The 'pied piper' of Mullingar

By Paul Hughes

There comes a point in the lifetime of, not all, but many local sporting outfits where someone associated with the club makes it to the very top.

Think Rockmount FC and Roy Keane; Esker Hills Golf Club and Shane Lowry; or Jason’s Snooker Hall, Ranelagh and Ken Doherty. Think, also, of the now-defunct Limerick FC when, in 2016, its former player-manager, Sam Allardyce, landed the England job, albeit temporarily.

Mullingar RFC has produced its fair share of big names in recent years, including the likes of Conor O’Brien, Conor Gilsenan and Mark Flanagan, but arguably, the most stellar name associated with the Cullion club in its 100-year history is that of Josef Charles Schmidt.

In 1991 – around the same time Allardyce kicked off his coaching career by steering Limerick to the League of Ireland’s top flight – an affable 25-year-old New Zealander, a qualified teacher taking the traditional Kiwi “gap year” or OE (overseas experience), arrived in Mullingar with his wife Kelly.

The couple planned to teach in the UK but fate took them a little further west. “We had no idea where it was,” then Irish rugby head coach Joe Schmidt said in his 2019 autobiography, ‘Ordinary Joe’, “but we decided to take the opportunity all the same.”

These were the days before Celtic tigers and before any M4s, M50s or M6s streaked across the landscape between Dublin and the Midlands. “Winding our way through small towns and relatively narrow roads,” Joe recalled of his first journey to Mullingar, “I asked if it was quicker to get to Mullingar on the back roads as opposed to the main highway. Eddie Holland, who was driving, explained that this was the ‘main highway’.”

After landing in Mullingar and tasting his first pint of Guinness at the late Con Gilsenan’s pub on Dominick Street – a mecca for local rugby heads, and the site of many of Joe’s Mullingar reunions over the years – the young Kiwi, with his shock of blonde hair, reported for duty at Cullion as Mullingar RFC’s new director of rugby.

“The first training at Mullingar RFC was an education,” he recalled. “The players… were brilliant craic and very quickly helped me settle in.

“I was their new coach, but I was also one of the younger members of the senior squad and I learned a lot from them. I thoroughly enjoyed their company and the challenge of trying to help get them organized.”

Speaking to Mullingar-based scribe Garry Doyle for the Daily Mirror in 2023, solicitor Bob Marron, then a full back with the club, said that Schmidt “changed everything” for Mullingar RFC during his 16-month stint at the club. “He was like the pied piper,” Bob remarked. “He was incredible.”

In training, Joe placed a heavy emphasis on ball work. Discipline was razor-sharp; grids were laid out and sessions began and ended strictly on time. Jack Cooney, then playing rugby as an aside to his Gaelic football career with Westmeath, recalled Joe writing letters to squad members explaining how they could improve their game in various ways.

“Joe’s thing was 15-man rugby, playing at 100-mile-an-hour pace,” another one of his charges, Pete Faulkner, told the Mirror.

“We started hammering some of the teams we would have previously beaten by a couple of points. One of the plus points was that he was playing himself. He was brilliant.”

Mullingar got an early glimpse of the coaching phenomenon that went on to such extraordinary success with Leinster and Ireland. It wasn’t just the club that benefitted from his talent and insight; after teaming up with the late Joe Weafer during his extended “gap year”, Joe had a strong input into conjuring Leinster success for the students of Wilson’s Hospital, Multyfarnham.

Schmidt has been back in Westmeath countless times since his OE, in either a private or public capacity – the latter, notably, when Leinster won back-to-back Heineken Cups in 2011-12, or when in 2016, he oversaw an open training session at Shay Murtagh Park with the Irish rugby team, then holders of the Six Nations’ Millennium Trophy. Thousands turned out at the Cullion venue that squally day as Joe, warm and engaging as ever, pressed the flesh with friends old and new. Part of the local furniture as he is, you’d be forgiven for saying, “Sure, he never forgets where he’s from.”

As Mullingar RFC celebrates its 100th anniversary, its HQ resplendent with a stand and terrific new facilities and pitches, few will disagree that the arrival of Joe Schmidt 34 years ago was a key milestone in pushing the club forward, and his enduring legacy the greenhouse for future success.