For more than 30 years, from his emergence in the early 1990s as hurling’s Harry Potter, DJ Carey has been a vector for rumour and gossip and tittle-tattle. In the beginning most of the stories that circulated were small-minded and petty, though sometimes they would be vicious too, delivered like a hurley-jab to the ribs. Were they true? All of them? Any of them? Carey’s denials were never the last word.
As the GAA’s first superstar, his name had a market value. On the field, he was a streak of lightning. Off the field, he was a clean-living, non-smoking, teetotaller with a soft voice and a winning smile. After matches he would be mobbed by kids looking for autographs. He obliged strangers and admirers with small talk. People were attracted to him. They wanted to touch the hem of his garment.
But he was also stalked by a faceless posse that Carey often described in interviews as “knockers”. Though they never confronted Carey face to face with their condemnations, he always claimed to know what they were saying. In the early 1990s the GAA’s puritanical objection to its players making a few bob from side hustles had started to crack, but it was still a divisive issue.
In those days, the accusations against Carey were that he was leveraging his name for money. On a completely different scale and with astronomically different consequences for him and his victims, that formed the central plank of his criminal scams over the past decade or more: he leveraged his name for money.
RM Block
During Carey’s playing career, it was victimless. In the first flush of his fame, he was asked to go here, there and everywhere and saying yes seemed to be his default response. It sparked rumours about how much he was being paid for medals presentations or coaching sessions or cutting the ribbon on a new supermarket. The perception hardened, though, that he was hungry for public appearances, of all kinds.
Carey fought those flames for years. He would bring it up in interviews and plead that he never sought a penny from a club to attend one of their functions or conduct a training session with their kids. In any case, nobody had been ripped off. Whether you believed him or not was a rolling referendum on Carey’s bona fides.
“The odd day you’d get petrol money or diesel money,” he said in a 2004 interview. “Then, more often than not, you’d get a trophy that’s probably worth a 100 quid or more, which is big money. But you’d prefer to have got the money’s worth, because you’re after going there, and I don’t care, you know, unless you’re born into money, like, a few bob for everyone comes in handy.”
Carey and money became an item in the public imagination. When he returned from an aborted six-week retirement in 1998, the Kilkenny county board felt compelled to organise a press conference, partly to rebut rumours that the Kilkenny supporters club had induced his come back with a payment. There was no other player in the history of the GAA, before or since, about whom such a thing would be said, much less believed.
“Kilkenny refute Carey ‘cash for play’ rumours’,” was a headline in the following morning’s Irish Independent.
“People were talking about me getting money for coming back,” he said in an interview a year later. “I had family sitting in the stands [at matches] listening to opposition supporters shouting, ‘Pull across him, he’s getting paid for it, he deserves it’.”
What changed over time, though, was the openness of Carey’s relationship with money. It was no longer a mistress. In the GAA he was a persistent agitator for change. Carey was adamant that GAA players should be allowed monetise their public profile, either with the GAA’s existing sponsors or others in the corporate sector. Those relationships have been normalised since, and the GAA has accounted for them in their rules, but at the height of Carey’s playing career it was an area of ongoing conflict.
No other player in the GAA, though, was better positioned to exploit that market than Carey. When Kevin Moran’s sports agency, ProActive, organised an Irish launch in 1997 Carey was one of a handful of GAA players to attend. Entering into an arrangement with a professional agency would have been in breach of the GAA’s rules on amateurism at the time, but Carey and others were committed to breaking new ground.
By 2003, he had hired Barbara Galavan as his manager. She had been part of U2’s management team for 17 years and was a friend of the businesswoman Sarah Newman, with whom Carey was in a relationship. No other GAA player needed a manager.
In that year alone, he had a sponsorship deal with Puma, was part of a billboard campaign for McCoy’s crisps, and released a Video/DVD that topped the bestseller charts for eight weeks. It was launched by Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach of the day, followed by a guest appearance on The Late Late Show, the biggest marketing stall on the national broadcaster. The film was also broadcast as part of RTÉ’s True Lives series.
Around that time, Carey paid a visit to Áras an Úachtaráin too. For an Irish sportsperson, his profile could not have been higher. The Celtic Tiger was heading towards peak giddiness and Carey’s name was for sale. Over many years, he had successfully commodified his status as a GAA player. Others followed over the last 20 years, but he was the pioneer.
[ DJ Carey belongs to a strange and depressing categoryOpens in new window ]
Not all of his personal appearances were common knowledge; he would be hired for corporate days, product launches, talks, golf events. How much money was he making from this work? The same people who speculated on his fees for presenting medals 10 years earlier kept adding zeros.
“I can sit back and smile about it,” he said in an interview, a few days after the 2003 League final. “I exaggerate things. You really exaggerate. Exaggerate to the last and it makes it worse for them. Padraig Harrington always says, ‘If they say you make €100,000 from appearances, tell them, no, you make €200,000.’ It makes them worse.
“For me, time moves on. I’m still hurling okay. I’m still going okay from a popularity point of view. I was never as popular – and I don’t mean to be bragging about that. I wouldn’t for one minute want to be bragging.”
Poring over long transcripts of old interviews with Carey from more than 20 years ago, every word he uttered is subject to a different lens now. In his prime, very few high-profile GAA players were as accessible to the media as he was. He was good in that environment. Comfortable. He didn’t give short answers.
It was obvious then, and it is even more apparent now, how conscious he was of managing the message. Repeatedly he would characterise himself as the victim of outside agents: the rumour mongers, the knockers, the sceptics. In his autobiography, published in 2013, he devoted a chapter to this entitled: “A rumour a day keeps the truth away.”
“The trouble is that one untrue story can fan out and multiply,” he wrote, never dreaming how that line would read more than a decade later.
With sportspeople, we’re always looking for a rounded picture. It is never just about the goals and points. Carey played that game. During his Kilkenny career he answered questions about his failed business and his broken marriage and the unique stresses of being DJ, even if it was really none of our business. Looking back, every simplistic attempt we made to understand his complexity was risible.
Along the way, his health would come up too. Around 2001 a rumour swept the southern half of the country that Carey had cancer. The story didn’t come from him and, when he was asked about it two years later, he confirmed that it wasn’t true.
He knew, though, how the rumour had started. Suffering from stomach pains, he had been sent to a hospital in Waterford for tests, which were conducted in the same area of the hospital that housed the oncology facilities. Somebody had recognised him and jumped to an unfounded conclusion. It was as innocent as that.
But according to Dodger, Eimear Ní Bhraonáin’s terrifically forensic new book on Carey’s life and crimes, he first started telling people that he had the disease just two years later, in 2005, while he was still playing for Kilkenny.
A Sick Man: DJ Carey and his cancer con
Other health issues came up too. He claimed once to have been hospitalised seven times with concussions suffered in hurling matches. Once would have been a huge story. Nobody questioned this assertion or pressed him for chapter and verse. Everybody in the media who had dealings with Carey knew his capacity to spin a yarn, but at that time he had no reputation as a liar.
When he appeared in the news for stories that had nothing to do with hurling, though, it often had a sensational quality. Ní Bhraonáin catalogues the extraordinary number of times that Carey was the victim of burglary, or at least claimed to be.
In one vouched incident his car was robbed from the forecourt of a garage while he was in the shop paying for diesel. This episode turned into a frantic car chase facilitated by a Good Samaritan who witnessed the theft and offered to help. Carey, though, gave slightly different accounts of what happened in interviews with three different newspapers, while other discrepancies emerged in court.
“The facts surrounding what happened with the car theft are difficult to substantiate when there are so many conflicting accounts and rumours, and the interviews that add to this confusion came from DJ himself,” writes Ní Bhraonáin.
Carey’s health hit the headlines in April 2012 when he collapsed in a Garda station while filling in a form. The story was one of the lead items on Tuesday’s main evening news, even though his medical condition was a matter of speculation at that stage. On Wednesday morning one middle-market newspaper devoted its first five tabloid pages to the news story and his back story: relationship break-up, business difficulties, debt. Among GAA players, only Carey had the capacity to cause such a splash.
According to his book, he was diagnosed with pericarditis, a virus that attacks the tissue around the heart wall. But while he was receiving treatment for that condition, they also found seven clots on his brain and two aneurysms. By the time the book was published in October 2013, however, those issues were reportedly under control.
“In early August this year I got the best news imaginable,” Carey wrote in his book. “I was given the medical all-clear. The various health problems I experienced over the previous 16 months have been sorted out and I’m in fine fettle again.”
The mesh of fact and fiction, though, is staggering. According to Ní Bhraonáin’s timeline it was from around this time “that DJ began to share the story that he had cancer in much greater detail with the people around him and that he became increasingly proactive in asking them for money to fund his treatment abroad.”
By the time his autobiography came out, the sky had fallen in on Carey’s financial affairs. His relationship with Newman had also ended. “I wouldn’t be a person who would go out and say, ‘Can you help me?’ It’s not in my nature to do that,” Carey said in an interview promoting his book.
“There were times I had to decide would I put 20 or 50 quid [diesel into the car] or would I eat tonight. There were times when I’d say to my sons I can’t get down tonight [to Kilkenny] because I’m busy. It was really that I couldn’t afford to put diesel in the car.”
Carey had entered a new and catastrophic phase of managing the message.
The relationship with money that Carey had cultivated during his intercounty career reached a dizzying zenith in the years immediately after his Kilkenny retirement in 2006. In that year, he was registered as the owner of a property in The K Club; two years later he was also registered as the owner of a property in Mount Juliet. He was also named as a personal guarantor – to the tune of €1.5 million – on borrowings made by Newman on another property in The K Club. They had a home in Monkstown, on Dublin’s south side, and a chalet in the Swiss Alps.
Carey’s pursuit of great riches had led to this precipice. In 2011, in the maw of the economic crash, the commercial court issued a judgment of €9.5 million against Carey and Newman. What he did next destroyed his life and severely wounded the lives of tens of others who were grotesquely scammed.
On Friday, victim impact statements were heard by the Central Criminal Court from some of the 13 parties he had defrauded. Among them was a distant cousin of Carey’s, whose wife was a cancer sufferer, and Tom Brennan, a consultant involved in the development of oncology drugs.
Of the nearly €400,000 Carey defrauded from his victims, €120,000 had come from Brennan, a man he approached out of the blue. Like all the others, he reached deep into his pocket out of the goodness of his heart.
“He completely took advantage of our friendship,” said the businessman Denis O’Brien, who gave about €135,000 to Carey, as well as the use of a house and a car. “I was completely duped by DJ Carey.”
Around the time his book came out Carey spoke about rebuilding his life from the rubble of his financial ruin. “The only thing I can control is me,” he said. “You go from there and get your confidence back. A person in business can make a few bob and lose it. No one can ever take away my five All-Irelands. No one can ever take my achievements away.”
None of that matters now.
