Maher milking all she can from farming and playing for Offaly

By Kevin Egan

Of all the games taking place all across the country on another full weekend of Centra National Camogie League action, Saturday’s fixture in Birr between Offaly and Down (2pm) is one of the most meaningful.

Down come into the contest with a spring in their steps. The Mourne County are the great survivors in Division 1B, having finished second or third from bottom each of the past four seasons, and with just four wins across those four campaigns.

However, they’ve already put one victory on the board this year thanks to a Dearbhla Magee goal and an attacking masterclass from Aimee McAleenan against Dublin last weekend, so a win this week would leave the Ulster side looking up the table at a potential final, rather than nervously at the trapdoor.

For Offaly, the 2026 campaign is all about finding their feet at a higher altitude. Last season was a success story from start to finish, with league and championship glory secured. However early reverses against Wexford and Limerick mean that opportunities to stay out of the drop zone and avoid an immediate return to Division 2 are disappearing fast.

Not that you’d know it from talking to Ciara Maher, who lined out at midfield for the Faithful County last Saturday. It’s later the same night when she bounces into this chat with undeniable positivity and energy, undeterred by the loss, and relentlessly confident that the team’s development is ongoing and the graph is moving in the right direction.

“There were plenty of good players we had to plan for last year, but physically, there is a difference,” is how she describes their first two games.

“You're not getting as much time in the ball, you're being swamped by three or four girls every time you get it in your hand, so it’s about being clever about it and we're working on that. We were very disappointed with our performance against Wexford and felt we could have done a lot better but against Limerick we were improved, we're definitely getting there.”

Maher is not the most physically imposing of players, and she admits that until she came out of minor, she never lifted a weight in the gym. Yet she’s a natural warrior who rarely takes a backward step in the trenches around the centre, and there’s little doubt in her mind that her farming background plays a huge part in that.

“We're milking cows at home, my father is full-time farming and there's four of us in it. I'm probably the most involved out of them all. All my summers I spent farming at home or with my uncle up in Templederry. I milk a herd of cows there in the evenings… I've been farming since I was small, I just have a huge interest in it.

“Every day is different. There could be a load of meal coming on a pallet you’d have to move that into a shed by yourself. You could be moving a thousand kilos and you wouldn't even realise. It is physically tough going, depending on what you’re doing.

“It would have a benefit to you, strength-wise, on the field. I know a lot of girls would say, ‘You're hardier now,’ I don't know whether you would be or not!”

The sparkle in Maher’s eye as she talks about farmwork makes it clear that while other inter-county players at the start of their careers (the UL student is just 20) might wish to move into a less demanding career, for her, farming and playing for Offaly are both central to her life, and there’s no plan to steer a course away from either.

She talks about the current low milk price and the impending Mercosur deal with no small amount of passion, not to mention dispelling one famous myth - “you couldn’t use a hurl for hunting cattle, it’s too short, you’d need an ash plant!” But to her, 36c a litre is like a defeat on the field. She doesn’t see setbacks as red flags, just something to work through.

The Moneygall player said she “had to go to college and get a degree,” so she’s studying to be an agricultural science teacher, with a block of teaching practice due to start alongside Tipperary star Grace O’Brien in St Joseph’s, Borrisoleigh.

“My father's got a lot of life in him yet,” she says, a hint that perhaps her time in the classroom mightn’t go the full 40 years if there comes a time when he chooses to pass on the reins. And she’s definitely front of the queue. Her two sisters, she notes, are “grand to stand in a gap, but they’d rather be somewhere else!”

While an evening’s milking is not ideal preparation for training afterwards, Maher talks about it as a situation that requires a solution, rather than considering it as an inevitable choice between two passions.

“In the evenings when we had training, [my uncle] would let me avoid the wash-up, and then I'd run after the cows were milked. Any other evenings I wasn't training, I was able to hang on.”

Admittedly, it will take some working out. “The way the inter-county thing has gone now, you're gone every night of the week and your weekends are basically ruled out. If I was farming full-time now and I had nobody with me, I think it definitely would have to be looked at. You'd have to get in someone to help you on the days you weren't there. But there are a few inter-county hurlers farming and they seem to be able to do it - 100%, it’s doable if you have help.

“If there's a match on, I'd take it fairly handy on the Friday, so, if I had to go and work, I might fodder, but I’d avoid any physical work.”

On the field, she certainly doesn’t shirk that physical side of the game, and her enthusiasm for the 2026 campaign hasn’t dimmed in the slightest. At least one positive result and probably two from their home games against Dublin and Down are likely to be needed to avoid relegation, but Maher feels these results are within their grasp, while the Leinster championship draw also offers opportunities for Offaly to continue to break new ground.

“We've nothing to lose now, we need to go out there and perform, and get a win, it's as simple as that,” she says of Saturday’s game at Grand Heating St Brendan’s Park.

“We haven’t been in a Leinster final for a few years and this year we play Dublin in a quarter-final with Carlow to play the winners. Kilkenny will be the favourites so every team on that side of the draw will think they have a great chance to get to the final, we certainly do. We’re all guns blazing for that too.

“We have 28 girls there driving each other on, it's exciting, with a few new faces. Everyone there, you can look left and right and know that the girl beside you is going to absolutely die out there for the jersey. It's important to have that in the group too.”

What better way to finish, than with a wholehearted declaration that this Offaly group is still ready to milk everything they can out of the 2026 season.