Sometimes they can referee it a bit like soccer

I’m 26 years of age. I’m from Eadestown, Co Kildare, but I live and play my Gaelic football in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia. My team is called Irmandinhos La Estrada.

Organised GAA games just started in Galicia when one guy went to Ireland and saw a Gaelic football match on TV and said: “I wouldn’t mind trying that out.”

He came back, started a team in A Coruña and in the last three years it has absolutely exploded. It’s on television here – TV Galicia. All the newspapers this week had us in the paper. The radio does a live report every week during the season.

It’s funny – there are more teams in Galicia than the rest of Spain combined. I put the popularity of the game here to the fact that Galicia is a Celtic region. They’re very similar to us.

You find in Madrid and Barcelona it’s a lot of Irish university students on Erasmus, and most teams are recruiting Irish guys to come over, whereas here it has taken off because it is completely Galician.

There are only three Irish guys in the whole Galician league, including myself, out of 500. Galicians say Gaelic football “is a sport that has all sports wrapped up into one”. That’s why they love it. It has multiple scores. People are a bit tired here of the endless 0-0 scores and all the money in soccer.

They’d be soft

Games are played on Astroturf soccer pitches. We put GAA posts up. It’s 11-a-side. It’s very professional. The referees do refereeing courses. There was one in Belgium recently.

Sometimes they can ref it a bit like soccer – they’d be soft, which gets to me at times. A tackle that at home would be judged a brilliant tackle could be judged here as a foul. I haven’t seen any diving but you might see a lad who would make a foul look worse than it is. They’d be kind of chickeny.

The GAA here is a bit like a family. I’m not just talking about your club, but the entire league. After every match, they have what’s called El Tercera Tiempo, or the third time, after the first half and the second half, where teams meet up after the game.

The club that’s hosting will provide food and teams get together and have a few beers. I don’t see that happening at home.

Everyone gets on well and looks after each other. I love it. They’ve started something beautiful here.