LAST UPDATE | 27 Jul
IF YOU WERE to have passed O’Sullivans By the Mill in Montmartre, Paris this evening, you might have thought, ‘Ah yeah, the Irish and sport and alcohol – it’s all one heady mix.’
It seemed that getting a seat along the Seine wasn’t the hottest ticket in town. Although the venue – the official Team Ireland House – isn’t a Taylor Swift Eras concert, there was no entry to 92 Boulevard de Clichy without a pre-ordered ticket.
The cavernous pub sold out its opening night event with a near constant stream of people entering after their bags were checked and their bodies scanned.
Inside, an array of Team Ireland tops, county colours and, of course, the odd Italia 90 jersey mingled with plenty of Team USA paraphernalia. Eagle-eyed kit aficionados would also have spotted a Ghana fan amongst the green, as well as a couple of Costa Rican supporters. There were Mona McSharry t-shirts that left the building and came back with even more Mona McSharry t-shirts.
There was a pile of phones charging behind the bar, and another with the helpful Team Ireland staff member manning the third part of the three-part secure entrance.
There was a big cheer for the refugee team and for the Canadians – mostly due to holidaying Irish migrants living in the north American country.
There was a sponsor invitee-only area with cosier seating arrangements that wasn’t quite full but there definitely weren’t any tickets to be had for there either.
Somewhat inexplicably, there was a giant mascot who had their own minder but, even still, kept getting turned around and walking into walls or people – but never the sponsored area.
There was Guinness too. But this wasn’t a scene of the too-close ties of the alcohol industry and sport.
This was much more Olympic-wholesome. The good side of the Games.
It was the athletes. It was the idea of representing Ireland. It was embracing sport. It was using sport as the reason to gravitate towards each other.
“It’s nice to be together. Meeting up over sport,” Karla Kennedy tells The Journal. She is one of 30 family members of rugby 7s player Terry Kennedy who has made the trip to Paris.
“It’s a home away from home,” a statement more poignant because she and her partner Saoirse currently live in Canada.
The idea of coming together is underlined in an even more ‘rare and special’ way, as she puts it, because Saoirse’s brother Shane O’Donoghue kicks off his second Olympics tomorrow with the men’s hockey team.
“It’s once in a lifetime,” agrees Karla, two family members at one Games.
Coincidentally, Thammy Nguyen is in our eyeline a short time later. Recently a subject in the RTÉ documentary Path to Paris, viewers would have become familiar with her goal to join her brother Nhat in this city for these Olympics.
She had said her dream was to walk out in the opening ceremony, as siblings, on this very night. Her in weightlifting, him in badminton. When she ran out of road for qualification, she knew she would be here anyway to support her brother with six other members of the Nguyen family.
Although admitting to having ‘mixed emotions, she says simply: “I’m here to support my brother.”
A man and a woman decked out in Irish hats and scarves seem like another good place to ask some probing journalistic questions. “Why are you here?”
“My niece plays for the Ireland Rugby 7s team,” Joe McNally from Westmeath responds.
Jackpot, I think. Another one. (Reporter’s inner monologue: ‘God, I’m good at plucking them from the crowd.’)
“But she’s injured. Here she is.”
Unprepared to be face-to-face with Katie Heffernan, who was part of the qualification process for the team only to be injured last month, I ask: ‘How are you doing?’
“As good as I can be,” she says, before I’m introduced to her two-year-old niece Erin who I’m told says the rest of the 7s team are her friends, not Katie’s.
“She’s been at their games, and the IRFU family days, they all know her, she’s the real mascot,” explains her mam Laura Heffernan. (I’d put money on Erin Moloney being a future name for sports journalists.)
Katie says training and preparation for the rugby team has been going well, and she’ll be in the stands for every game once the tournament kicks off on Sunday.
Will it be bittersweet though, being in the stands and not on the pitch?
“From Sunday, my best friends are going to be Olympians. I would not miss that.”
Today in Team Ireland House, the story wasn’t Celine Dion, or the boats, or the many controversies of the Games. It wasn’t doping or cheating or any of the dark hearts of competitive sport.
It was the Olympic community in its truest form. It was the ordinary people of Ireland making the most of being able to call their teammates, their friends, their cousins, their siblings or simply their country mates, an Olympian. And despite it all, that still means something.
Let the Games begin.
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