DCU Voices

DCU VOICES 68 DCU’s ‘Lion’ hungry for more action One of just two players to have played in all six tests on the last two Lions’ tours, Tadhg Furlong tells Mícheál Ó Scannáil why he feels he still has some unfinished business in the famous red jersey It’s far from playing for the British and Irish Lions that Tadhg Furlong would have daydreamed about when he sat through lectures in the DCU business building. While he was earmarked early in his New Ross RFC career as a star of the future, making what was then a very competitive Leinster squad would have been the Wexford man’s first priority. “I liked DCU,” Furlong told me. “It went hand in hand with rugby. I was in the business school, and I won’t lie, I wasn’t the most dedicated or committed student there was, but I really enjoyed it. I never thought I’d get here though. “The history and the players that went before is what makes the Lions so special. It’s the challenge of trying to mould four teams into one and make it work. The standard of training is ridiculously high, the level of talent there, the minds, and it’s the social side as well.” Furlong made his Leinster debut while still studying in Glasnevin. Still, little did he know then, that less than a decade later he’d be returning home from his second Lions tour. And with him on the plane home from South Africa was his Business Studies classmate from all those years ago, Tadhg Beirne. “I was in the same year and course as Beirney. I played underage with him, and we would have seen each other every morning and gone out to DCU then afterwards to get the college done,” Furlong said. “We would have been in the same groups for a lot of projects too so we would have got a lot of work done together.” Furlong’s second Lions tour ended in defeat. The Lions won the first test of the series before being beaten twice in the next two by South Africa. Michéal ÓScannáil (BA Journalism, 2018) Presenter and Reporter at RTÉ @moscannail “A lot of that stuff goes over your head. You’ve enough on your plate to be worrying about what’s being said in the media. I suppose it is a part of rugby now, it is a big part of the game.”