Former Ireland rugby player, Bernard Jackman, has enjoyed great success throughout his playing and coaching career, and is well-respected as a pundit and a keynote speaker.
The Co. Carlow man has played for Connacht, Leinster, and has coached Dragons in Wales and French side, Grenoble.
Jackman is head of high-performance sport at Horse Sport Ireland, and he comes from a family of cattle dealers near Tullow in Co. Carlow.
He was the keynote speaker at the Irish Pig Health Society (IPHS) Symposium held on Tuesday, April 16 at the Curragh Racecourse Exhibition Hall in Co. Kildare.
He told those attending that when he was a child, he used to spend a lot of time going to cattle marts, factories, and farms with his father in the lorry.
Jackman said: “My dad is not big into sport, just big into working hard and trying to make money from selling cattle.
“If he was in the lift with Roy Keane, Paul O’Connell, Ruby Walsh, Tiger Woods, he wouldn’t know who they are. He just wants to talk about cattle, the price of land, the price of diesel. That’s his passion.”
The former Ireland rugby player explained that his father rarely came to see him play as the games often clashed with the sales in Tullow Mart on a Friday and Carnew Mart in Co. Wicklow on a Saturday.
This continued into when Jackman began his coaching career, which saw him take charge of Grenoble in France in 2011.
“Every week I’d be ringing him asking about cattle, and the odd time he’d ask me if I had a match this week.
“One day he said to me, “what’s the name of that place you’re in again?”. I said “Grenoble”, and he said, “Pat Fox, who is a neighbour of ours, said there’s no rugby over there“.
Jackman said that further phone calls with his father “were a little bit strange”.
With this in mind, Jackman travelled back home to visit his father at home to check in on him, but his father was already at Carnew Mart attending a sale.
Jackman then travelled to the mart, where he said buyers usually hoard around the ring like “a scrum”, describing it as a “very social” event.
However, on this occasion, Jackman said that when he approached the sale ring, “some people went right and some people went left”.
He said: “I was there, ‘what’s going on? Do I smell? Is there a rumour about me?’. I tried to shake fellas’ hands and they wouldn’t shake my hand.”
Jackman then went into Arthur Quinn’s office at Carnew Mart, asking him why he was getting “the cold shoulder” from everyone at the sale.
“He goes, ‘Ah what do you expect, you’re over there in Chernobyl coaching the rugby team’.”
“So, my father spent a year telling people I was coaching Chernobyl instead of Grenoble,” Jackman added.