Mary Immaculate College and Limerick hurler, Shane O'Brien, pictured at the launch of the Electric Ireland GAA Higher Education Championships and Camogie Third Level Championships.
By John Harrington
Watching Shane O’Brien in action for Limerick in last year’s Munster Senior Hurling Final against Clare, it quickly became obvious why he’s nicknamed ‘The Bull’.
Though still only a teenager, the strapping 19-year-old made grown men look like boys as he won ball after ball, shrugged off would-be tacklers with ease, and scored two fine points in a hugely influential display.
In a viral video after Limerick’s 2023 All-Ireland Final win Darragh O’Donovan had warned us all that there would be no stopping “The Bull O’Brien” when he got going, and less than a year laer he was proven right.
There’s a rich tradition in Gaelic games of players earning life-long nicknames for the way they operate on a pitch, but O’Brien was ‘The Bull’ well before he ever picked up a hurley.
“That came from the parents,” he says with a smile. “I actually only saw the photo a couple of weeks ago at a family wedding. I was about six weeks old and I have a brother Dylan who's about three years older than me and I was actually bigger than him!
“So it came from the parents and a few lads from Kilmallock got wind of it then and Donovan got wind of it then and it went viral and been going on since then!”
Good genetics might have given O’Brien a decent head start, but he’s worked hard all his life to become both the hurler and athlete that he now is.
It surely helped that his father Adrian is one of the foremost strength and conditioning coaches in Ireland having worked with the Limerick footballers, Clare hurlers, and Tipperary footballers before joining John Kiely’s backroom team for the upcoming 2025 season.
Shane O'Brien of Limerick in action against Conor Cleary of Clare during the Munster GAA Hurling Senior Championship final match between Clare and Limerick at FBD Semple Stadium in Thurles, Tipperary. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile.
His methods in that role will be very familiar to his son who has always been an apt pupil when it comes to his father’s teachings on both strength and conditioning and his hurling coaching philosophy.
“Yeah, I've been doing work with Dad since I was eight or nine,” says O’Brien. “A lot of times now he would have been the enforcer on it! I never really liked the gym when I was younger. Ah no, he's been brilliant, I enjoyed it.
“We did things like going to Chelsea when I was younger and he did seminars and gyms over there and I would have went with him a lot of times and up the country to a lot of things as well so I've always kind of been with him in that sense going around to different places and being in a gym environment.
“It's a different sort of relationship you'd have with him when you come home compared to when you're out on the field. It's going fine, it's good.”
O’Brien has always been driven to be the best hurler he could be and as a child pucking a ball around would have regularly day-dreamed of hurling for Limerick in Munster Finals in front of a packed house.
He got to live it for real against Clare last year when he produced that performance that made him a national name, and the experience was everything he hoped it would be.
“Yeah, it was class,” he says. “The parade around before the game was just unbelievable.
“The atmosphere you'd get off the crowd. And as I walked past the new stand in Semple Stadium I locked eyes with a few family members and it was just such a cool moment.
“Out of the 40 thousand that were there whatever way I kind of locked eyes on them. It's brilliant for them as well because the parents would have brought me to training sessions from when I was six upwards and now for them to see me playing in those big matches and occasions is brilliant for them.”
Shane O'Brien of Limerick after his side's defeat in the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship semi-final match between Limerick and Cork at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Seb Daly/Sportsfile.
After that convincing Munster Final win over Clare Limerick were hot favourites to win a historic fifth All-Ireland title in a row but were then scalped in a classic All-Ireland semi-final by Cork.
It was a tough loss to process at the time, but O’Brien is more philosophical about it now.
“It was definitely disappointment initially,” he says. “The boys have been so used to winning that it's just a huge disappointment with how the year ended.
“We were going so well after winning the Munster Championship and we just got beaten by a better Cork side. The lads have no complaints about our performance, it was just disappointment from us with how we perormed ourselves.
“We've always known that if you're not top of your game then you're going to be beaten. Clare, Cork, Kilkenny, Galway, doesn't matter who it is, Tipperary, Waterford, they're going to beat you if you're not up to it. You just have to be top of your game every day.
“There have been so many battles that the lads have had throughout the last five years, coming out by a point of two, where if they weren't at the top of their game they would have been beaten too and there would have been no talk about a Drive for Five or any of that kind of stuff.”
This Limerick group has never looked like one that needs the friction of a rough experience to hone their edge, but that defeat to Cork will surely be a deep well of motivation for the season to come .
“Yeah, definitely,” says O’Brien. “We've hit the ground running. We got in a nice block of sessions before Christmas in December. Fellas definitely will have a chip on our shoulders to drive us on an extra bit, not that we weren't driven before, but it definitely will give us an extra bit of motivation coming into this year and hopefully we can get positive energy off that and drive on one step further than last year.
“Obviously there's a quality squad in there and making the 26 is going to be my first thing, cementing myself in that 26 and then from there on hopefully push on and get a few more minutes under the belt this year.”
Before he thinks about pulling a Limerick jersey on again, O’Brien is very much focused on the upcoming Electric Ireland Fitzgibbon Cup campaign with Mary Immaculate College.
They defeated a very fancied University of Limerick team in last year’s Final and if they’re going to successfully defend their title they’ll have to do it the hard way because they’ve been drawn in a ‘Group of Death’ with UL again, SETU Waterford, and ATU Galway.
“It's going to be tough,” says O’Brien. “We're out next Wednesday against ATU and by all accounts they're a very good team so we won't be taking anyone for granted.
“Jamie will have us up for each team and we'll know what we have to do. SETU will be no walkover either, we played them in the semi-final last year and they're a quality side. Then you obviously have UL in the last game of the group stage.
“Obviously dependent on how the first two games go, that will be a huge game inside in Mary I. So, yeah, it's going to be a competitive group. There's going to be no games given to us easily.”
