An Irishman's Diary

THE Ballymun flats have never been one of the heartlands of Leinster rugby, I think it’s fair to say. The schools cup has rarely set pulses racing in those parts. The problem of how you might rock the ‘Rock, in the unlikely event of such an opportunity arising, has not detained the locals unduly.

But bastions are falling everywhere these days. Not even Ballymun and Leinster rugby are mutually immune. A former GAA player from Louth – God help us – is currently holding down the full-back spot, not just for Leinster, but for Ireland too. And although Ballymun is a much more distant outpost than that, except in purely geographical terms, who’s to say it couldn’t be next? Enter Dean King. Or, in the short term, exit. The teenager is pure Ballymun: born 19 years ago into an eight-storey block of flats in a suburb synonymous with poverty and deprivation. But his unlikely love affair with rugby will take him to New Zealand at the end of this month, on an even more unlikely scholarship.

Courtesy of a link-up between his club, Unidare RFC, and the New Zealand Ireland Association (NZIA), the teenager will spend six months in the home of rugby, playing for an outfit in Waikato province, North Island. Unidare hopes exposure to the soil that grows All-Blacks might rub off on him too. He hopes it will further his long-term ambition: to play professionally for Leinster.

At the very least, it promises to be another fruitful chapter in a life that could have been wasted. King had not yet been born when, in 1987, Bono sang: “I see seven towers but I only see one way out”. Soon afterwards, however, he was getting a much closer view of the towers than Bono ever had, and of all the problems that went with them.

That he never knew his father wasn’t the worse thing that happened to him. Aged 8, he watched his mother fall to her death from a second-storey balcony, leaving him effectively an orphan. From then on, he was raised by his extended family – grandparents, aunts, and uncles – whose commitment to him in bad times was one of his first lucky breaks.

Even so, he was a troubled kid. His mainstream education ended in first year at Ballymun Comprehensive, when he “threw a chair” at a teacher. “It was an accident – I didn’t mean to,” he says with a sheepish smile. But he admits he was “a bold boy”. The school agreed and expelled him.

There followed a period of exile in another of Leinster’s remoter parts: Clonmellon, Co Westmeath, where his grandparents had gone to live. The city boy hated the countryside. But it was there that he discovered Youthreach, an organisation that attempts to rescue early school drop-outs for some kind of education. It certainly rescued him.

“Youthreach saved me,” he admits. It was more informal there; you “didn’t have to call teachers ‘sir’”; and over the age of 16, you even got paid (a “training allowance”, it’s called, of €50 a week). When he moved back to Dublin, to live with aunts and uncles, he continued his second-chance schooling, this time in Youthreach Ballymun. There he completed his Junior Cert – “one of the best days of my life” – and then a course to prime him for that mezzanine level between secondary school and college: Post-Leaving Cert studies.

The discipline he chose was exploration – Coláiste Dhulaigh’s “Shackleton course”, as it’s known, named after the great polar explorer. And it must have been a similar sense of adventure that helped King to discover a sport rarely found in Dublin at Ballymun’s northerly latitudes.

The opportunity came thanks to Unidare, a club that for half a century has flown a lonely flag for rugby in Dublin 11 – first in the old Unidare works in Finglas and now, after several periods of exile, at Dublin City University. This was another outreach project and again, in Dean King, it found a willing hand.

He tried tag rugby first, which was all right. But his epiphany, if that’s not too fancy a word, was the first time he played the full-contact version. “I fell in love with it,” he says, with the same mischievous smile that must have made his former teachers nervous. “You were hitting people and getting away with it – I couldn’t believe it!”

In between hits, he could run. His speed soon established him as a regular in the Unidare youth team, scoring frequent tries from full-back, wing, or – in the number 13 shirt made famous by Brian O’Driscoll – outside centre. So when Unidare and the NZIA got together to hatch a plan for a biennial scholarship for a young player from the club, King fitted the part. It wasn’t just about the rugby, however. Candidates also had to write a short essay to argue why they should get the chance. But in this too, the Ballymun kid had the best argument.

His home for the next six months will be Matamata, home to 12,000 people and – in cinematic fiction at least – to J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits: a local farm was the scene for Hobbiton in the film version of Lord of the Rings. Which suggests life may be even quieter there than he found it in Clonmellon: “But maybe that’s what I need now.” On his return, he remains contracted with Unidare for at least a year. Then the world will be his oyster, though a bigger club in Leinster would probably do for a start.

If the time comes, as Unidare chairman Kevin Furey explains, his nursery club will let him go with the pride of knowing they gave him a start: “Whatever team he’s running out for, he’ll always be ours.”