He arrived in a stork basket, 10 years ago next week. Conor Whelan had been the best forward on the 2014 Galway minor team but whatever currency that might have held in other years, it looked like pennies on the dollar this time around. Though he’d scored two goals against Limerick in the All-Ireland semi-final, Galway had been torched by 15 points. If there was help for the senior team coming from that group, it surely wasn’t coming in a hurry.
Anthony Cunningham saw it differently. Whelan was in his first year in college in Limerick when the then Galway manager got in touch. The first contact was early in the season but Whelan declined, not wanting to rush into it. By mid-summer, Cunningham was back asking again. It was in the run-up to the Leinster final and this time Whelan said yes.
His first training session was in the second week of June 2015. His first senior intercounty game was the All-Ireland quarter-final in July. Six weeks later, he was starting an All-Ireland final. An All Star nomination came on the back of a career that was three games old, none of them in the league or provincial championship. It must be a record.
“The stars aligned a little bit in terms of getting your chance and going in,” he says now, upon being reminded of the decade anniversary. “I suppose I stepped up and took it too. It seems like only yesterday really. When I look at the whole 11 seasons, it feels like one big blur.
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“It just goes so fast. Something that I always say is if you have a season where you get knocked out of the round robin series, you lose a lot those years because you’re only playing five championship games and the whole thing is over. You feel like you never really got started at all.
“I’ve been fortunate with injury, I’ve only missed one game – against Westmeath in 2022 and I could probably have played if I really needed to push my body. It’s been a journey, definitely. Lots of ups and downs.”
And plenty more to come, most likely. According to the numbers put together by hurling’s great annals-keeper Leo McGeough, Whelan has played 57 championship games for Galway. Of the current crop, all the players who have more than him – two Burkes, two Mannions and Conor Cooney – are all over 30. Whelan won’t be 29 until October.
But if it all ended tomorrow, he’d leave a hefty footprint behind him. He is the fourth-highest scorer in Galway’s history, with 16 goals and 129 points to his name. That 177 total means he is behind only Cathal Mannion (8-171, or 195), Cooney (14-199, or 241) and the unreachable Joe Canning (27-486, or 567). The difference with Whelan is that every one of his scores has come from play.
He has scored in 50 of his 57 games, has scored twice or more in 42 of them. He’s Galway’s only All Star forward this decade and one of only three Galway attackers to win multiple All Stars since the turn of the century – Canning and Damien Hayes are the others. By any measure, Whelan is among the greatest-ever Galway hurlers and as electric a player as the game has to offer.
And yet, when you’re looking for a lens through which to tell his story, hurling is probably one of the less interesting things to catch the eye. We might start with his PhD, which he is due to hand in this week. Go back to that 18-year-old in his first year in Mary I in 2015, giving a polite thanks but no thanks to the Galway management when they’re trying to make an intercounty hurler out of him. Now ask him about his PhD.
“So basically there’s 950 Gaelic games student athletes in Ireland,” he says. “An elite student athlete is someone who’s registered as a full-time student education level and they’ve spent at least one year on a senior intercounty panel. So there’s 950 of those registered with the GPA.
“I kind of came up with this concept of administrative intervention where you pair the student athlete with a mentor. My PhD is out of ATU Galway. There were 13 elite student athletes there and I paired them each with an alumnus in the college. So not somebody that was their lecturer and not somebody that was from their sporting environment. Somebody that they didn’t know.
“They were to meet every two weeks and just plan out their time for the student athlete. They set goals, both sporting, academic and personally. They were also there for social supports – any issues that come up around assignments, conflict between lectures and training and so on.
“We’re all aware of the mental health issues in Ireland and we’re all aware of the challenges that student athletes face. But you have to design something that’s realistic and something that you think students could utilise. The feedback I got from the 13 student athletes was that, yeah, there’s someone there and to be honest, I didn’t meet them every week. But if I needed them, he was there.”
Whelan’s day job is in occupational health and wellbeing with the Castle construction group. His PhD was always going to delve into some aspect of mental health: ever since his cousin, the Galway defender Niall Donohue, died by suicide in 2013, Whelan has continually immersed himself in that world. All going well, his PhD will form a template for the Gaelic Players Association (GPA) and other organisations to use to help student athletes manage their mental health and wellbeing from here on out.
“Initially, I kind of just wanted to understand it better. I suppose after my cousin had passed away, I was kind of pushed into that space a little bit and I was like, ‘If I’m going to be in this space, I want to really understand it and be able to offer actual tangible advice rather than just regurgitate other stuff you read.’
“[Niall’s death] is definitely a factor. I’ve been fortunate enough that I have also done a masters in psychology. I have been very interested in alcohol and addiction and spent some time volunteering in Cuan Mhuire [rehabilitation organisation] for six or seven months. I’ve always been interested in that concept of mental health and how far out it goes, what it delves into and all the different strands that affect it.
“And yeah, obviously Niall would be a factor in that. Unfortunately, he experienced acute mental illness. I suppose as a direct consequence of that, my view on mental health is that it’s not as abstract as people sometimes make it sound. There’s always factors in the background that can influence it.
“When you think of mental illness, you always think of acute mental illness, which probably makes up for about 15 per cent of the population. But there’s so many other variances within that 85 per cent.”
As for his own head, one of the ways he clears it is by travelling. Generally with friends but sometimes on his own, Whelan makes a point of getting away as much as he can in the off-season. Asia, Australia, South and Central America. Purposeful wandering, off the grid where possible.
“I suppose a couple of different things appeal about it,” he says. “I really enjoy the whole thing of just working hard and doing your turn, your graft, back here and then taking a few months and heading off at the end of it and seeing the place. Just going away and getting a fresh perspective. I find sometimes that you go away too and you have a lot of appreciation for the life that you’re coming back to and the things you have in your life.
“And being off the grid – I can remember being on the east coast of America with one of my best friends and you’re travelling for five hours on a Greyhound bus and you’ve no signal or anything. You’re not getting emails about work or anything like that. When you’re there, you’re there.
“That is definitely, in the modern world, one of the things I love the most about it. Just being completely there. Like, I don’t buy a Sim card in a new country. If I happen to go to a place that has wifi, great. And if I don’t, fine. I’m just here.
“Every day I was over in Japan, I was just literally heading off and my sole objective was, ‘I’m going to go here today. I have no idea where I’m going but I’m going to just explore this place and see what’s the crack with it.’ And you’re just going out and you’re literally people-watching in a cafe. You’re watching people go to their normal work dressed as full anime characters or whatever.”
He doesn’t train when he goes away. He doesn’t bring a hurley. He might get a run in somewhere but it won’t bother him if he doesn’t. He gets on a flight and leaves his life behind, the better to see what he can see.
“It’s really interesting from a mental health point of view to go to these places and see how they approach things. Places like Japan and South Korea have massive challenges around mental health. I couldn’t get over how much time they spend on their phones.
“In Japan, they have a suicide forest down around Mount Fuji that’s very famous. I was in South Korea and they have a really terrible work-life balance there. Just being in these countries shapes your perspective and changes it.”
And when he comes back, he’s a hurler again. He’s Conor Whelan, Galway’s best and most reliable forward. Micheál Donoghue used 40 players in the 2025 league campaign – only Tom Monaghan and Cianan Fahy played more minutes than Whelan. He’s carried his bat through the Leinster championship too – only getting a rest for the last half-hour against Antrim when Galway were well out the gap.
“It’s been very enjoyable. Micheál brings such positivity to the group and, in fairness, he’s given everyone a chance. He played 40 players in the league and I think he’s up around 30 in the championship as well.
“I’ve been part of groups before that have had that idea starting out but once you lose one or two games, have reverted to type. But he hasn’t done that. It’s really good to see young lads coming through and getting their chance.”
He would know. Not many have made better of it.
If you are affected by any of the issues in this piece, please contact The Samaritans at 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.ie
