Pope gives Ireland his blessing

HOME AND AWAY: IGOT a call in the middle of the night back in 1991. I'd been playing rugby overseas every other year and I'd been running a property valuation business in Dunedin. But the World Cup was over here (Ireland) that year and I was asked to play a season for St Mary's in the AIL. The plan was that I'd go back home after that season.

I shared a flat with three other New Zealand players in Templeogue and was working for Colemans, which was a company that delivered drinks to pubs. In that respect I think I witnessed the growth and fall of the Celtic Tiger more than most people.

I worked out in the Belgard Road in Tallaght, which was just raw land, waste ground and I delivered to pubs all over Dublin. I enjoyed the work but at the end of that year I went back to play Super 12 (now Super 14) and got back into the business world. But I missed the craic. So I arrived back at St Mary’s in 1992. That was the year we got to the final of the AIL against Young Munster and I got sent off.

But at that time Victor Costello was coming from Blackrock and I was at the 31 or 32 mark and I said I’d walk if we were getting a number eight of Victor’s quality.

Those were the days of Trevor Brennan, Denis Hickie, and Victor, players of quality. Anyway we won the AIL in 1999 and became the only Leinster team to have won it. We still are the only Leinster team, which I find incredible.

I also coached at Clontarf for a number of seasons where we also had some success but my first appearance on Irish television was in 1993 in a programme called Rugby After Dark, with the late Mick Doyle. Then in 1995, RTÉ’s Niall Cogley rang me and asked me to come in for a World Cup game between Ireland and New Zealand because I knew both countries. I said “I don’t know” because I’d booked to go home and couldn’t afford to cancel. RTÉ said they’d look after that and afterwards Bill O’Herlihy came and said that it went well and asked me to stay and work the entire World Cup. From then on I’ve been doing it each year. I’m the veteran of the current panel with Tom McGurk and George Hook.

I loved the amateur ethos of rugby and after that 1999 season when we won the AIL at St Mary’s, I was stripped of 21 players including all of the pack. I was also working with Mike Ruddock with the Leinster A side and I’d sent some letters to the UK, which meant giving up the media and relocating. It was then that I made the decision that coaching professionally in rugby was not for me.

The other thing was that I had embraced Ireland. I love the craic. I love the people. I love Ireland and now I’ve lived here almost half my life. I’m 47 now and I arrived here when I was 28. Age 28 to 47 is quite a chunk of your adult life. New Zealand is my birthright but I don’t really know what I am now. It’s a tough call for me when New Zealand play Ireland.

I live in Blackrock, where I bought a house back in 1986. Dunedin, where I went to university is about the size of Limerick. But for me to go from a city like Dublin to a city like Christchurch, where I grew up, it’s like someone switched the lights off.

I like the vibrancy and energy of Dublin and I find New Zealand isolated now. I talk to my mum and dad and say I’m going to Rome for Heineken Cup or I’m going to Paris for a Six Nations match . . . they are cities on the front of chocolate boxes. They couldn’t afford to travel in New Zealand the way they can now.

There was never any thought in my head of living in Ireland when I was growing up. I had a house in Dunedin as a student where Mike Brewer and two other rugby players were living. You would have laughed if we’d sat around the table in that house and said I’d be living in Dublin working with Irish television and the others would be living in Scotland and Japan.

But this is the best thing I ever did. I’ve been lucky because I’ve done a lot of things, shifted to different areas. I’ve been able to meet a lot of people in different areas, which is something that has always interested me and at the moment I’m working with a rugby idea that is basically a show that is interactive with kids, a show to which they can come with their parents to see new training drills, books, mouth guards, weights, boots everything.

I still have a strong New Zealand accent and people still presume I’m from Australia but I know that I have been accepted in Ireland. My contract with RTÉ is up in 2011 and by then I’ll be 49. I’d like to think I had another 10 years.

• The former Otago player came to Ireland almost 19 years ago to play and coach rugby. He has since become a rugby analyst with RTÉ.