IT’S an overcast afternoon in Downpatrick and Caolan Mooney has commandeered a seat beside the window of a coffee shop that looks onto a large carpark and the hum-drum comings and goings of shoppers.
It’s December and Mooney looks as fit as a middleweight boxer a few weeks out from a title fight.
He’s 32-year-old now and reckons this will be his 11th pre-season with the Down seniors.
You ask if somebody told him he’d still be playing for his county in 2025, would he have believed them?
“It was tough on my mum and dad. I knew I was self-destructing. And I also knew the next phase of that, if I had carried on, it was not being here. I was in a very dark place...” - the life and times of Caolan Mooney
“I felt as if the world was going to end...” St Colman’s College sports studies students submit articles on the game, fight or issue that mattered most to them this year…
He fires back with a wide smile: “I would have said I’ll be lucky to be still breathing.”
A man of impeccable manners, you sense an anarchic wit about Mooney.
Father to Cóirle (3) and Cómhan (1) and married to Adair, Caolan Mooney is a life lived, a compelling discourse all in itself.
He’s been to hell and back more than once.
So, it’s a remarkable feat of resilience and burning ambition that he’s still competing at elite level.
He has a personal training business and a day job with Northern Ireland Electricity.
Leaning back on a two-seater sofa, he says: “I’m feeling good. I’m probably fitter than I’ve ever been – even when I was in Australia.
“But this year might be it for me. It’s the [skin] graft on my hamstring, the load and the tolerance of matches – that’ll probably decide how things go. If I can get through this year without it flaring up, then who knows. If it keeps nipping away at me, it’s your body telling you that it’s time.
“Playing football doesn’t last forever, so you embrace it while you can. I’m just embracing it. Until my hamstring tells me otherwise, I’ll give 100 per cent.”
Caolan Mooney had the world at his feet. Double MacRory and Hogan Cup winner, ‘living the dream’ playing Aussie Rules for Collingwood in his late teens, coming home, falling in love with Down, falling out of love with Down, the injuries, the drinking, the scrapes, as quickly as he’d get back on track the wheels would come off again.
He suffers from tinnitus in his right ear after sustaining a fractured skull and a bleed on the brain following an altercation in the street in 2019.
Tempestuous. Tumultuous. Turbulent. But amid all the madness, Mooney was a generational talent.
“Physically, Caolan was out of this world. I’ve yet to see anybody as quick,” says his former Down team-mate Aidan Carr.
Cathal Murray loved everything about the fresh-faced youngster who arrived at St Colman’s from St Mark’s High School and wanted to sample for himself the college’s storied hallways and MacRory Cup football.
Mooney spent two years there in 2010 and 2011 and won back-to-back MacRory and Hogan Cups.
“I don’t think there is a player who dominated the MacRory Cup the way Caolan did in those two years he was with us,” says Murray.
“We probably wouldn’t have won what we did without him – and that’s the difference he made to us.
“We were a very good team, don’t get me wrong, but he took us to a new level.”
SO where is the mercurial Rostrevor man at as 2024 draws to a close?
“Hanging on,” he says with a smile.
He loves being part of Conor Laverty’s Down panel. He even enjoys team meetings and the dynamic the younger members bring to the table.
“‘Lav’ is a passionate wee man,” he says of his manager. “That’s what ‘Lav’ is. The banter’s always good. [For team meetings] It’s like warming up the crowd and then you’re getting guys tuned into what we’re doing. I enjoy that aspect of it and I love the craic involved too.”
In 2022, he had his fill of the county team. For the umpteenth time.
They lost heavily to Monaghan in the Ulster Championship while some players - including Mooney - frowned at the prospect of playing in the inaugural Tailteann Cup.
But whether it’s fatherhood, his wife’s influence or simply getting older, Mooney has matured quite a bit since then.
He’s able to look back at his younger self, and even winces occasionally.
Two seasons ago, he agreed to be a guest on a GAA podcast where he tore into the Down set-up - the same set-up he was determined to leave in his rear view.
He did the podcast just two days after suffering a cruciate ligament injury.
“I did the podcast on empty emotion,” he says. “I’d just done my knee and I was looking for someone to blame, and it was only me to blame. I should never have gone back in 2022...
“If I could take 40 minutes of my life back it would be that podcast. It annoys me that I did it.
“You look back on life before you’d kids, and you think: what was I doing with myself? That’s why I was open to doing this interview. I suppose it’s a bit of self-reflection because I’m a completely different person to who I was only a few years ago.
“[Having] kids open your eyes to different aspects of life. I just wish it had happened sooner.”
He doesn’t hesitate to say there are things he’d do differently.
For starters, he wouldn’t have gone to the other side of the world to play AFL - at least not at 18-years-of-age.
“I remember I got to the top of the escalator in the airport, and I was thinking: ‘I don’t know if this is for me.’ And then I just gave myself a shake and carried on…”
ONE thing he wouldn’t change, though, was going to St Colman’s to play in the MacRory Cup. His precocious talent was such that he was playing for the Down minors at 16.
He became friends with some of the Colman’s boys on the minor panel, so it was a straightforward decision to politely decline an offer from the late Jody Gormley of Abbey CBS to study and play football there.
“I was coming from Vocational schools to Grammar school football and you could see MacRory meant so much to everyone in St Colman’s, it was like a religion. If you were playing MacRory you were walking about the school almost like a God.
“Sounds a wee bit silly but it was true because everybody wanted to be a MacRory player. But to me it was just football…
“Up to then, I’d no real interest in the MacRory Cup, never watched it on St Paddy’s Day, just went and played football and that was it, whereas it was different for the other boys.
“They would have been saying before the 2010 semi-final, ‘We’ve never beaten St Pat’s Dungannon’. The same before the final against Omagh.”
There was nothing more awesome on a Gaelic field than Caolan Mooney in full flight.
Murray recalls his flying left half-forward embarking on a 70-yard run in their 2010 semi-final against Dungannon at Casement Park before off-loading the ball to allow Tony McGreevy of Clonduff and Jerome Johnston of Kilcoo to hatch a goal between them.
St Colman’s hadn’t won a MacRory since 1998 and in the decider against Omagh CBS, Mooney was again the game winner – grabbing the killer goal three minutes after the restart to quell an Omagh uprising.
“Students who weren’t even part of the panel were crying after the final and I was thinking that this is weird for me...
“When I see people from those days, thoughts flow through my head, the people you met, the success. Football was football then...”
Murray recalls: “In the 2011 final against Dungannon he scored two goals and you’d swear the men he was going past were just standing still, he was just gliding past them and controlling the ball and then waving his arms to the crowd…
“He was so economical. Caolan’s not the sort of player where he’s going to dominate a game for 60 minutes, but you can’t take your eyes off him. You’d be thinking, Caolan hasn’t touched the ball in six or seven minutes and then – bang.
“In one of the Hogan Cup campaigns I remember him hitting something like 2-3 against the combined Dundalk colleges team and he must have only touched the ball six or seven times.”
LIKE Marty Clarke a few seasons earlier, Aussie Rules outfit Collingwood came calling for Down’s latest prodigy and signed Mooney in 2010 with the intention of the teenager coming out the following year after his studies at St Colman’s had finished.
Coming off the back of his first season with Down in 2011, Mooney had no great longing to play Aussie Rules – “I used to watch a wee bit of it on Thursday nights on TG4, and that was about it” – but the lure of getting handsomely paid to play professional sport was irresistible.
During his first trial, he remembers Collingwood giving him a ball to practice with.
“The first thing I did was go down to the pitch. My Da started booting balls at me and I was trying to make these outrageous catches.”
Even though his first team appearances were limited at Collingwood – he made six in total and around 50 for the ‘twos’– Mooney enjoyed life Down Under in the first couple of years.
“Every time I looked at my back balance, I thought: ‘That’s decent. I’m happy.’ It was better than getting £30 a week for lifting glasses in a bar around home…”
Outside of training and matches Mooney was very much left to his own devices in Melbourne.
“You were put into a house with a few other first years. A guy Jamie Elliott, who is still playing for Collingwood and is one of their best players, was one of my room-mates.
“He lived in Victoria, so he was going home at the weekends. You had a house guide who was there to shadow but nothing else. You were cooking and cleaning for yourself…
“I always struggled in Australia for body composition and that kind of stuff. There was no nutritionist showing me what to cook. All I knew was spuds, steak, eggs, toast and spaghetti hoops. I remember I took a fascination to sushi.
“I knew nothing about diet or portion sizes. Looking back, that was a flaw on their part; they didn’t give you much guidance about what you should be eating. Obviously, I was having pints too and I knew I was drinking too much but I was 18 or 19.
“Most people do that in the Holylands – I was doing it in Melbourne.”
He was re-signed by Collingwood but in his third year he became increasingly frustrated with the lack of first team opportunities, which compounded his homesickness.
As soon as he informed the club he wanted to return home, his pass to enter the club grounds was removed immediately.
“I couldn’t get back into the club to get my stuff. It was cut-throat.
“As soon as I came home, I realised I was coming home to nothing. That’s when I regretted not concentrating on the academic side of school.
“I was 21 and didn’t know what I was going to do. I was in a bad place.
“I went off the rails. I couldn’t have been any further off the rails. Those first two years after I came home were brutal, really bad, what I was doing to myself, where I was going, I didn’t have any structure.
“I felt there was an expectation on me to do what Marty [Clarke] did when he came home, but off the pitch I wasn’t in the right head space to deliver on my potential.”
Christmas songs play on a loop in the café and the shoppers outside move around the place like ants. Leaning forward, Mooney says he would have loved the chance to talk to his 21-year-old self and usher him down a different path.
Mooney would’ve spent Monday to Friday up in Belfast, rarely darkening a lecture room door in Jordanstown, drinking when he could, as much as he could. One lost weekend rolled into another.
“It was tough on my mum and dad. I knew I was self-destructing. And I also knew the next phase of that, if I had carried on, it was not being here. I was in a very dark place...”
In 2015, Mooney’s worrying demise had reached every nook and cranny of the Mourne County. At one point, some past Down players reached out to him in a bid to help.
“When you’re in a dark hole you don’t really care what people say, you just do what you think is right and cover the cracks.”
In 2016, he left the Down panel and headed to New York for the summer. But “getting out of Ireland” wasn’t the panacea he was searching for.
One night Mooney opened up to his father.
“I told him where I was, what I was doing. He was shocked. My Da is not an emotional character but now he’s got grandchildren I can see it coming out in him more.
“He said to me: ‘It doesn’t matter what other people think of you – just know everyone in this house loves you.’
“That’s what brought me on. He said about starting at the bottom of the ladder and slowly building yourself up, and that’s what I did.”
Mooney reached out to the late Eamon Burns about returning to the Down set-up in 2017.
Initially sceptical, backroom team members Cathal Murray and Damien ‘Watty’ Watson persuaded Burns to give Mooney a chance.
During one particularly heavy training session up a mountain somewhere in Castlewellan, Mooney swore he’d made a grave mistake by returning to the fold. He could hardly catch a breath.
‘Shut up and go on!’ snapped Aidan Carr.
“Only for ‘AC’ saying that I probably would have stopped. I don’t even know if he remembers saying that to me. It was like a flick of a switch just to carry on and I got through it.”
Mooney was brilliant for Burns in 2017 as Down reached an unlikely Ulster final, beating Armagh and Monaghan in memorable encounters before falling to Tyrone in the decider.
Mooney received an All Star nomination at the end of that year.
“I’ll never forget it,” Carr says. “We were playing Armagh in Newry in the Ulster Championship. I was on the bench and Caolan got the ball along the sideline in the first half.
“The minors were sitting behind us and Caolan took off down the line. You could hear the shock among the minors because they’d never seen him in action before. You couldn’t get close to him.”
In 2021, there was a whole hullabaloo when he transferred from his native Rostrevor to Downpatrick - but the equation was uncomplicated for him.
It meant less car time and more time with Adair, Cóirle and Cómhan.
Regardless, the rumour mill dined out on it.
Life moves on.
Who knows what 2025 holds for one of the true footballing mavericks of the modern era. His passion for Down burns as brightly as it did in 2009 when he joined the minors.
He wants the red and black jersey to retire him rather than him retiring of his own accord, blessing his hamstrings as he goes.
When he was 18, Caolan Mooney had the world at his feet.
Spool forward to the present and he still has the world at his feet. It’s just a different kind of world - one of contentment and stability.
Two things you cannot buy that Mooney probably always craved.
“When he was at St Colman’s you could not dislike Caolan,” Murray reminisces.
“The smile on his face, so pleasant and mannerly. A rogue in him too. He’d flash a smile at you and no matter what he’d done, you’d just say, ‘For God’s sake, Caolan.’ A well reared kid.”
