LONG READ Dan Sheehan: ‘I don’t feel that rugby swallows me up a whole lot’

“If you had asked me at the start of the season,” Leinster head coach Leo Cullen stated, “I’d prefer to be top of the URC table and all the rest. But if you asked me after our first four rounds, when we’d lost three times, we always knew it would be a season like this.”

So much is expected of Leinster, each season for the past 18 years, that anything less than perfect will be scrutinised. Picked apart. Leinster are fourth in the URC and the last Irish province standing in the Champions Cup. They will be heavy favourites for this Sunday’s Round of 16 clash with Edinburgh, with most of us aware trickier challenges await. The Scots beat Toulon and Gloucester in the pool stages to make the knock-outs – something Leinster senior coach Jacques Nienaber was eager to remind everyone of this week.

Leinster’s top brass have found themselves in a position “not where we want to be”. However, both Cullen and Nienaber are buoyed by the return of so many top stars. Andrew Porter and Tadhg Furlong (six starts between them) have combined for only 470 minutes in Leinster blue so far. Garry Ringrose and Jamie Osborne have eight starts (560 minutes played) between them. Hugo Keenan has played just once, for club and country, this season but is back and ready to go.

Last Friday, Dan Sheehan started only his fourth game of the season for Leinster. He has only played 373 minutes for his province, compared to 404 for Ireland. Against Scarlets, Leinster had nine British & Irish Lions in action. That is some amount of firepower.

Sheehan, in his first outing since the Six Nations, had some bright moments against Scarlets, notably an important breakdown turnover and assist for Josh Kenny’s first try. Now in his sixth season as a professional, the 27-year-old brings a sense of calm to proceedings. He has gone from ‘almost crisis meetings’ and ignoring the outside noise with Ireland to a Leinster team eager to start firing on full cylinders.

‘Family are my why’

It is February 2022 and Sheehan poses for a picture with his mother and father, Sinead and Barry, sisters Susie and Emma, and brother Bobby. The snap is taken after his third game for Ireland – a win over Wales – but it is the first time the whole Sheehan clan have been together to see him play for his country.

“They are my main reason for doing what I do,” says Sheehan. “They are my ‘why’, at the minute. Giving them the big days out. Growing up, watching and talking about rugby would have been a big part of what we did. Our relationship would have been around going to rugby matches, watching games together on TV or talking about what was going on in that world. That was a big part of our lives.”

Go back four years, to 2018, and Sheehan was 19, not long out of school and heading to France on a big adventure. He had started the year as fifth-choice hooker in the wider Ireland Under-20 squad. Injuries to Rónan Kelleher and Eoghan Clarke meant he made the cut for the World Rugby Under 20 Championship. It was an underwhelming tournament for the young Ireland team. Sheehan got a taste of the highs and lows sport can deliver, in rapid doses, when he lined out against Japan. He scored a try after 10 minutes but was then helped off after breaking his ankle.

I think my auntie was in a marketing agency at the time. They needed a kid willing to shave his head and my parents willingly put me forward!

Kelleher and Clarke were already ahead of him in the Leinster pecking order. Sheehan was kept on, as he recovered from the ankle injury, but was uncontracted, and unpaid. He impressed all the coaches and staff at Leinster with his resilience and, as one coach put it, “workability”. When he was fit enough to return to the field, he was drafted in for training sessions with the senior squad. Heads were soon turned. He was also making folks in club rugby take notice, with stand-out performances for Trinity and then Lansdowne in the All-Ireland-League. The Covid pandemic stalled that rapid rise but, when rugby returned after the first lockdown, Sheehan lined out for his Leinster debut.

It was the realisation of a childhood dream that must have felt far away, in more ways than one, when he and his family moved to Romania.

Rugby has always been a huge part of Sheehan’s life. When he was four, in 2003, he was introduced to Jonah Lomu. The All Blacks legend was in Dublin to do a photoshoot for a Ballygowan campaign. The marketing team were on the look-out for a boy to get a mini mohawk, like Lomu, and pose for pictures. “It was as simple as a family connection,” Sheehan recalled, last year. “I think my auntie was in a marketing agency at the time. They needed a kid willing to shave his head and my parents willingly put me forward!”

Sheehan was ready to run through walls after being in Lomu’s orbit. It was another few months before he went along to Bective Rangers for his first taste of minis rugby. When he was nine, the family decamped to Romania when his father got a job in Bucharest. Sheehan and his brother attended the American International School. He threw himself into soccer, softball and swimming, but there were always enough willing souls about to organise a game of rugby.

“After three years in Romania,” Sheehan recalls, “my parents decided to bring us back for an Irish education. Myself and my brother went to Clongowes when we came back. I went into second year and Bobby went into first, and we boarded there. It was obviously daunting at the start, as there was a lot to take in. But we settled in quickly enough. You just buy into the concept of boarding school and, by the end of it, you don’t know any different.

Whenever they feel I might be getting too big for my boots, they’ll quickly put a stop to that.

“I had some great memories there and it set me up well, when I left school, to be more independent. It’s a great school from the academic point of view but there was also that focus on sport too, if that’s a passion for you. I made a lot of good friends there.”

Sheehan would follow the likes of Rob Kearney, Tadhg Beirne, Dave Kearney, Will Connors, Fergus McFadden and Gordon D’Arcy in representing Clongowes on the international stage. After impressing in his first full season with Leinster, he made his Ireland debut in November 2021. The next three years would fly by, thick, fast and memorable – Grand Slam wins, a victorious tour to New Zealand, highs and lows at the 2023 World Cup and close, heartbreaking calls on Leinster’s Champions Cup odyssey.

So many of those moments were shared with his parents and siblings. “It’s as important to them as it is to me,” Sheehan says. “They’ve been travelling around to my games for years and get the same from it, almost, as I would. It’s definitely something I look back on and enjoy – giving them the days out.

“Then you have my brother Bobby (also a hooker), who has been around rugby for years. He was playing with UCD for a while, made his Leinster debut in October and is playing at a high enough standard that he might start picking up some more caps. A big part of our family’s identity is rugby and if we can give everyone a few big days out, it’s all good.

“As for home life,” he adds, “it’s completely normal. Whenever they feel I might be getting too big for my boots, they’ll quickly put a stop to that.”

In January 2025, Sheehan had the honour of captaining Leinster against Stormers (he first carried out the role in November 2023). It was also the occasion of his rugby comeback, after he tore knee ligaments during Ireland’s 2024 summer tour of South Africa. Typical of his all-action nature, Sheehan scored two tries in a winning effort on his return. Four weeks later and with Ireland captain – and good friend – Caelan Doris injured, Sheehan was asked to lead his country in a Six Nations clash with Wales. “It’s something I probably, as a kid, never thought I had the capabilities (for),” he said, at the time. “I was always a bit reserved as a child and only in the last few years have I really grown the leadership skills within both Leinster and Ireland.”

I do like to play golf and I’m into my food. I’m into going out and trying new places, or heading back to favourite spots.

Sheehan scored five tries for Ireland in the Six Nations, ran in two hat-tricks over the course of last season and in May, made his first ever British & Irish Lions squad. As well as captaining the Lions during a warm-up game in Australia, Sheehan started all three Tests. He scored tries in the first two encounters, helping to wrap up an impressive series win over the Wallabies. His first start of this season was at Soldier Field, Chicago as he captained Ireland in a tough loss to New Zealand.

It is very easy to simply run through his rugby achievements, but Sheehan insists sport is only a part of what makes him tick. Rugby is not all-consuming. Not quite.

“I don’t feel that rugby swallows me up a whole lot,” he says. “It’s something I really enjoy, and it never feels like it is getting too much. I do like to play golf and I’m into my food. I’m into going out and trying new places, or heading back to favourite spots. That helps me switch off and get my mind on something other than rugby. The main thing for that though would be friends. If I had a down week, we might organise a game of golf, away somewhere, so we can get away from things a bit, while still having that competitive edge. I haven’t got to that stage in my rugby career where I feel I have to get away from it.”

Sheehan is in a long-term relationship with Katherine Egan, an intern doctor at the Mater Hospital and a very handy hockey player. “Katherine is a busy woman, and she makes sure to take care of her own career and ambitions,” says Sheehan. “That’s what I love about her, to be honest. She has a huge drive to be successful in whatever she does, whether it is her hockey or in her career. She is a massive part of my life. She gets to as many games as she can but she offers a good grounding for me. She’s not flattered by the whole lifestyle. She’s been there before all of that, too. She does keep me grounded. She’s someone who… you’re not just this international rugby player, in their eyes. You’re just a normal person, in many ways.”

“Katherine knows me well, at this stage,” Sheehan adds. “She knows whether I’m getting too high or low and is able to put things back into context, fairly quickly, and we just go back to our normal lives. She is an incredible driver and I often do take things from her, like how incredibly driven she is to be successful. I see that and the commitment she puts into her own lifestyle and profession. We can bounce ideas off each other as well. She is great for that.”

One welcome distraction, away from sporting pursuits, comes from Sheehan being involved with GOAL. He is an ambassador for the international humanitarian response agency, founded in Ireland almost 50 years ago.

“I think a really important thing to do is to give back,” Sheehan comments. “Whether that is a drive for donations or just raising awareness of the great work places like GOAL are doing, using my platform – whatever that may be – to do some good. I’ve been partnered with them for a while now, so it’s great to be able to raise awareness and get in behind some of their campaigns – Jersey Day or the GOAL Mile… I’m conscious of how much we have going for us in Ireland and GOAL is great for raising awareness of what is going on in other parts of the world, where others don’t have it as easy and are going through tough times. It’s important to try help spread those stories, highlight some of the great work that’s going on by these agencies and give back in any way I can.”

We had four years with Leinster where we were getting to semi-finals and finals and coming up short, so to win that Grand Final against the Bulls was massive.

As the season approaches make-or-break territory, Sheehan is hopeful that Leinster’s URC triumph last season, and being part of a successful Lions tour, enhances the muscle memory. After losing Champions Cup finals with Leinster in 2022, 2023 and 2024, getting the job done against a determined, proud Wallabies side meant a huge deal.

“It was really special and it was a bit of a monkey off our back, for a lot of us,” Sheehan reflects. “Now I thought winning the URC title with Leinster was another big monkey off the back, too. We had four years with Leinster where we were getting to semi-finals and finals and coming up short, so to win that Grand Final against the Bulls was massive. Hopefully we can now kick on. We have that sense of winning and that taste for it.”