Exclusive:Leitrim Traitors Ireland star was forced into GAA retirement after breaking back in match

Former Leitrim footballer Donal Casey has found himself in the public eye in recent weeks as a popular contestant on The Traitors Ireland television show on RTE every Sunday, Monday and Tuesday night.

The young teacher has won a lot of fans on screen and he did so on the pitch for Leitrim Gaels and the Leitrim intercounty team before an injury during the county final led him to a doctor’s office where he was told he’d never play the game he loves again.

Sport is often used as a metaphor for life but sometimes the line between the two gets awfully blurred, the shockwaves of a seemingly inconsequential incident on the playing field reverberating through all aspects of your life, a harsh reality that Donal Casey now has to come to terms with due to this forced retirement.

The 24-year-old was set to be one of the foundation stones of Steven Poacher’s Leitrim Senior team for the next ten years but instead, the Leitrim Gaels clubman is now devoting himself to the burgeoning sport of Hyrox, having been forced to hang up his boots completely for both club and county.

An innocuous clash early in last October’s Leitrim SFC Final left the Leitrim defender with two hairline fractures in his neck and a displacement fracture of the vertebrae, meaning Donal experienced both the best day of his playing career and the absolute worst, an injury that left him contemplating his own mortality!

Never one to court publicity, Donal admitted the reason he sat down with the Observer for a remarkably revealing and frank chat was to get the news out to the public who have been so supportive of him since suffering his awful injury: “I’ve never wanted publicity but it's the ambiguity around it that I just want to put it to bed more than anything and just let people know, it's not goodbye, it's see you later. But, for now, it's a chapter that's closed and I just want to close it and move on.”

The decision to hang up his boots was forced upon him and the Leitrim Gaels clubman admits he is still struggling to come to terms with the news: “It's hard to digest, I think that's the way I've put it. Especially not knowing for so long and then eventually it kind of came to the point where I had to make that decision and walk. I've gone through the ringer with injuries and I did tell the lads if I get one more bad injury, I'm done - that's what I said to them. Now I never thought I was going to break my neck in a country final but, it's hard, the injuries affect your life far more than people ever know.”

Given what he knows now, it is astounding that Donal played the entire game as Leitrim Gaels claimed their first ever Fenagh Cup, a fact all the more remarkable because Donal instantly knew that something was badly amiss: “I never saw it coming because it was my own man that collided with me - at that time, I knew there was something wrong, I just had never felt that feeling before.

“Obviously there's all stuff going on and Ballinamore boys telling you there's nothing wrong with you. And I was ‘will you go away and give me a minute at least?’ It was actually funny with Tom Prior, who I was marking, I kept saying to him, ‘Tom, there's something wrong here’ and Tom was like ‘would you ever go away, you’re only trying to get in my head’ but I was like ‘I'm telling you, Tom, there's something not right’.

“To be fair, I've never blamed anyone - there was no one going to take me off the pitch. The consultant said I should have been airlifted on the spot but I played on. When the whistle went, it was this kind of relief but then the pain started hitting me. People were coming up, grabbing me around the neck and I had to get away from the celebrations. I didn't know what was wrong at the time so I was still afraid that something was wrong and it could affect me even further. There were two hairline fractures, and then there's a displacement fracture of the vertebrae. I was lucky that it was C5, C6, and C7. If it was any way higher, it was goodnight Irene, basically.

“The displacement fracture is the issue. It's where the bone has moved because of not getting it treated straight away. That will never go back to where it's supposed to go.”

When his teammates were celebrating an historic victory, Donal and his family spent the days heading to hospitals seeking treatment and it is only now that he realises that playing on meant he diced with a far more serious situation: “It's a thing in football that you get up, you play on but it is the realisation that I could have been paralysed because of a neck injury or a head injury. It's so much more serious than ‘get up and play on’ so looking back, I'm lucky to come out the way I did after the whole lot.”

Not that he was feeling lucky when his consultant told him the dreaded news that his footballing days were over: “The day of my last meeting with the consultants, he knew I was going to go mad and I did, I went mad. I was like ‘what are you talking about?’ I was saying ‘no, there's no way, there's no way, there has to be a way’ - I couldn't accept it. Even when we were saying goodbye, I said ‘well can we have one more session next year?’ and he started laughing and said ‘do you know what, we'll book it for next March’ - it was just literally me thinking ‘you never know’ type of thing but the consultant knows, he told me straight out.”

Lest anyone think the consultant cruel for laying a heavy dose of reality on his patient, he also provided a perspective that Donal is gradually coming to terms with: “I always say perspective is the big thing. The consultant sat me down and said ‘there's a 17-year-old rugby player here and I have to go into him now after you’. I was kind of saying, what's that got to do with me? You know - it was all me, me, me. But the consultant said that this 17-year-old has the same injury as you except he's paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his life. Talk about hitting me with perspective really. After what happened, I probably should be paralysed for the rest of my life and I'm blessed, do you know what I'm saying? That's the way I have to look at it.”

But all the perspective in the world doesn’t alleviate the crushing void that now exists in Donal’s life, the loss of simply having the craic with his teammates hitting home the most: “It's your life, you've devoted your life to it and then, like that, it is gone. You don't even see a lot of the lads and it is like you’ve lost two families, club and county. That's the hardest part - seeing all the lads out playing and going through all the motions that you've gone through with them for years and you're not a part of it anymore. It's a hard thing to digest.”

Losing that connection of being part of something greater than yourself is what has hit him hardest: “It's the people - I'm saying that because now I'm doing a bit of training myself and I nearly hate it because I go into training for the craic first. There is something about being a part of a team and this team mentality. Losing that team spirit, I think, has been the hardest - it is not even the matches, it's the training, the gym sessions, the nights away, it's all that” said Donal before going on to confess his jealousy when his brother Robbie told him about doing a two hour video session with the club recently, adding “I would do anything to be in there doing that, I absolutely loved it - at the time you might be giving out but you're still having the craic.”

Fundamentally, it comes down to people for Donal and not even a winners’ medal from last October’s County Final compensates for the loss of that connection: “It is a nice one to have the medal, being the first for the club and I'm lucky that I did get one before it all kind of went downhill. People say at least you have the medal in the back pocket but I'd give up the medal to just be able to train with the lads. The meaning of that medal is nothing compared to being a part of it and training with the lads - it's winning the medal with the lads rather than the medal at the end of the day.”

Through all the dark days since his injury have been his family and his girlfriend Leah, Donal stressing he wouldn’t have gotten through it without them: “I was out of work for months. I'm not able to do anything - I was basically bed-bound for months. My family were amazing, I don't know how they put up with me for the last few years of this - I swear to God, driving me everywhere, feeding me.

“I can't shower, Leah had to literally bathe me -that's how bad it got. I could do nothing, you can't pick up stuff off the floor. There does come a point where you have to say is it affecting everything too much? You don't think about it when it's you, but when you actually take a step out of it, Jesus Christ, everything revolves around you because you're injured all the time. So, there is a bit of calmness that comes over me when I know that I won't have to go through all that again.”

One thing he hasn’t been able to do is watch his former club and county teammates in action, even if he hopes someday to return to the game in a coaching capacity: “Maybe one day, but I can't watch games right now, it just hurts too much. I hope people don't ever think that I'm all about me but it genuinely hurts too much.

“The only way I can describe it is you're like a mother and your son is playing a rough sort of a sport and you want them to do well but you can't look at it. I don't have the heart to watch if I'm not able to help them, that's the bit I hate. If they’ve lost, I can't go in there and sit in the dressing room with them; if they win, I can’t go over to celebrate but one day, hopefully, obviously after a while of being out of it, it changes.

“The goal was always to go into coaching. I love coaching and I've been lucky enough to do a bit of coaching up in the school. Hopefully one day I will coach but realistically in a few years' time, you'd be disconnected from what's going on. Just now it's very raw and it's very personal so I just need that time off and hopefully then it will actually come back.”