The train from Dublin to Cork. A cliche full of green fields. January weather. Odd sights and strange things.

What are they Dad? Cows?

What are cows Dad?

Well . . .

The first thing he remembers about Cork is rain. A colourless Sunday afternoon, Cork playing Dublin on the wireless.

Outside the rain. Soft and never-ending. The sheer insistent grey drizzle of it. In Sydney when nature provided rain it put on a show. Hard rain. Half an hour of it. Storm rain. Then curtain up and the resumption of sunshine. Normal service.

Leaving had been hard. They took off on a Saturday, friends and relatives crowding them at the airport with hugs and tears. Sean Og was 10. He knew Dad was Irish but never understood what that meant. Irish. Ireland. Words.

The airport. Saying goodbye to uncles, aunties and friends and the thought of not seeing them all the next day. Thoughts too vast for a 10-year-old to hold. For two or three months he remembers resenting his father. Why did he have to move. Why did he have to bring us here. This rain.

They left on a Saturday and in Sydney, well, Sunday was the day of play. Dad would take the boys to Borewood and their young minds would plug into Gaelic football. Once Dad had gone home to Ireland for family business and brought back a bundle of hurleys.

They took little interest beyond the odd dutiful puc around. Gaelic football was the Street leagues and sunny Sundays in Borewood.

In school rugby league was the only game. New South Wales has a passion for the sport and as usual it was the job of Christian Brothers to pass it on. Later when Sean and his brother Teu were back in north Cork and a few of the lads would start tipping around with an oval ball they discovered rugby union. And the Cork lads discovered league and its mysteries.

"Hey boys ye're not just down under with the accents, ye're down under in the head too."

Sean thinks about it. All that strangeness is just 11 years in the past. They had snow the first winter. Culture shock can freeze your ass. He came to Ireland and people thought he was a refugee out of Home and Away. He was a walking daytime soap.

G'day mates and the entire production. Lifetime ago.

Sean Halpin left Roslea in Fermanagh when he was 18 or 19 and went away to Australia to work on the buildings. For a while it seemed as if the only people he ever met there were from Cork or Kerry. It formed in his head that he'd go there if ever the time came.

First though he went to Fiji and met Emeli working behind the desk in a hotel. In Cork, for simplicity, Sean Og O hAilpin says that he and his mother are from Fiji. Technically it's true. You can't be explaining to every dog and divil about the 840 or so islands that make up Fiji.

Emeli came from and Sean Og was born on Rotuma, a tiny little full stop on the bottom of your map. It's hard to find a spot on the planet that is further from Cork. To get there you have to fly to Australia, cover the 2,000 or so miles to Suva on the big island of Viti Levu and then take a boat or a plane 400 miles north to Rotuma, a fleck in the eye of the Pacific, 22 miles in radius, 3,000 or so inhabitants and the imagination's view of paradise.

Beaches, sunshine, lushness. Coconuts even. So unchanging that you can still see what Captain Cook saw.

"Sometimes," says Sean Og, "I think about going there if I have a stinker of a match. That life, where nobody knows you or expects anything. Paradise."

When Emeli was young the parish priests in Rotuma were Fathers Johnston and Maguire. Both from Ireland. Irish. Ireland.

Just words. Now Emeli's four big sons dander around the house in Blarney and speak Fijian to her. And she knows they aren't the only Irishmen to know the language. The priests are out there somewhere. She is fastened to this part of the earth and Rotuma is a dot on the atlas.

Last year when her oldest boys Sean Og and Teu were in DCU together they would surf the net and ferret for pieces of news from Rotuma and Vanua Levu and Viti Levu and the other islands. Print them out and present them to her. Home. It's been 11 years since she's seen it.

They settled on the north side of Cork. Sean and Emeli. Four boys Sean Og, Teu, Setanta and Aisake. Two girls, Sarote and the youngest of the clan Etaoin, the only native Corkonian among them. A big happy house filled with games and languages and talk.

Cork and its strange passions has enveloped them. Abie Allen in Na Piarsaigh gives out a famous story. Na Piarsaigh are playing. Tight game. The younger brother Setanta doing well but more needed. Emeli on the sideline giving out a bit of Fijian as the game ebbs and flows. Things heading towards the wire.

Suddenly, clear as larksong, a string of Fijian words sailing across the field. Setanta's input to the game leaping instantly. Abie says to Emeli afterwards, what did you say to him there?

"I said `you'd better wake up or you'll be getting no dinner tonight'."

"That's the mother," says Sean Og. "She'll always notice. She says `you were a bit slow today' or `you were standing off him'. She'll enjoy a day like Sunday."

Cork became home but university in Dublin was good. Cork's clannishness can close in on a body. Leaving Cork for a while was breath filling his lungs. Sean Og stayed in digs the first year, the flats for two years and a place on campus for final year.

A North Mon man had set up a degree course in Finance, Computers and Enterprise, through Irish. Sean was part of the second year of intake. North Mon men blazing a trail.

Irish is part of him in a way he couldn't have imagined 11 years ago. He went through North Mon in the all-Irish stream. It was a struggle to get that far. His brothers and sisters were parachuted into gaelscoileanna on their return from Australia.

Sean Og missed the cut somehow and ended up in regular primary school doing extra classes at night. In North Mon, Brother Beausang devoted patient hours to helping him catch up. Instead of chafing against the language he embraced it.

At home he speaks Irish to his brothers and sisters, Fijian to his mother, English usually to his father. No set rules though.

Jazz.

"Whatever comes out we speak. I suppose bad language is the number one language. We would have had the old cupla focail in Australia. When I came to school here I had a lot of catching up to do. It was hard."

The Cork team have been infected with Sean Og's love of the tongue. Ted Owens does the physical training and is headmaster of a secondary school during the day. Every word which passes between himself and Sean Og is an Irish word. Seanie Farrell speaks a little. So does Donal Og in goal and a couple of the other lads.

"When we'd be under pressure we'd spark up in the Irish," says Sean Og. "Or in training we'll get it going. Even simple words. Just to get using the Irish."

Language he has. When it comes to the games he's still playing catch up, he reckons. He got involved early with Na Piarsaigh in Fairhill. Between there and North Mon he had his GAA education.

"I went up to Fairhill because of some friends and they joined me up. The football matches would be going on and that was no bother. Then they wanted me to play hurling and I was shy about that. I had a golf grip and I was all over the place. So I said I couldn't play. Abie Allen, who looks after all the kids, said that was fine, I was just to come and watch matches. That was worse so I says to him one day, I'll go up and have a go. Abie and Paddy Moore worked it out. Made me change my grip. Never looked back. Lucky to have two great men working on me.

"We were under-12s but we were allowed in the 13 C competition. We won that and there was the first taste of it. As I say, we never looked back."

He has colleges, minor, and under-21 All-Ireland medals plus one Cork county senior championship in the drawer whenever he decides to take a look back. And a senior career which stretches into the future, a reputation already freckled with greatness.

And of course two Munster senior finals looming this month. Hurling and football. Last of the great dual stars. He thought earlier this year the footballers would stop calling and he'd slide off to hurling, spared the ignominy of falling between two stools. Instead Mark O'Connor got injured.

So Larry stuck me in at full back. When Mark recovered I thought I'd be back to my rightful place on the bench. But he stuck with me. I played right through the league. Thought I'd be out maybe against Waterford but he played me again. So I'm still there.

I'm lucky so far, the games have a couple of weeks between them at least. Long-term I can't keep them both going, though. It's crazy.

Yet for now the craziness has brought him the best dance card of anyone on the floor. Two Munster finals this antic summer. The last season of such fond foolishness as playing two games at the highest level.

Coming off a bout of football, he finds his hurling touch hard to locate and he spends an afternoon at the back of the house, playing against "the back goal" that himself and his brothers created, the posts on the field of dreams.

Last year he took a job in the bank during the months when the sun was high and the championship was unwrapping itself. This year he has left his days free. He'll be stuffed into a suit for the rest of his life so why not one spell of this delirious caper?

He'll have one last summer like childhood, nothing but a string of games to link the days. He played for 10 different teams this year and now it funnels down to this. Big days with the big boys. Stuff he'll remember when he's 89 and doesn't know what day it is.

Tomorrow it is Clare. People are hungry for the spectacle of it. A Munster hurling final. Cork's light and gentle touch against the shellacking Claremen. Sean Og finds himself part of the central storyline. Last summer it was alleged widely and freely that he was racially abused during the corresponding game with Clare. He plays it down. To the point of denial almost.

"I tell you now it was blown out of proportion. I respect the Clare men what they have done for hurling. The fact that we lost had people sort of looking for excuses. It was documented last year. Racial abuse. None of that kind of thing happened like. There was some talking on the pitch. In every code of sport there is always talk on the pitch. I was out the wing with P J.

It was a Munster semi-final with everything at stake. P J is out to win. I am out to win. There's a bit of argy bargy. So what? It happens. At the time we seemed to be talking and they were presuming I was getting abuse off him. I laugh at it now."

So what was being said?

P J reckoned there was a good horse going in the Galway races and I didn't agree with him and I told him that. People think I've something against Clare because of that. I don't.

His first Munster final. He has mapped the steps in his head. Friday he'll train. Saturday he'll loaf. Keep himself to himself. Take a walk and watch the Aussie Rules football on TnaG.

Sunday on the bus and time will be fleeing fast. Through the crowds and into the dressingroom. Cork have their act together this year. No more dinners and team meetings in the mobbed Anner Hotel before games. In the dressing-room same old same old but with a twist. Ted Owens will speak. Corcoran will have words.

Landers will too. Then Jimmy Barry. The wind-up. He feels it in his gut when he thinks about it, the excitement, the rush.

Dreamtime.

It's Wednesday night now. Worn out with the waiting. Sean Og is wearing a black vest over a white T-shirt and pucking across the width of the Pairc Ui Chaoimh pitch. The stadium rises up all around him, grey and ominous like an eastern European relic. He essays a few sideline cuts, working the ball through the air like a golfer lightly stroking a nine iron.

Jimmy Barry Murphy and Ted Owens move among the players, joking and encouraging. Sean Og clips sliotar off the greasy turf, palms it, gives a little shimmy and pulls low towards Seanie Farrell.

Turns and keeps moving in the rain, the sheer insistent grey drizzle of it.

"Maith thu," says Ted Owens.