill in Mullaghmore that day and vividly remembers the sound of the explosion. My cousin Noel, who’s a Church of Ireland rector, would have been a driver for Lord Mountbatten when he was younger.”

Colin says he understands the complexities and tapestries of Irish identity, noting that he himself was regularly dragged off the bus from Dublin at the border.

“There were young army guys the same age as ourselves armed with automatic weapons, getting us to open our bags and go through our bags, so I saw it from both sides.”

Colin was getting that bus to Dublin to college, specifically DIT, where he was studying communications and journalism. He went on to work for both provincial and national media outlets while also completing a two-year stint in Boston.

His first role in the GAA was with the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention (ASAP) programme, which had been introduced in 2006 with the aim of de-normalising the association of alcohol and sport. “In Ireland, when you’re born people go to the pub and drink,” says Colin. “When you have a birthday people go to the pub and drink, when you get married people go to the pub and drink – confirmation, christening, and then finally at your death they toast you and say farewell and you can see sometimes the same in sport. When you win you go to the pub and celebrate, when you lose you go and commiserate, and when there’s a draw you’re not sure what to do so you just go for a drink anyway, so we wanted to break that association.”

While Colin has no problem with the social aspect of sport generally, his gripe was with the fact that going to the pub for a few drinks after matches is inappropriate, particularly around underage teams. “That’s seen as the norm ... it’s the only option.” So he and his team worked with clubs to adopt drug and alcohol policies. They got 700 clubs to put these policies in place, policies which stated, for example, that no underage events or activities are hosted in a licensed premises.

Instead, Colin says: “You’re brought to your local community centre or to the clubhouse and it’s just a more appropriate setting.”

He quickly decided, however, that there needed to be a wider remit to his role. He says that a narrow focus on just drugs and alcohol may have been appropriate in 2006 when Ireland was among the highest consumers of alcohol in the OECD, but fast-forward to 2010: “The situation that the country found itself in: mental health was a huge topic and we were in the recession, everybody was under enormous pressure. I felt there was just a need to broaden the work we were doing into a more holistic health and wellbeing programme.” Thirty-two county ASAP officers fed back to Colin’s office the issues they could see clubs experiencing on the ground. One of their key requests was to see less of a focus on the competitive element of sport for the very young teams, and so Gó Games was born. This is a philosophy as well as a coaching and games structure, and it removes the competitive nature of games at underage level up to U12.

“They’re often small-sided games or reduced-size pitches and reduced numbers increases the number of touches that young people experience,” explains Colin. “There are also roll-on, roll-off subs so everybody gets to be part of it.”

The GAA’s role

You could never overstate the role the GAA plays in enhancing the health of Irish people through its provision of sport, without the barrier of membership fees (compared to the staggering fees you often have to pay in some sports). The organisation is constantly out fundraising, something which Colin notes frequently earns it the tag line the Grab All Association. Yet the GAA’s voluntary work doesn’t receive the recognition it deserves. St Peter’s GAA club in Warrenpoint in Co Down did an evaluation of the value of their volunteer hours in one year to their local community. They priced it using the minimum wage in the UK at the time and it amounted to almost three quarters of a million pounds. However, the role the GAA plays in enhancing the health of Irish society is being taken once step further by Colin. He and his peers sat down with the chief medical officer in the Department of Health, Dr Tony Houlihan, and some others and teased out what their vision for the GAA supporting the health of the nation could really look like. They came up with the concept of the Healthy Clubs Project and put a call out for participants. Colin says 40 clubs contacted them for the first phase.

“Some were really doing excellent work already. What they were doing for their community was mind-boggling, it was doing them a disservice to call them a sports club.” The aim of the Healthy Clubs Project is that every GAA club will become a hub for health and wellbeing. Each club is supported in how best to make their club more health-enhancing. The project is in phase two now and there are 60 clubs participating, with at least one club in every county. For phase three, Colin and his team want to grow numbers to approximately 150 clubs.

Colin notes the GAA can sometimes be seen as a closed community and the Healthy Club initiative is also concerned with tackling that stereotype. The aim in this regard is for the GAA to become a proper hub for an area in engaging partnerships and reaching out to all aspects of the community and letting them see that this GAA club is a community club. “Our core activities will always be the promotion of the Gaelic games, but we’re about so much more than that as well,” he says. And who better an ambassador for inclusion than he. CL