No one in Ireland needed another reason to be up for this Saturday’s match against France, not with the title on the line, and the grand slam, and the promise beyond it of a shot at becoming the first team in history to win the Six Nations back-to-back-to-back. All that, and the prospect of a spot on the British & Irish Lions tour down the line in the back of the mind. But they got three more good ones last week regardless when Cian Healy, Conor Murray, and Peter O’Mahony announced that they were going to retire, together, at the end of the championship, and that this would be the very last home game for all three of them.
Healy, Murray and O’Mahony have won 372 caps between them, which is more than you might find in a green Test XV. They have been ever-present through the era in which Irish rugby was transformed. Healy, who is the oldest of the three, won his first call-up in the spring of 2008 when they were still hopeful triers chasing their first grand slam in more than 50 years. It finally came a year later. Healy won his first cap that autumn in Brian O’Driscoll’s 100th match, a 20-20 draw against Australia.
Healy was only a kid, a “headbanger” he says himself, fond of a drink and not long out of Belvedere college but with a hell of a bench press on him and a natural athleticism that he had honed in a schoolboy career in track and field. He was packing down alongside old John Hayes, who had cut his teeth in the amateur days and who had played, on his own Test debut a decade earlier, alongside Peter Clohessy, and on and on back through the long lineage of hard-headed, horny-handed Irish front-rowers. Even then Healy was a different sort of beast, one of the first modern props.
In the early days the opposition reckoned they could get at Healy in the scrum, as they do every young kid, but in time he grew to be as good as any of them and by 2012 he was just about the best loosehead in the game. He was tough enough, with a mean streak that got him banned on a couple of occasions, and strong as any in the set pieces. But he was a menace in the loose, too. A neck injury almost did for him in 2015 and it’s a minor miracle of the medical sciences that he’s managed to play another decade of Test rugby since, ever-present on the bench, ready for his 20-minute stretch, his body held together with kinesiology tape and bandages.
Murray was next, in 2011. Six‑foot-some and broad as a barn door, he looked like a loose forward who had stumbled into the backline by accident. Good luck running down his channel. But Murray had a sharp pass too, plenty of smarts and a kicking game that was a weapon all of its own. Even now, you can’t think of him without Johnny Sexton alongside him (and the man deserves his ovation just for putting up with him in training for the best part of a decade), and a pod of forwards charging around the outside. Murray and Sexton ought to share an ampersand. They were the mechanism that Ireland’s clockwork attack worked around, the best pair of half-backs the country have ever had.
And then there was O’Mahony, last in, in 2012, youngest of the three, but maybe the oldest soul. Healy, a prop who could play like a centre, and Murray, a scrum-half who was shaped like a No 8, were models of modern players, members of the first of the generation to come through the professional Irish setup. But O’Mahony was a throwback, too small, too slow, too slight despite his farmer’s arms, to make it as a modern-day Test-match back‑rower; it took him a while to get by some of the bigger, more athletic men ahead of him. But he had a game that ran on anger, spit, sawdust and grit, and was hell to play against.
It was O’Mahony who derailed Eddie Jones’s England damn-near single-handed, on a miserable, damp, day in Dublin in 2017. England arrived on an 18-game winning streak, one away from breaking the record set by New Zealand, and one away, too, from winning back-to-back grand slam titles. Only O’Mahony wasn’t in the mood to let that happen. He smashed every tackle, made a mess of every ruck, charged hard in the loose, stole a crucial lineout in the final minutes and was named man of the match in what was one of the great performances in a career that’s been full of them. He almost managed a smile at the end of it. Almost.
Between the three of them, they played in five championship-winning sides and, as important, shaped the Irish side that finally beat the All Blacks after more than a hundred years of losing to them. That was at Soldier Field in Chicago in 2016, and the head-to-head between the teams since is tied at five matches each. They peeled off a couple of Test wins in South Africa too, once in 2016 and then again in 2024. And if there’s still, always the thing missing in all this, the World Cup victory that was beyond them in 2011, ’15, ’19, and ’23, that will fall on the next era of players, men who will have learned as much about what the game takes from Healy, Murray and O’Mahony, as they did themselves from the generation before them.
