Down legend Michaela Downey still has the hunger to carry on

By Daire Walsh

Despite hanging up her football boots on a couple of occasions in the past, Down stalwart Michaela Downey once again found herself gracing the local scene in the Mourne County earlier this year.

An All-Ireland junior football championship winner with Down at Croke Park back in October 2000 alongside her sister Aoibheann, Downey had initially opted to retire from all levels of football as a player in 2016.

She subsequently returned to club action with the Newry-based St John Bosco four years later, but a serious bike accident in the early months of 2021 saw her once again placing football on the back burner.

Yet the start of 2024 saw Downey being selected on an Ireland Masters side for an International Rules Series against Australia and this gave her the appetite for another club football comeback. While Bosco weren’t in a position to field an adult team in the current season, she did line out in the colours of the nearby Clonduff – who she had previously represented under similar circumstances.

At 44 years of age, she played a pivotal role in helping Clonduff to reach the semi-final stage of this year’s Down intermediate football championship, where they eventually lost out to Saul.

“My boots had been nailed to the wall for a good few years. Then when I got the opportunity this year to play with the Masters International Rules, I thought ‘you know what, I could give this another go’ and enjoyed my time playing. So I thought ‘I’m going to have another go at it’.

“I was very lucky that in Clonduff this year, there was about five or six girls around the same age as me that went back to play this year. They’re maybe not 43 or 44. I’m 44 now, but there’s five of them were over 40, put it that way. Just 40 or 41 and I would have played with them way back in 2006.

“Unfortunately we got beaten in the championship semi-final, but we did very well considering we were in the intermediate championship. You were playing against teams that were really in a higher league than you. On another day we actually could have beaten the team that beat us, but they were better on the day.”

This year’s Masters games weren’t the only times that Downey had donned the green jersey as back in 2006 she was part of an Ireland squad that earned an emphatic 173-33 aggregate victory over Australia in an international rules series that was held at Kingspan Breffni in Cavan (first test) and Dublin’s Parnell Park (second test).

Playing alongside household names such as Rena Buckley, Caroline O’Hanlon, Cora Staunton and Sinead Aherne, Downey featured prominently in what is the only ladies international rules series to have been played to date – excluding this year’s Over 40s encounters.

“I was privileged to get playing at that time because you were playing with the likes of Cora Staunton and all the Cork girls that I had been looking up to, and would never have the opportunity to play against them because obviously Down weren’t playing at the same level that they were playing at. That was a fantastic opportunity,” Downey recalled.

Interestingly, the manager of the Ireland team for that particular series was current GAA President Jarlath Burns. Two years later, Downey would take up a position as a teacher at St Paul’s High School in Bessbrook, Co. Armagh – where Burns served as principal until taking up his current post with the GAA at the beginning of 2024.

The school also counts a number of players on the current Armagh men’s senior panel (including Burns’ son Jarly Óg) amongst their list of past pupils and this ensured there was a prestigious visitor to St Paul’s for the beginning of the new term.

“Talking to Jarlath, he’s always insisting he’ll come back to St Paul’s. It was brilliant that time, I wasn’t working in St Paul’s at that time, but it was two years later then I got a job in St Paul’s, so I’ve known Jarlath a long time.

“GAA is the main sport for boys and girls, it’s a big school. The boys, obviously there is a lot of Armagh players, we had Sam Maguire in the first week we were back. We had 14 past players and quite a lot of them boys I taught.

“Because they were all the one age group, they all played in a MacRory Cup final in 2013 and they were beaten by St Pat’s, Maghera by a point. All of those boys would have been in the one team. Then obviously all won an All-Ireland there with Armagh. As much as I’m a Down woman, I was delighted to see them win.”

What is perhaps most remarkable about Downey’s longevity is the fact that she played in the very first game that the Down ladies footballers competed in – an All-Ireland ‘B’ Championship encounter with Galway on October 8, 1995.

Yet while Downey supplemented an All-Ireland junior final win against the same county five years later with a TG4 All Star award in 2008 – “to win that was fantastic and Down don’t win too many awards like that” – she has also accumulated multiple Down senior championship crowns with both Clonduff and Bosco down through the decades.

Although she hasn’t yet made a decision about potentially carrying her playing career into 2025, the prospect of once again representing the latter club is something that Downey would find enticing.

“I enjoyed my time and I’ll have to wait and see. Personally, I would love it if the Bosco were to get up and running again at an adult level. If they did that next year, it would be a very young team and if I thought I could help them or assist in any way by playing with them, to try and give them a wee bit of experience, then I would give it a go,” Downey added.

“Whether or not that’s possible, I don’t know. I’ll never say never again because I’ve stopped playing that many times and my boots are still on. People won’t believe me if I say I’m quitting now! That I’ve definitely quit for good.”