“Bonjour. Je m’appelle Rory Grugan, et aujourd’hui on va parler des compétences du foot Gaélique ...”
On y va, Rory. The Armagh veteran is talking into a camera, standing alone on a pitch with a ball. He is speaking entirely in French, guiding the viewer through the skills of Gaelic football – le solo, le passe à la main, la prise de balle haute. His accent is just about spot on, Bordeaux by way of Ballymacnab.
This is how he has passed the winter. For 10 weeks between September and December, he travelled around France, putting on coaching sessions for schools and clubs the length and breadth of the country. He went to 17 GAA clubs and 23 schools, gave sessions to 640 club players and almost 1,000 schoolkids. He appeared on France 24 TV news and was interviewed in L’Équipe. A different kind of gap year.
“When I was going around primary schools and talking to eight- and nine-year-olds, they haven’t a clue of what the sport is,” Grugan says. “They’re shown a video of it from YouTube and they cotton on to it very quickly. They have no perception of who you are or anything like that obviously. They find it hilarious then when they find out that you’re a teacher but you’re also on YouTube playing in Croke Park in front of 80,000 people.
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“When you ask adults why they like playing it, they talk about the community side of it and the social aspect. But on the game itself, they like the fact that you use your hands and your feet, that there’s a lot of cardio fitness involved, there’s physical contests and all that stuff combined into one. These are French people playing a sport that they’ve come to completely fresh, not growing up with it like we do.”
When Grugan came off with four minutes to go against Kerry in Croke Park last year, he was as curious about what the future held as anyone. In the immediate term, there was no mystery – Armagh were nine down when he was replaced by Shane McPartlan and whether there were four minutes left or 40, they weren’t pulling it back. Armagh’s defence of Sam Maguire was over.
That could well have been that for him. He was 34 years old, he had his All-Ireland, he’d seen every spot and stripe of the intercounty game a few times over. Grugan played for Armagh when they were in Division Three, grinding out results in Tullamore and Mullingar and Wexford Park. He won All-Irelands as a minor and a senior, the only Armagh player ever to do it. If it was time to pull stumps, he was guaranteed a standing ovation as he walked to the boundary.
“With the stage I was at in my career, both as a teacher and with football, I basically didn’t know what 2026 held for me,” he says. “I knew I was taking a career break. I had been teaching for 10 years and I had already made that decision, that I was going to take a year away and do some travelling.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do in terms of my involvement with Armagh. I was just ready to try new things, essentially. And sometimes things just fall into your lap.”
Grugan has always been drawn to the French language, ever since family holidays when he was a kid. During his college days, he worked as a language assistant in Brittany for a while. When he started working, his day job was teaching French in St Macartan’s College in Monaghan, part of which involved running Erasmus exchange trips with a school in Belley, near Lyon. That’s how it started.
“They were over with us from Belley and as part of their trip to Ireland, they were learning about our culture and Gaelic games and that. The fella who is the head of Gaelic Games Europe, Chris Collins, was there observing what we were doing with them and he just got chatting to me about what he was doing in his role.
“We were just talking normal football stuff and I think a light bulb just went on in his mind around the potential to do what we ended up doing. He started working away in the background then with the French [GAA] federation and put together a programme that would allow maximum exposure for schools and clubs across France. That’s how it came about.”
And so was born a pilot programme called the GAA Player Exchange Programme, organised by GAA Europe and supported by the GPA and McKeever Sports. Grugan says himself that he was the guinea pig for the entire enterprise – this had never been done before and there was nobody to hold his hand to guide him through it. Daunting in one way but kind of thrilling too.
A typical day would have him in a school at 8.30am, taking three different explanation/coaching sessions through the day. He would try to fit in a bit of his own training in the afternoon ahead of a session with a club that evening. It involved a lot of travel, a lot of repetition and sometimes not a lot of sleep.
“It was intense at times, definitely. When you’re coaching, you’re always trying to put the best foot forward. You have to be very present and give a lot to it. Obviously, when you’re going there, people are excited to have you and are making a big deal of it.
The biggest surprise he got more or less everywhere he went was the make-up of his audience. Obviously in the schools, the kids were all locals. But he completely expected that when he’d stand in front of a crowd at a senior club, he’d be mostly talking to ex-pats. That wasn’t the case at all.
“I think at the start, because I just didn’t have the understanding of how much work was going on in France in regards to the GAA, I just assumed that the amount of actual French people I’d be talking to would be small enough. But I had the wrong idea, to be honest. The numbers of French people who are playing is growing all the time.
“So for me, the chance to deliver coaching to them in their language was great. It got me right out of my comfort zone and gave me great exposure to France and the French people, as well as the language. I was learning new things every day. You could see that they really loved the sport.”
The one complicating factor throughout was that Grugan was rehabbing an injury in probably the least helpful circumstances you could imagine. He had needed surgery on his heel/Achilles for a while and was in a lot of pain by the time Armagh lost to Kerry. But instead of going for an operation straight away, he held off on it until his club season with Ballymacnab was over.
“By the time I got the surgery, it was about 10 days out from getting on the ferry to France,” he says. “I remember on the Monday, my partner brought me up to Ulster Independent Clinic in Belfast to get rid of the crutches and that night I drove to Rosslare to get on the ferry. The next day, I was on my feet giving a coaching session.
“To be honest, that was the most difficult thing about the whole experience really. Just the way things worked out, I was on my feet a lot when I probably should have been resting up. But when you’re coaching, you’re the one who has to be leading it and demonstrating things so it was unavoidable. I was hobbling around the place. That was the major challenge, fitting in my own rehab and physio while doing it.”
When the programme came to an end just before Christmas, he took off travelling around southern hemisphere for five weeks. He got back from New Zealand on a Friday and was in with the Armagh squad on the Saturday, watching on as they lost by a point at home to Galway.
As much as it’s been an annoying league campaign for his team-mates, it’s been worse for Grugan – his injury is taking longer to recover than he’d hoped. At this stage, he’s crossing his fingers to be back in time for the championship.
“The worst of it is, it’s a feel thing. There’s not really markers you have to hit to know when it’s ready – it’s more a case of working away and knowing that eventually it will feel ready to play on. But it isn’t there yet. It usual takes about six months and I’m around five months into that.
“I suppose I’m just trying to help in other ways around the squad. It’s been a frustrating league but we feel we’re not too far away. Division One is so cut-throat that you don’t have to do much wrong and next thing you know you’re one win from five. It’s a big game against Dublin on Saturday night. We definitely don’t want to be relegated.”
