On November 19th, 2021, Dublin University went to the Aviva Stadium for an AIL Division 1A game on the all-weather back pitch against Lansdowne and started a 20-year-old lock who was in the Leinster sub-academy. Joe McCarthy had missed over a year-and-a-half’s rugby due to the pandemic and a badly torn hamstring.
Leo Cullen told the Trinity head coach Tony Smeeth: “You’ll have Joe now for the rest of the season. He needs games.” Well, to a degree that’s how it panned out, but not exactly.
Smeeth recalls of Trinity’s surprise 27-25 win on the back pitch: “We beat Lansdowne, which we don’t do very often, and they were quite strong, but he was immense that night. Leo was there, and suddenly we didn’t have him so often!
“Everybody was just stunned. Lansdowne had quite an experienced pack and he was throwing guys around, and he was only 20. That was the game that kind of launched him as far as they were concerned.
“He was the enforcer right off the bat. He’s an incredible counter-rucker. He was also a penalty machine, and he still is a bit, and his brother is going to be just as good. That’s the scary thing,” adds Smeeth of McCarthy’s 20-year-old sibling, Paddy, already about 115kg and a star of last season’s Irish Under-20 Grand Slam-winning, World Cup finalists at loosehead.
A week after that win over Lansdowne, Trinity were at home to Young Munster in College Park. Trinity’s starting secondrow was McCarthy and Harry Sheridan, another Irish Under-20 lock, now playing with Ulster.
“It was a good Young Munster team, but we had the two boys,” says Smeeth. “Joe was storming down the middle of the pitch with guys hanging off him. It was just incredible.”
The sides would finish fifth and sixth, but that day Trinity won by 38-3. The following January, Cullen gave McCarthy his Leinster debut against Cardiff, and he went on to play a dozen times for the province by the end of the season.
Andy Farrell was also suitably impressed. He brought McCarthy to New Zealand as part of the Irish tour, starting him in both games against the Maori All Blacks, and to South Africa as part of the Emerging Ireland tour the following September/October, when McCarthy started the wins over Griquas and the Cheetahs (as did Jack Crowley and Calvin Nash).
Fast forward to November 19th, 2022, exactly a year to the day since that barnstorming display on the Aviva back pitch and with an extraordinary symmetry, McCarthy was making his Test debut for Ireland against Australia at the Aviva Stadium.
In ways, the meteoric rise began that Friday night on the back pitch. Ever since McCarthy’s barnstorming breakthrough 2021-22 season, Leinster had marked him out as the long-awaited riposte to Will Skelton, their home-grown successor to Rocky Elsom, Nathan Hines, Brad Thorn and Scott Fardy, the answer to all their prayers in some ways.
We’ll never know how McCarthy’s career and indeed Leinster’s 2022-23 season might have panned out but for the ankle injury he suffered while training with the Irish squad in readiness for the Six Nations. It sidelined him for three months and the Champions Cup final came just too soon for him.
After La Rochelle beat Leinster, Ugo Monye ventured on BT Sport that the problem with Irish rugby was the lack of a Will Skelton in Blackrock College.
Ironically, scan a picture of the Willow Park under-13s from a decade ago, and McCarthy is third from the left in the back row, although you would struggled to pick him out.
“He was no bigger than anyone else at that stage,” recalls Smeeth, who was also that team’s coach. “But isn’t it an incredible comment by Ugo Monye? I’m not saying Joe is a Will Skelton but he’s a different type of power athlete, that’s for sure.”
That said, Smeeth freely admits: “Hand on heart, I can’t say I really remember him that well. He wouldn’t have been a starter.”
Since 2011, Séamus Toomey is a long-serving physio/forwards coach of the Blackrock College SCT, and he also admits: “To be honest with you, he only came to prominence in sixth year with the SCT. Joe McCarthy came out of the blue. But the most important thing about Joe McCarthy is that he’s a great human being. I couldn’t speak highly enough of him or his family.”
In McCarthy’s senior cup season, 2018-19, Blackrock were beaten in the quarter-finals by St Michael’s. “A few days after I got a lovely message from him,” recalls Toomey.
McCarthy said the past few days had been “horrible”, but thanked Toomey for being an inspiring coach, adding: ‘It’s been so special to be a part of this squad and what you have given me this year I will carry into the rest of my life’.
Toomey responded by encouraging McCarthy to put his energies into his Leaving Cert and to keep playing rugby ‘as I think you have potential. So stay with it and see what happens.’
The exchange took place on March 1st, 2019.
“You saw the way Joe looked after his brother Andrew after the game,” adds Toomey in reference to McCarthy giving the latter his man-of-the-match award in the Stade Vélodrome. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. They’re just a class family. Really decent, good people,” says Toomey.
“The most important thing for us is that we try to help the boys walk out the door as good people, and Joe McCarthy left this school with a good Leaving Cert and good values, and that’s the most important thing.
“Yeah, we want to win schools cups. We make no bones about that and we try our best every year. We also want to produce quality players and whatever their potential is, whether it’s AIL, representative or international, we want them to reach it.
“With Joe McCarthy, I don’t think anyone can sit here and say ‘we knew this was going to happen’. No, we didn’t. He came into the team in sixth year and as the year went on, he got better and better, and he’s continued to do that,” says Toomey, highlighting McCarthy’s work ethic and attention to detail,
“He was a good scrummaging right lock, he was a good back lifter, a good mauler, his jump ‘tech’ at that time needed work and you could see against France the other night, he’s starting to jump a bit more.”
McCarthy never made the Leinster schools team, but McCarthy played in a competition in Methodist College to mark the 150th anniversary. His performances caught the eye of Wayne Mitchell, the Talent ID manager at the IRFU and head coach of the Irish Clubs/Schools Under-18 side.
McCarthy scored two tries in a big performance against the English Counties in their annual Easter competition.
That led to recognition by the Leinster Under-19s, then the Irish Under-20s and a place in Leinster’s sub-academy. McCarthy played three times off the bench for the Irish Under-20s in the Covid-interrupted 2020 Six Nations as backup to Tom Ahern and Brian Deeny, before his 19th birthday. Alas, on the eve of the rearranged Under-20 Six Nations behind closed doors in Cardiff, McCarthy suffered a torn hamstring.
With the AIL also suspended for the 2020-21 season, it makes McCarthy’s rise in the last season-and-a-half even more meteoric. All the while, he has been studying global business at Trinity, and is already in fourth year, as only this season has he split his studies. “He’s a pretty extraordinary kid really,” says Smeeth.
Of the older McCarthy, Smeeth says the emergence of a 125kg lock is just what Leinster and Ireland needed. “But it’s not like he’s just a big plodder. He’s very athletic, more athletic now than I remember. They’ve obviously worked on his athletic ability, because now he swerves and he steps, whereas he used to be straight ahead,” says Smeeth, laughing.
“The big thing is that they stay healthy,” Smeeth says of the McCarthy brothers, “because they’re young guys and the way that they play. Paddy has just been out for the last four months with a shoulder injury and is playing for us this weekend (at home to Cork Con this afternoon). He’s probably more skilful than Joe and explosive as well. They’re like [Pacific] Islanders. I don’t know where they get that gene from because his mum and dad aren’t that big.”
There’s also no rugby in the family tree. His father – also Joe – hails from Castletownbere in west Cork, his mother Paula, who was a nurse, from Cashel in Tipperary. McCarthy was born in Manhattan, where the family moved when his father worked there for AIB, before coming back to Dublin when he was three.
Toomey does share Smeeth’s concerns about McCarthy’s wellbeing.
“He’s gone big-time since last weekend but Joe McCarthy, with all due respect, needs to be protected from himself. Joe McCarthy will offer for every ball, for every carry and if they don’t protect him and share the load in that Irish pack, he could get broken up. He is still developing, he’s still only 22, he’s still growing into his body, he’s still developing his game.”
But given reasonable luck with their health there’s no telling where this story will go. A frozen pitch denied them the chance to play together for Trinity in December 2022, but they did so for the last quarter against the Dragons last December when Paddy played his fourth game for the province off the bench.
Smeeth has no doubt that the younger McCarthy will be backing up Andrew Porter within two years, while Toomey believes both brothers will play for the Lions as well as Leinster and Ireland.
The journey of the McCarthys is only just beginning.
