Ciara Mageean was a special person

I never met her. 

My experience of her was probably similar to most. I’d followed her athletics career from a distance. In the last year, I heard a couple of in-depth interviews with her and my admiration for her grew exponentially.

When I was growing up, Sonia O’Sullivan was our greatest athlete. We experienced tortuous lows and tumultuous highs with her. Fantastic medal-winning performances at European and World Championships throughout the 90s were punctuated with some major disappointments at the Olympics in ‘92 and ‘96 before sheer joy and relief as she won silver at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. She captured the hearts of the nation in a way very few do.

Mageean had a touch of the Sonias about her. She appeared at once both vulnerable and incredibly resilient.

Even back before her cancer diagnosis, there was her heartbreaking injury, when she seemed at the peak of her powers, which ruled her out of the Paris Olympics. Just months previously, she hit a career high with her gold medal win in the 1500 metres at the European Championships in Rome.

I listened to her relive that moment when she realised she was unable to compete at the 2024 Olympics, and the subsequent tear-filled discussions with her partner and parents.

You couldn’t but be swept along on the emotional river she navigated. She was very open in sharing her thought process. Perhaps that was maybe what made her so compelling.

Her resilience was never far away and it was striking how quickly she managed to deal with the high emotion and refocus on a new goal — the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

The cancer diagnosis in 2025 obviously put paid to that. Yet it was amidst this greatest adversity that I imagine she captured the hearts of everyone who encountered her. I listened to her again on a podcast a few months ago. Around the same time, she featured on an episode of RTÉ’s “Uncharted”, where she discussed her illness candidly.

Listening to her, it was clear she was transferring that same high-performance mindset from dealing with setbacks in sport to attacking the challenge of her cancer diagnosis. Once again, her vulnerability and resilience were equally apparent.

There was frankness with which she shared her thoughts. She had fears, she was disappointed, and she had an incredible way of making peace with all that and refocussing the mind on the next step.

I got a jolt when I heard of her passing on Sunday morning. Did you ever feel an outsized sense of grief for the passing of someone you didn’t know? I think Ciara Mageean elicited that kind of feeling across the country through her openness in sharing her struggles and her sheer likeableness.

Mageean was a role model, the likes of which our youth needs. I often find myself wary of the influence of some of the public comment from sportspeople nowadays. It’s all too often overly, unnaturally positive, like lemmings just rehashing the latest gobbledegook they’ve heard on Tiktok.

Mageean didn’t spout nonsense. She was realistic, and she was able to accept disappointments before moving quickly to look for positives and chart a path forward. I’d say she was a dream client for any sports psychologist.

She reminded me of Ronan O’Gara in her thought processes, and in how open she was with them. O’Gara is another exceptional role model. These folks do a great service to our country, especially to the next generations who have looked up to them.

ALL-STARS

The All-Star team was the hottest topic of discussion in Gaelic football circles this week. While I find the whole idea of All-Star selections somewhat at odds with the team nature of our sport, it is the perfect vehicle to highlight and recognise the superstars, the role models.

Emphasising and rewarding, in a very public manner, the effort and brilliance of the country’s best footballers can only be positive in terms of their place as role models for our youth.

Originally, I found myself not too interested in it for whatever reason. I think, perhaps, it took place too long after the competition ended.

The All-Ireland final was over three months ago. The Connacht final was almost half a year ago.

We’d all moved on and when the All-Stars were announced this week it was actually hard to remember back to who were the main protagonists of what was a brilliant summer of football.

Still, thinking of the value of Ciara Mageean as a role model on Sunday morning reminded me of the importance of these events.

Many around the county have lamented the fact that no Rossie was awarded an All-Star. I don’t think we really expected one though, given how skewed towards performances at the business end of the All-Ireland Series the selections are. You could argue that many ways, but all 15 players selected had excellent campaigns.

Still, the provincial championships remain important in their own right. That was never more evident than this summer with the scenes after massive wins for Roscommon, Westmeath and Armagh in provincial deciders.

Did any one player have a bigger influence on his county winning silverware than Darragh Heneghan? You could argue that his All-Star award should have been engraved as soon as he slotted his second goal in the Connacht final.

We can do more at a local level to recognise and promote our stars. Roscommon LGFA, to be fair to them, made a great move last year in initiating an All-Star awards, rewarding the best players at senior, intermediate and junior levels.

It would be mighty if the GAA could follow suit. A link up with media would make it a relatively easy process. The Roscommon Herald already does much of the spadework — they’ve named All-Star teams of sorts based on club championship performances. It wouldn’t take too much work to formalise and glamourise the whole process with an official awards night.

The key point is that recognising and valuing true role models is important. When I look at some of the social media that our youth are consuming these days, the type of “role models” being pushed in front of them through algorithms intent on hooking them into mindless content is deeply worrying.

We have a duty to push forward alternatives, by promoting those we feel best represent our values. We have a duty to promote our best GAA players in this way. We have a duty to promote the likes of the O’Rourke sisters in Castlerea and their fantastic success story. We are blessed with any amount of sports people at a local level leading the way.

We are blessed that we had the privilege of following Ciara Mageean’s career and life.

There are lessons in there for all of us. Lessons in humility, in facing up to difficulties in hard times, in sitting with pain, in choosing to fight back and in facing challenges one step at a time.

Special people like her are generational. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam,