Shanahan battles through dark days
Déise hero ‘in a good place’ at last
MAURICE SHANAHAN is talking about tattoos. Just like his brother Dan, the Lismore man wears his heart on his sleeve.
‘The saying is, “Sky above me, earth below me, life within me”,’ he says.
While he got the tattoo at the beginning of 2015, the year he went supernova in a Waterford jersey, winning an All-Star even as Kilkenny quashed the Déise’s All-Ireland dream for another year, the message speaks more to the past 12 months and a rollercoaster series of events of which being dropped from the county panel by manager Liam Cahill was only one part.
He married girlfriend Katie Reddan in February 2020, the pair’s trip to Tenerife before the first lockdown making them the last of the Irish honeymooners.
The economic fallout from the Covid saw him lose his job.
A stellar club campaign with his beloved Lismore put him on the radar of most hurling aficionados but he had to watch on as his county stormed to the All-Ireland final last December.
Six weeks ago, he became a father for the first time after the birth of daughter Rosie.
‘Life within me’ indeed.
Shanahan speaks with such engaging candour that he makes the perfect ambassador for a good cause.
He’s teamed up with Electric Ireland and Darkness Into Light (below) to invite the public to sign up for One Sunrise Together on Saturday, May 8, to raise vital funds for Pieta’s lifesaving services.
Shanahan’s own struggle with depression is just another strand to his layered personal story. ‘It changes everything in life when you have a baby,’ he says, recalling, too, the joy of last year’s wedding when the world was much more normal.
‘With lockdown coming just a few weeks later, we were very lucky. We had everyone there. My brother came from Australia. If it was a few weeks later, he wouldn’t have got back into Australia. It was a special day for us.
‘A lot of people had to cancel weddings and other things they had on with Covid. No one expected it to hit us the way it hit us. ‘It definitely takes a toll on people. You can’t even meet your friends or your neighbour. That’s wicked hard. But I suppose, you just have to think about the bigger picture and just try and get through it — but definitely, there were days…I lost my job with Covid. So it took its toll. So it was a bit of a disaster. But look, you just have to drive on.
‘I was with Iverk Produce for 13 years, supplying fruit and vegetables to hotels and restaurants. The whole lot closed. It’s still closed to this day.
‘And I don’t think there are much plans for opening up in the future.
‘I applied for a few jobs and I got into GSK in Dungarvan. I went up doing 12-hour shifts and it was kind of every second weekend.
‘When I was back playing with my club, I didn’t want to miss any trainings.
‘I decided to leave it. To be honest with you, it’s a bit of a regret to this day that I left it because I enjoyed doing what I was doing in there.
‘Look, you learn by your mistakes.’
It’s a sign of how much hurling is his world. Even shooting 2-17 for Lismore in one round wasn’t enough to prompt a call-up to the Waterford squad who would go all the way to the All-Ireland final in fine style.
‘Yeah, deep down you wanted the lads to win always, because I’m a Waterford man and I played with them for 10 years. Jesus, the joy I got from them winning and getting to the All-Ireland final was great.
‘Like, the last 15 minutes of the Kilkenny game when Stephen [Bennett] got the goal, I had to walk out to the back garden for five minutes because it kind of hit home —“Jesus, I would have loved to have been there with them”.’
The cause of Pieta is close to his heart after he previously went public with his own struggle with depression to the point, in 2014, where he couldn’t see any reason to keep living — even as he continued to play with Waterford.
‘You might be an hour down to training and you might be crying for 40 minutes. You just have to pull yourself together, go in and train with the lads, go back out and nearly cry your way home.
‘That’s the way I was, then. I didn’t want anyone knowing either because I was too proud. But people could see it on me because all I was doing was going to work, to training, and back home to my bed. I locked myself away.
‘Everyone knows I tried to commit suicide. Thankfully, it didn’t work out for me. But other families aren’t so lucky. Only for the people around me at the time I wouldn’t be here talking to you today. My family — my mother and father, my two sisters, my two brothers…’
He also received help from his old primary school teacher Sean Prendergast, now principal in Lismore, and Conor Cusack from Cloyne who was involved with the GPA. ‘The family I grew up in, we never wanted for anything. My mother and father did everything for us. When I got my depression I didn’t want to leave them down saying, “I’m depressed”.
‘It’s not an easy thing to come out and say to anyone. I bottled up for a long, long time. The minute I said to people I was suffering, there was a bit of relief lifted off me straight away.
‘I am in a good place right now. We only had a child six weeks ago. It was the best thing that ever happened.
‘Just to have her around every day is unbelievable.’