Eimear Corri Fallon pulls down the curtain on her international rugby career

AT the relatively young age of 27, Eimear Corri-Fallon has made the decision to call time on her international career in order to concentrate on her medical career.

It was not an easy decision for Corri-Fallon who first touched a rugby ball in Portlaoise RFC 15 odd years ago. In the intervening years she has gone from playing with Portlaoise underage teams to representing her country at the World Cup. No mean achievement.

Just six weeks after having played, what turned out to be her final game in the Irish shirt, against France in the World Cup, Eimear made public her retirement in an interview with Diarmuid Kearney, carried on the IRFU website on Friday.

It was news that shocked all but her closest confidants, including her parents, Siobhan and David. But this was the way Eimear went about her career, quietly, with no fuss. A doctor by profession, she had reached the point where balancing her two passions was becoming an almost impossible task.

“It hasn’t been an easy decision,” she said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be playing rugby for 15 years and have achieved quite big goals for me in the last number of years. In some aspects of it, I’m probably at the most successful end of my career. Me off the pitch is Eimear the doctor, and it hasn’t been easy balancing the two.” “I really wanted to do the two and really wanted to give the two my best shot. But it’s just where I am in my career now. I graduated in 2024. I’d done my year’s mandatory internship and I’d kind of started the pathway to consultancy on a formal training programme to get there. But just the demands of medicine don’t allow me to give rugby my 100%. And I think I’m not the type of person nor athlete that wants to be or wants to feel like I’m not able to give it my 100%.” Reflecting on how she took her first rugby steps out in Togher, Eimear recalled athletics were her first sporting love. Rugby came about largely due to the exploits of two other Portlaoise RFC members who made the international grade, Alison Miller and Emma Hooban.

“Athletics was actually my background. And just from being quite prominent locally in Portlaoise, I had competed in a couple of community games, national competitions and that. And it was actually Alison who happened to be what we call your manager when you’re there, looking after you when you’re residing up at the community games tournament.

“Alison would have been on my radar. And I happened to be in school (Scoil Chríost Rí) with Emma, who’s also been an Irish international as well. So I think it was probably a perfect combination of a lot of things. She was actually the one that got me involved. I would have been aware of it through Emma, I would have watched Alison Miller, be a huge inspiration for girls out there.

“That 2014 win over the Black Ferns, it’s kind of that era when rugby would have started getting on my radar. And then it just completely took over. I kind of love the contrast between the isolation or a kind of training on your own as an athlete to being in a team sport where everyone has a different role and you’re dependent upon your teammates or with this common goal. That just hugely appealed to me and kind of ever since 2010, 2011, it’s been all rugby.” Getting back to playing rugby at the highest Eimear gave a look into what it takes to combine playing a career. Graduating in 2024, Eimear began her mandatory internship while having to balance training, travel, and competing.

“When I was working and playing rugby, it was just very, very, very long days. And I did it because maybe stubbornness, but I absolutely wanted to do the two and I wanted to give the two my best shot.

“Getting up at about 6.30, leaving at 7 to be at work for 7.30-7.45. I’d be working 8 until 6 if I was lucky. We don’t technically have a fixed time in healthcare. It’s just when your patients are all stable enough and when all the jobs for the day have been done that you get to get away.

“I would have then gone from straight from work, to having my dinner in work to going straight to training and either getting my gym work at training or then having to get up the next morning if I’d missed it because work had gone over before all of that. It was just long days and not getting home then until maybe 10-10.30, and then doing it all again the next day.

“And your weekend would just be kind of a match on a Saturday, which could be all day if you have to travel up to the likes of Belfast or Limerick for the Energia AIL or obviously within interprovincial, you’re meeting in the morning and you’re playing your game and you have your post-match function and you get home afterwards.

“And then Sunday would be a food shop and prep all the meals, all the lunches, all the dinners for the week because I wouldn’t really get to have as much of a recovery time or a downtime as everyone else would and I’d be on my feet a lot.” But there has never been a moments regret.

“For me, I’m very happy with what I’ve achieved and I’m delighted to have been involved with the Irish group. And I just feel like the best thing for me going forward career-wise and the group going forward and me as a player is for me to kind of end things on my own terms and give medicine my 100%.” If there was even the merest hint of disappointment at ending her career at this stage, it was how the World Cup had ended for Ireland, losing to France in the quarter-final.

“The World Cup was amazing (but) the group wanted to go further and they absolutely are aiming to go further four years down the line in Australia. It’s the way the game is going and the development this group has done in the last couple of years that really does require 100% commitment. You really need to focus on everything, all the small margins, recovery, on-pitch, off-pitch analysis and all that sort of stuff.

“I had taken time out, I had committed to that group and I’m delighted to have been involved in the World Cup this year. But I just think going forward, I probably wouldn’t have been able to balance the two. And just for me, I went back to medicine.

“But I’d really like to be able to show people as well, it’s okay to have other interests. It’s okay to now have new dreams and follow those new dreams or new goals. I think it’s not often we see that side of the game. But it’s a hugely important side of the game because it doesn’t last forever, and that’s what I’m heading back into the scrubs.” But her boots are now about to be dumped, gathering dust in some cupboard. Eimear intends still playing with Blackrock where in 2016 after moving to Dublin for college, and perhaps even to Leinster down the road.

“Definitely not the end. It’s absolutely not the end of the road for me from a club or an Interprovincial side of things. It’s just a case of being at a crossroads whereby I need to be able to give 100% to either career or sports to best progress personally in either of them,” she said.

In the interim, anyone who knows Eimear will wish her luck in whatever direction her medical or rugby careers take her.