Former Irish rugby 7s captain enjoying her time back with Tinahely

Lucy Mulhall of Wicklow in action against Nicola Brennan of Sligo during the 2018 TG4 All-Ireland Ladies Football Intermediate Championship quarter-final match ©Diarmuid Greene/Sportsfile

By Daire Walsh

After being away from the competitive arena for an extended period of time, former Ireland Women’s 7s rugby captain Lucy Mulhall Rock has enjoyed being back out on a Gaelic football pitch with her native Tinahely in Wicklow this year.

A key component of the seven-a-side game for the guts of 10 years, Mulhall Rock announced her international retirement in the aftermath of the Paris Olympics in 2024. While she did feature in group stage encounters with Great Britain and South Africa, a torn hamstring injury sustained in the latter game brought an abrupt halt to her on-field journey with Ireland in the French capital.

This led to a prolonged stint on the sideline and even though she travelled with the Tinahely panel when they faced Kilmacud Crokes in a Leinster senior club football championship final 12 months ago, she was pregnant at this time with her son Fionn.

However, Mulhall Rock subsequently returned to sporting action after giving birth earlier this year, and lined up alongside her sister Emily when Tinahely secured their 12th successive Wicklow senior football championship crown with a final victory against Bray Emmets on October 3.

“I had our son just at the end of April. As did Sarah Hogan and Jessie Byrne, we were all within two weeks of each other. Then Jackie Kinch a couple of months later. All of us are back playing now. It has just been really enjoyable for me. I was always involved with the club to a degree, but when you’re in something like rugby, you were all in,” Mulhall Rock acknowledged.

“It was such high commitment and you realise with a football team, you’re all in or you’re not. So it has been nice just to be able to go all in with them and enjoy the whole journey. It has just been really nice to reconnect with girls that I grew up playing with as well.”

In addition to how hectic it had been with Tinahely in recent months – their club championship campaign for 2026 only came to an end when losing out to Longford Slashers in a Leinster senior semi-final a little under a fortnight ago – Mulhall Rock is also being kept busy in her professional life.

As well as kick-starting a coaching platform for women called Femily with her former Ireland strength and conditioning coach Orlaith Curran at the beginning of the year, she has opened Rockies gym in Tinahely with her husband Michael in recent weeks.

“That’s another big jump or a big new chapter in our lives. It has been really rewarding and it has been nice to do something that I’m really passionate about and I really enjoy. Loving every minute of it, it’s nice to do it as well as a family,” Mulhall Rock acknowledged.

“My husband and I have been working on this for quite a while now and it’s nice just to have it up and running in our local town. Just really excited for where it can get to. Busy time, but learning every single day and hopefully can just get better at what I do every day.”

Her current ventures with Femily and Rockies are part of an interesting transition for Mulhall Rock, following on from a full decade of commitment to the cause of Irish rugby. Even before leading her country out at the Paris Olympics, she had also captained Ireland at the Rugby World Cup Sevens in 2018 and 2022, as well as travelling the globe on a regular basis as part of the World Series circuit.

Although she was primarily a 7s player, Mulhall Rock also represented Ireland at 15s level on a handful of occasions and scored a try in a Women’s Six Nations game against Italy in 2022. When she reflects on her time as an Irish international, the former Trinity College student admits she is still learning to appreciate what a rollercoaster that time in her life was.

“I probably haven’t sat down to process it all fully for what it was. Because when you’re in it you’re so hungry to just improve and for the next thing in sport, that you don’t really get a chance to look at it. It was such a huge opportunity. I often look back now and I think I was so young, I didn’t think about it and I just went for it.

“I’m so glad I did because now I probably wouldn’t have taken the risk, because it was such a risk at the time. It opened up so much for me, it allowed me to travel the world. Then it’s funny how it has all led back again to Tinahely and back to playing football. It’s like full circle, but it was amazing. I don’t take any of it for granted.”

Because the IRFU were actively looking for female players from other sports who could bring transferable skills over to sevens rugby, it was Mulhall Rock’s Gaelic football prowess that arguably led to her getting an opportunity to wear the green of her country.

As well as being a lifelong member of Tinahely, she has also represented Wicklow prominently at inter-county level and enjoyed a dream season with the Garden County in 2011.

Player of the match when the Leinster side drew with New York in a TG4 All-Ireland junior football championship final at Croke Park on September 25, Mulhall Rock scored 1-3 as Wicklow overcame their US-based counterparts in a replay at the same venue a fortnight later.

This already made it a special year for the Tinahely attacker, but it was made all the sweeter when she was named TG4 Junior Players’ Player of the Year at an All-Star ceremony just a number of weeks later.

“It was wild. I was going to secondary school, had started sixth year. The first All-Ireland I was 17 and I turned 18 in the week between because we had the replay obviously,” Mulhall Rock added.

“I remember on the day just having half of Tinahely up in Croke Park. There was so many of us from the team that were playing on it. It was class at the time. I just was so young to appreciate any of it really.”