IT’S THE END of May 2016 and the sun is shining down on buzzing Galway. Connacht are well into a third day of celebrating their stunning Pro12 title success. There are a few bleary eyes and heavy heads alright, but no one wants the festivities to end.
Matt Healy is jolted out of the revelry by a phone call.
“It was Joe Schmidt and he was like, ‘Put that bottle of Buckfast down, you’re coming into Ireland camp!’” recalls Healy with a hearty laugh.
Three-and-a-bit weeks later, Healy makes his Ireland debut against the Springboks in Port Elizabeth, putting the cherry on top of what has been the best season of his career – a rugby career that looked like it wasn’t going to happen at one point.
Healy recounts all of this on a busy Friday morning at My Little Flower, the coffee shop he opened in the town of Oughterard, about half an hour’s spin out west of Galway city, back in August. He didn’t pause for breath after hanging up his boots. Healy is grateful for what he achieved in the game, so the immediate transition hasn’t been too tough. It helped that his last season for Connacht wasn’t a good one. He was ready to move on.
In between speaking about rugby, 33-year-old Healy welcomes in the regulars and new customers alike, takes orders, chats away to them all, and looks at ease churning out coffees and teas. He’s an affable, likeable character so he’s well-suited to the new gig.
“It wasn’t this smooth at the start,” he says. “Anything like five coffees in an order would really throw me.”
The name, My Little Flower, comes from his two daughters, who both have flowers in their names: Mila Rose and Sophia Lily. And it was Sophia who wrote the letters for the logo after Healy’s designer asked that she give it a go. So this is a family affair.
Retiring from rugby last summer felt right. Healy only played once for Connacht in the entire 2021/22 season and when boss Andy Friend told him in March that there was no new contract for him, he had no interest in looking elsewhere.
He was relatively unscathed physically and recognised just how much his wife, Rachael, had sacrificed for him.
“It’s all the things you miss, weddings and birthdays,” explains Healy. “Rachael moved from Dublin two or three years into my stint here. That was big because she’s a serious home bird and all her family and friends were there.
Healy outside My Little Flower.
“This might sound silly but even holidays, you never really had that guarantee. Under one coach there were holidays planned and then taken away last-minute. When you have kids it gets even harder. So everything seemed to be leaning towards retiring.
“Had I not had the career I had, it might have felt harder. I’m very, very lucky to have had the career I’ve had.”
Healy had been proactive in speaking to others about moving on. His sense was that he needed to throw himself straight into something else. Coffee had become a passion over the last five years. His friends, Dan and Zarah, were the owners of Calendar Coffee roasters in Oughterard, and informal coffee chats soon became business meetings. Without game time in his last season, Healy had plenty of time to plan.
He did have a chance to play one last time at the end of last season in Connacht’s dead rubber against Zebre, but didn’t go for it.
“Friendy sort of… he sort of offered that to me. He said if I wanted to, I could play but I decided against it. It was always my approach that if the coach thinks I’m good enough, he will play me.
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“I never wanted to play on sympathy, I always wanted to play on merit. It would have been lovely and I know my family were dying for me to play. But I never wanted to play because the coach felt sorry for me.”
He finished up after 151 caps for Connacht and having been good enough to play on the wing for Ireland. Not bad for a guy who was a scrum-half all the way through to Ireland U20s level.
The Dublin native was a relative latecomer to rugby, only getting involved at secondary school in Gonzaga College.
“I had to get my mum to buy me a rugby jersey to wear to training, ” he says. “I remember the first time, rocking up in a brand new fresh French jersey. The lads were in their scraggy, dirty Lansdowne tops slagging me.”
He was soon dreaming of being a professional and played for Ireland through the age grades, emerging into the Leinster sub-academy but then getting released after the Junior World Cup in 2009. He was deeply discouraged and thought that was it, but went on to star in the All-Ireland League for Lansdowne.
The Dublin club had another good scrum-half called Brian O’Riordan at that time, so head coach Willie Clancy asked the pacy Healy to give the wing a go. The then 20-year-old scored two tries against Trinity to help seal Lansdowne’s promotion into Division 1 and never looked back, helping the club on towards their first AIL title in 2013.
Healy was prolific for Lansdowne in the AIL. Ryan Byrne / INPHO
Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO
During the three seasons that followed his move to the wing, Lansdowne folk like Mick Quinn and ex-Ireland centre Gordon D’Arcy encouraged Healy to keep chasing pro rugby.
He was hesitant, not wanting to feel the sting of rejection a second time, but Healy eventually got in touch with Niall Woods, his agent to this day. There was some talk of Leicester Tigers being interested at one stage, but Woods got him in with Eric Elwood’s Connacht.
So off he went on a one-year development contract, getting three caps in his first season but spending much of that campaign ridding himself of niggly physical issues. He would train all week with Connacht, then go back to Dublin to play AIL with Lansdowne.
“It was a bit shit, but they kept me on for another development contract,” says Healy. “I was 25 and I really wasn’t on a lot of money at all, scandalous actually! It was tough but thankfully it paid off. For lots of people, it doesn’t.”
Pat Lam’s arrival for Healy’s second season was good for him. The new boss helped him to become more structured and organised with his training. Skills coach Dave Ellis improved his kicking and passing. Backs coach Andre Bell analysed his game.
Healy’s confidence improved and he started to show the instinctive finishing prowess that he would become so well known for, notching six tries in 20 appearances in the 2013/14 season.
As with Connacht collectively, Healy grew and grew as a force through to that unforgettable 2015/16 season that ended with the province’s first-ever trophy in the Pro12. There were setbacks along the way as they got used to Pat Lam’s military-like demand for detail, but their momentum became an unstoppable force.
Healy says Lam’s focus on getting Connacht into the community was a big driving factor, giving the players a higher purpose and leading to remarkable moments like when they arrived at Murrayfield before the Pro12 final against Leinster to be greeted by a throng of thousands of their fans singing.
“I remember almost welling up,” says Healy. “I had my headphones on and was just thinking, ‘What the f**k, this is insane.’
“We got into the changing room and knew it was special. Pat got us together and said, ‘That was f**cking nuts, that doesn’t happen often.’ He told us to use that energy on the pitch. It went a long way and added to the whole day. I will never, ever forget getting off that bus. I get goosebumps thinking about it now.”
Leinster couldn’t live with them in the final, falling off tackles as they struggled to deal with the pace and invention of the Connacht attack. Everything worked for Healy and his team-mates in the beautiful Edinburgh sun.
Healy with Tiernan O'Halloran, Niyi Adeolokun, and the Pro12 trophy. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
A glorious day rolled into a magical night as Connacht flew back into Knock Airport to be greeted by another crowd of their fans at 2am in the morning.
“We had a sing-song there and then got on the bus to Galway. This is 3 in the morning and there were fires lit along the side of the road. 3 in the morning and people were up to light these fires so we’d see them for 10 seconds going by. It was so cool. Those are the memories that will live forever.”
There had been clamour all season for Healy to get a shot with Ireland but head coach Schmidt had resisted until injuries struck before South Africa. Not that Healy had any great expectations heading off on tour.
“I knew where I stood – I wasn’t going over to start any of the Tests because there were others ahead of me,” says Healy. “I definitely knew where I stood with Joe as well. He wasn’t my biggest fan at all.”
When Healy was in training with Ireland, he says Schmidt would bark at him for the least reason and he felt there was something the Kiwi just didn’t like about his play. He guessed it was his defence, with Connacht’s system under Lam set up so that wings didn’t make many tackles.
“Joe never really said much to me. I’d only be speculating on it. It’s something I’m very accepting of – coaches have their preferences and they like some players and people more than others. I knew that’s what sport is. It’s never your way all the time.”
But Healy got his Ireland cap as his parents watched on from the stands, replacing his injured Connacht team-mate Tiernan O’Halloran in the third Test. Ireland lost but it was an obvious high for Healy after a sensational season with Connacht.
Unfortunately for him, he broke his hand at the beginning of the next campaign and struggled with the injury for a long time.
“Even when I came back, I was shit,” he admits. “It did something to the proprioception, I had real issues with catching – which was never really my forte anyway!
Healy won his Ireland cap against South Africa. Billy Stickland / INPHO
Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO
“That’s not to say I would have got more Irish caps, but it definitely didn’t help. I was relatively old getting involved, I was 27 or around that. I knew Joe wasn’t my biggest fan and there were class wingers to compete with.”
There’s no sense of bitterness from Healy about it and he is content with what he got from rugby. He continued to score tries for Connacht over the following six years, living through the “very strange” season under Kieran Keane and on into the Friend era.
He enjoyed working with the Australian but 2021/22 was a quiet one after an injury early on and with the rise of new signing Mack Hansen. Healy’s final appearance came against Leicester back in January and that was that.
Nowadays, Healy is working six-day weeks as he does his best to ensure My Little Flower is a success, on top of being a dad.
He knows his new career will have twists and turns, ups and downs, but a decade in pro rugby has left him well-equipped to deal with all of that.
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'Joe said, 'Put that bottle of Buckfast down, you're coming into Ireland camp!''
IT’S THE END of May 2016 and the sun is shining down on buzzing Galway. Connacht are well into a third day of celebrating their stunning Pro12 title success. There are a few bleary eyes and heavy heads alright, but no one wants the festivities to end.
Matt Healy is jolted out of the revelry by a phone call.
“It was Joe Schmidt and he was like, ‘Put that bottle of Buckfast down, you’re coming into Ireland camp!’” recalls Healy with a hearty laugh.
Three-and-a-bit weeks later, Healy makes his Ireland debut against the Springboks in Port Elizabeth, putting the cherry on top of what has been the best season of his career – a rugby career that looked like it wasn’t going to happen at one point.
Healy recounts all of this on a busy Friday morning at My Little Flower, the coffee shop he opened in the town of Oughterard, about half an hour’s spin out west of Galway city, back in August. He didn’t pause for breath after hanging up his boots. Healy is grateful for what he achieved in the game, so the immediate transition hasn’t been too tough. It helped that his last season for Connacht wasn’t a good one. He was ready to move on.
In between speaking about rugby, 33-year-old Healy welcomes in the regulars and new customers alike, takes orders, chats away to them all, and looks at ease churning out coffees and teas. He’s an affable, likeable character so he’s well-suited to the new gig.
“It wasn’t this smooth at the start,” he says. “Anything like five coffees in an order would really throw me.”
The name, My Little Flower, comes from his two daughters, who both have flowers in their names: Mila Rose and Sophia Lily. And it was Sophia who wrote the letters for the logo after Healy’s designer asked that she give it a go. So this is a family affair.
Retiring from rugby last summer felt right. Healy only played once for Connacht in the entire 2021/22 season and when boss Andy Friend told him in March that there was no new contract for him, he had no interest in looking elsewhere.
He was relatively unscathed physically and recognised just how much his wife, Rachael, had sacrificed for him.
“It’s all the things you miss, weddings and birthdays,” explains Healy. “Rachael moved from Dublin two or three years into my stint here. That was big because she’s a serious home bird and all her family and friends were there.
“This might sound silly but even holidays, you never really had that guarantee. Under one coach there were holidays planned and then taken away last-minute. When you have kids it gets even harder. So everything seemed to be leaning towards retiring.
“Had I not had the career I had, it might have felt harder. I’m very, very lucky to have had the career I’ve had.”
Healy had been proactive in speaking to others about moving on. His sense was that he needed to throw himself straight into something else. Coffee had become a passion over the last five years. His friends, Dan and Zarah, were the owners of Calendar Coffee roasters in Oughterard, and informal coffee chats soon became business meetings. Without game time in his last season, Healy had plenty of time to plan.
He did have a chance to play one last time at the end of last season in Connacht’s dead rubber against Zebre, but didn’t go for it.
“Friendy sort of… he sort of offered that to me. He said if I wanted to, I could play but I decided against it. It was always my approach that if the coach thinks I’m good enough, he will play me.
“I never wanted to play on sympathy, I always wanted to play on merit. It would have been lovely and I know my family were dying for me to play. But I never wanted to play because the coach felt sorry for me.”
He finished up after 151 caps for Connacht and having been good enough to play on the wing for Ireland. Not bad for a guy who was a scrum-half all the way through to Ireland U20s level.
The Dublin native was a relative latecomer to rugby, only getting involved at secondary school in Gonzaga College.
“I had to get my mum to buy me a rugby jersey to wear to training, ” he says. “I remember the first time, rocking up in a brand new fresh French jersey. The lads were in their scraggy, dirty Lansdowne tops slagging me.”
He was soon dreaming of being a professional and played for Ireland through the age grades, emerging into the Leinster sub-academy but then getting released after the Junior World Cup in 2009. He was deeply discouraged and thought that was it, but went on to star in the All-Ireland League for Lansdowne.
The Dublin club had another good scrum-half called Brian O’Riordan at that time, so head coach Willie Clancy asked the pacy Healy to give the wing a go. The then 20-year-old scored two tries against Trinity to help seal Lansdowne’s promotion into Division 1 and never looked back, helping the club on towards their first AIL title in 2013.
During the three seasons that followed his move to the wing, Lansdowne folk like Mick Quinn and ex-Ireland centre Gordon D’Arcy encouraged Healy to keep chasing pro rugby.
He was hesitant, not wanting to feel the sting of rejection a second time, but Healy eventually got in touch with Niall Woods, his agent to this day. There was some talk of Leicester Tigers being interested at one stage, but Woods got him in with Eric Elwood’s Connacht.
So off he went on a one-year development contract, getting three caps in his first season but spending much of that campaign ridding himself of niggly physical issues. He would train all week with Connacht, then go back to Dublin to play AIL with Lansdowne.
“It was a bit shit, but they kept me on for another development contract,” says Healy. “I was 25 and I really wasn’t on a lot of money at all, scandalous actually! It was tough but thankfully it paid off. For lots of people, it doesn’t.”
Pat Lam’s arrival for Healy’s second season was good for him. The new boss helped him to become more structured and organised with his training. Skills coach Dave Ellis improved his kicking and passing. Backs coach Andre Bell analysed his game.
Healy’s confidence improved and he started to show the instinctive finishing prowess that he would become so well known for, notching six tries in 20 appearances in the 2013/14 season.
As with Connacht collectively, Healy grew and grew as a force through to that unforgettable 2015/16 season that ended with the province’s first-ever trophy in the Pro12. There were setbacks along the way as they got used to Pat Lam’s military-like demand for detail, but their momentum became an unstoppable force.
Healy says Lam’s focus on getting Connacht into the community was a big driving factor, giving the players a higher purpose and leading to remarkable moments like when they arrived at Murrayfield before the Pro12 final against Leinster to be greeted by a throng of thousands of their fans singing.
“I remember almost welling up,” says Healy. “I had my headphones on and was just thinking, ‘What the f**k, this is insane.’
“We got into the changing room and knew it was special. Pat got us together and said, ‘That was f**cking nuts, that doesn’t happen often.’ He told us to use that energy on the pitch. It went a long way and added to the whole day. I will never, ever forget getting off that bus. I get goosebumps thinking about it now.”
Leinster couldn’t live with them in the final, falling off tackles as they struggled to deal with the pace and invention of the Connacht attack. Everything worked for Healy and his team-mates in the beautiful Edinburgh sun.
A glorious day rolled into a magical night as Connacht flew back into Knock Airport to be greeted by another crowd of their fans at 2am in the morning.
“We had a sing-song there and then got on the bus to Galway. This is 3 in the morning and there were fires lit along the side of the road. 3 in the morning and people were up to light these fires so we’d see them for 10 seconds going by. It was so cool. Those are the memories that will live forever.”
There had been clamour all season for Healy to get a shot with Ireland but head coach Schmidt had resisted until injuries struck before South Africa. Not that Healy had any great expectations heading off on tour.
“I knew where I stood – I wasn’t going over to start any of the Tests because there were others ahead of me,” says Healy. “I definitely knew where I stood with Joe as well. He wasn’t my biggest fan at all.”
When Healy was in training with Ireland, he says Schmidt would bark at him for the least reason and he felt there was something the Kiwi just didn’t like about his play. He guessed it was his defence, with Connacht’s system under Lam set up so that wings didn’t make many tackles.
“Joe never really said much to me. I’d only be speculating on it. It’s something I’m very accepting of – coaches have their preferences and they like some players and people more than others. I knew that’s what sport is. It’s never your way all the time.”
But Healy got his Ireland cap as his parents watched on from the stands, replacing his injured Connacht team-mate Tiernan O’Halloran in the third Test. Ireland lost but it was an obvious high for Healy after a sensational season with Connacht.
Unfortunately for him, he broke his hand at the beginning of the next campaign and struggled with the injury for a long time.
“Even when I came back, I was shit,” he admits. “It did something to the proprioception, I had real issues with catching – which was never really my forte anyway!
“That’s not to say I would have got more Irish caps, but it definitely didn’t help. I was relatively old getting involved, I was 27 or around that. I knew Joe wasn’t my biggest fan and there were class wingers to compete with.”
There’s no sense of bitterness from Healy about it and he is content with what he got from rugby. He continued to score tries for Connacht over the following six years, living through the “very strange” season under Kieran Keane and on into the Friend era.
He enjoyed working with the Australian but 2021/22 was a quiet one after an injury early on and with the rise of new signing Mack Hansen. Healy’s final appearance came against Leicester back in January and that was that.
Nowadays, Healy is working six-day weeks as he does his best to ensure My Little Flower is a success, on top of being a dad.
He knows his new career will have twists and turns, ups and downs, but a decade in pro rugby has left him well-equipped to deal with all of that.
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