Poster Child for Integration…

…maybe a slight overstatement.

I landed in Brussels six years ago today and as I said to Dad this morning, there have been far more ups than downs.

The first year here was disrupted as I was still travelling home to play football and then was sent to the UK for a couple of months work on the production line with Toyota.

In the summer of 2006 I joined FC Irlande and that’s when things kicked off (pardon the pun). Sport is the only drug I need to keep me on a constant high and training twice a week, with a game on Saturday satisfied my fix. I became more involved in the following couple of seasons when I took on the position of trainer for the club.

The G.A.A. was lingering in the background all that time. We had a hurling team and an enthusiastic group of people but hadn’t got enough cutting in us to really make a go of the G.A.A. club.

The tide began to change in 2008 when we expanded to include Gaelic Football and changed our name to Belgium G.A.A. (formerly Brussels Hurling & Camogie club). We haven’t looked back since as European Championships followed in every code. I spent three thoroughly enjoyable and frustrating years training the Footballers before stepping back this year. Although that break was short lived as I will assist Conan now that Eoin is gone.

On the work front, it is difficult to imagine getting better experience than I have done in my job. The challenges of a merge of two separate Toyota entities was quickly followed by a financial crisis, a recall crisis and last but not least, the latest crisis linked to the Japan earthquake.

I have made my friends through sport and that has given me, like all the others in our clubs, a network of people across Europe and even beyond; that you would be comfortable calling on anytime you may land in their city.

My language skills show slower progress. I can say hello and thank you in Flemish and rely on a limited number of individual words, rather than sentences, to communicate in French.

Any regrets? Just one that will linger on - more of an itch that needs scratching than anything else. The missed South-East Hurling final of 2005 and subsequent victory that followed a year later. With a career that is likely to conclude in goal, it may not be out of reach yet.