Orlagh Lally: ‘There were days where I would just sit there and I didn’t care about anything’

On the days when it hit her the worst, Orlagh Lally would lie in her bed and digest the hours with the curtains pulled, determined not to catch sight of the sun. It was like she was playing that kids’ game, the one where the child covers her eyes and decides that because she can’t see you, it makes her invisible too. She would hide until it was too dark for anyone to seek her out.

“You feel numb,” Lally says now. “There were days where I would just sit there and I didn’t care about anything. Self-care, everything went out the window. I would just look at the wall and just be like, ‘I don’t care about anything.’

“There were some very, very bad days where I just thought, ‘I don’t want to be here.’ Like, I would never harm myself. I would never be able to do it. But I would be lying there thinking, ‘I just do not want to be here.’ And I would say that to my mam and my mam would be sitting beside me crying.

“There were days when I could barely get out of bed. I didn’t want to see the daylight because that would mean I’d have to get up and go and see people. It was pretty bad.”

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This was her, just more than a year ago. Lally was 21 years old. She was a three-time All-Ireland winner with Meath. She was a professional Aussie Rules player with Fremantle. She was living her life through sport, which had always been the only thing that interested her. And yet there she was, throughout January and February of 2023, walking in treacle. Feeling nothing. Stuck.

One weekend, she hauled herself into Navan to watch her team-mates play Mayo in the league. From the earliest days when she captained the Meath under-14s despite having only taken up football in secondary school, the county team had been her haven. Even when she’d locked herself away from the world, a few of them had been to the house to visit her, to show her what she meant to them. So she went in to Páirc Tailteann that Sunday to pay a little of it back. But sitting in the stand, it wasn’t long before she had a panic attack.

“Everything around me just started going black,” she says. “I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what was going on. I just had absolutely no control. Lucky enough, the team doctor was there and he came over to me. I went straight to A&E in Drogheda hospital, the psychiatric one.”

The road from there to here hasn’t always been linear. She needed medication for a while, she needed therapy for longer, she needed to get right in and dig down and find the roots of it all. But even if she wasn’t always sure of how she was going to get better, she never had any problem pinpointing why it would happen. Why it had to happen.

It’s right there on her arm. The tattoo says “Óg Go Deo”, in tribute to her friend Red Óg Murphy. Two years ago at the end of this month, she was living in the same house in DCU as Red Óg when he died by suicide. If you ask her now why she’s so open in talking about her mental health, she’ll reach for his name.

“For Red Óg, with what happened to him, that was a big wake-up call for me. Because I immediately thought if I don’t sort this out now, that could be me,” Lally says. “Because you just never know when it all gets too much. That was the big realisation for me. Although we lost Red Óg I believe that he saved myself and many others.”

Lally is talking now by Zoom from her sofa in Cockburn, a suburb about 15 minutes outside Fremantle. She stayed in Australia in the off-season this winter, giving herself the mental space away from football instead of coming back to play for Meath. She recently signed a new four-year AFLW contract and has been coaching kids from under-resourced backgrounds three days a week before the preseason torture chamber cranks up.

In the end, she played for Meath in the All-Ireland championship last year, despite having missed the whole of the league. But even though she was able to take that as a sign that the fog was starting to lift, playing county brings its own issues. She was working in Glanbia at the time and would regularly run into people who’d buttonhole her and start drilling for answers. It was hard to know what to tell them. They surely wouldn’t thank her for the truth.

“With Meath, it was a funny one,” she says. “Loads of rumours went around about me. People made up loads of reasons in their own head as to why I wasn’t playing. I remember I was at work and a man came in and said, ‘I thought you weren’t playing because you were pregnant!’ There were loads of stories. ‘Aw, I heard you had a fight with the new manager.’ ‘Aw, I thought you had decided you were too good to be playing for Meath any more.’

“And in my head, I was going, ‘God, if you only knew the truth.’ Half the time, I just wanted to say, ‘Would you ever eff off?’ But I would just sort of smile and shrug and say it was none of those reasons. I’d just walk away, which was the better thing to do.

“As a GAA player, people do feel that you nearly owe the county or something. You do get a lot of comments thrown at you. And if you think about it, I was basically just a 21-year-old who was going through a bad period in my head. I didn’t really know how to handle it in private, never mind in public.

“That was something I felt I had so much in common with Red Óg. Everybody absolutely loved him and looked up to him and because he was a GAA player, people felt they owned him a bit. But obviously deep down, he wasn’t feeling well.”

Lally had landed into the GAA house in DCU as a wandering stray. She was a nursing student and it wasn’t going well. First year was all online because of lockdown, second year involved endless placement hours and she hated every one of them. On top of it all, the house she was in was a party zone and between placement and training and books and matches, she needed a calmer setting.

“So the next option was the GAA house with four other boys. And I was like, how bad could it be? The lads were great, in fairness. Apart from not being able to clean up there wasn’t a bother on them,” Lally recalls.

“I remember a few days when Red Óg came in and he had chicken that was bright pink and he’d be going to me, ‘Do you think that’s done?’ And I went, ‘Most definitely not, unless it’s salmonella you’re looking for.’

“We had a communal dining area and kitchen. Sometimes he’d be on the phone to his mam and for a 21-year-old lad to speak to his mam out in the open and tell her he loved her and ask how his nana was and all that, you didn’t see that too often. He was so open about the love and care he had for his family, which is definitely not something you’d see in many males, showing that vulnerability at that age.”

[ The life and death of Red Óg Murphy: ‘We had no reason to believe anything was wrong’ ]

Red Óg Murphy’s suicide was unfathomable. To his housemates, to his team-mates, to his family. His parents, Redmond and Geraldine, had no indication that he was feeling anything out of the ordinary. They have been adamant since his death that they would rather treasure the 21 years they had with him than torture themselves for answers.

But equally, they want people to keep talking about their mental health. Young people especially. Young sportspeople most of all. At the end of May, they are putting on an event at Summerhill College in Sligo where the likes of former rugby international Alan Quinlan, retired Dublin All-Ireland winner Philly McMahon, Rory O’Connor (Rory’s Stories) and sports psychologist Caroline Currid will talk about the places where sport and mental health collide and combust.

“It’s probably hard for anyone to understand,” says Lally, who has kept in constant contact with Red Óg’s family since his death. “But for me, his death nearly made it feel all right that I didn’t feel all right. I was thinking that there was nothing wrong with me and that I was being dramatic in some sense. I thought I was being ungrateful. I thought I was the problem.

“And with Red Óg, my idea of him was that everyone loved him and he was so good at everything. Even all the girls my age were all mad about him. All of them wanted to try and be with him. So then I was like, ‘It’s actually okay not to be all right.’ Even when you do have everything. Or I suppose even when it looks from the outside that you do have everything.

“Anyone that would have been looking at me, even my dad who is closest to me and who I love and we get on so well, even he couldn’t really ever know what was going on in my head. From the outside looking in, it would look like, ‘Aw, she’s got everything, she’s happy out.’ And I was very good at putting on a face. I was the one making everyone else laugh. But deep down, I felt terrible.”

That’s the thing. Orlagh Lally’s life now probably looks much the same to anyone checking in on it as it did a year ago. She’s still a three-time All-Ireland winner. She’s still an Aussie Rules professional. She’s still immersed in sport. But unknown to the outside world, all the hours of work she has done over the past 12 months has changed how she sees herself.

“Your brain is so used to telling you certain things and thinking in certain ways,” she says. “You have to completely rewire it and retrain it. It’s definitely a lot more complicated than just going and chatting to someone. I think people probably don’t realise that. It does definitely take time. It took me three or four months before I even started to see the results. Sometimes you don’t even see them – someone else might notice something. You just keep going.

“That’s why I always look at the life I’m getting to live now and how privileged and lucky I am. This is what Red Óg would have been made for. He was one of the most gifted and talented footballers I’d ever seen. But also one of the most genuine and pure people. Part of me feels like I get to live that dream for him as well. I absolutely love it. It has brought a new appreciation for life and the opportunities we get to take.”

If you are affected by any issue in this article, please contact Pieta House on 1800-247247 or the Samaritans by telephoning 116123 (free) or Text HELP to 51444.

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