Healy in seventh heaven and moving to a faster beat

GERRY THORNLEYtalks to Cian Healy about his meteoric rise with Leinster and Ireland

CIAN HEALY is living the dream. Last season was his breakthrough for Leinster and here he is, in his rookie international year, about to win his seventh cap. He’d always imagined being a rugby player, but it’s been better than he could even have dreamed.

“I just never thought it would be so electric, like this. It’s unbelievable, walking out onto Croker and the Stade de France and Twickenham. I just never imagined it like. It’s unbelievable,” he repeats, suitably wide-eyed.

Healy is, by his own admission, “nuts”, or at any rate hyper-active. Always has been, always will be. There would always have to have been something very active to keep him busy. That he wanted to become a full-time professional rugby player had long since been his ambition.

“I wasn’t really giving myself an option, I was like: ‘I have to do this, this is what I want.’ I said it since, jeez, I said it since early in school. I used to go to the gym before or after school separately and do stuff separately and keep working on different things.”

His nickname is “Church”, a legacy from playing in the Churchill Cup when his passion for rap and hip hop music came to prominence among team-mates.

With his liking for most other forms of music, especially dance, he can often be seen lost in his huge ear phones. “I got a set of decks there a while back to mess around with in the bedroom.”

Painting is also another past-time, though the notion of this being a calming influence can perhaps be dispelled as he usually has the hip-hop or dance going full blast at the time. “I’m not this kind of sit-on-a-quiet-hillside-and-paint person . . . I think I’m incapable of relaxing so everything is kind of upbeat.”

The painting is a legacy of his time in Belvedere and “a great art teacher”: Ger Conron, a cousin of Jamie Heaslip’s.

As for rugby, while at primary school a mate of his, Scott McGreal, asked him to come along to a training night in Clontarf. “I never played soccer or anything because I couldn’t pick the ball up. It just did my head in and then the lads told me about this and I loved it.”

He played through the underage section in Castle Avenue on a particularly good vintage which also included Paul O’Donohoe, and it was largely because of rugby that he went to Belvedere College.

There, he was put on a fairly strict weights regime which combined well with his javelin, discus and shot putt with both Belvedere and Raheny Shamrocks. In turn, the athletics, with training before and after school, and on Sunday mornings, was good discipline for his rugby.

“It’s tough training on your own but the coaching and all was gas. I wasn’t the most serious athlete. I just used to step into the circle and throw it and step back out and go for a ramble! That was about it.”

When he tore elbow ligaments throwing a javelin, it ended that sporting interest, but in the All-Ireland Schools athletics championships he won gold medals in the shot putt and silver medals in the discus in each of his final two years at school.

“There’s a lot of core and balance and power work that goes into it so coming out of that initially I was a lot more powerful. I was into a kind of aggressive skating as well, so that made the legs quite powerful.”

His dad, Don, is very much from a football-playing family and didn’t take to his son’s sporting choices, even rugby. “I remember him initially giving me a slagging and now he’s mad about it; nuts about it.”

With Belvedere, he reached a Junior Cup semi-final and two Senior Cup semi-finals either side of winning one. Colin McEntee, the director of the Leinster Academy, spotted Healy’s talent and invited him along to the Leinster sub-academy.

“Then, at the start of the year I was called into the academy and I just turned into an absolute weights freak then. I started lifting weights constantly. It was good though, because we were doing a lot of ball skills as well so we weren’t just meat heads! And yeah, it was an enjoyable time in the Academy, it was good fun despite the early mornings. But we became a great group of friends.”

Although game time in the AIL was in short supply, Michael Cheika spotted something too and pitched him in against the Border Reivers in their last game in 2007, and then injury to CJ van der Linde ensured opportunity knocked last season.

“I always said since the start if I get an opportunity I’m not going to let it go lightly. So when Cheiks gave me the chance I was pretty adamant I was going to take it and hold it. There’s great competition in there though, and coming out of this and going back into Leinster it’s going to be a real dogfight for positions.”

The culmination was the final against Leicester which, for Healy, meant an hour up against Martin Castrogiovanni, finished off, for light relief, by 20 minutes against Julien White.

“That’s one way to do it,” he recalls, chuckling. “I was delighted with it. The bigger the names in scrums the better. I like being put against the fellas who rate themselves, and see what I can do.”

Coming into this season, he hadn’t been capped, but having only made his debut against Australia last November, today marks his seventh cap. “I hoped, I didn’t think,” he says of his meteoric rise. “Marcus was on a high and was playing quite well and his unfortunate injury gave me an opportunity. But he’s back now and it’s going to be a lot tougher. You can’t take anything for granted really.

“It’s been brilliant; it’s been great. Being with Leinster first off and constantly getting picked and then coming into the Irish spot has just been awesome. It has been a dream come true and I’m enjoying every minute of it.”

Now the chance to crown off Ireland’s time in Croke Park. “I think we need to do the people in Croker justice as well. It’s been an honour to be allowed play there. We’re going to back to our own stadium in Lansdowne soon enough but to leave this one with a bit of a legacy in it would be nice.”