By Matthew Wilson
Donegal Town native Niall McGroarty is enjoying the experience in Barbados as he continues to help to grow and develop Ireland’s native sport in the country.
Having spent the last number of years working in Dublin, McGroarty was seeking a change in scenery and having been offered a new role within his firm, he took the plunge and moved to the Caribbean island back in July.
“I wasn’t thinking about Barbados specifically but I was thinking about moving away and where I might go. I got offered a job out there and it was a big promotion for me and I thought it would be something different to live in Barbados and give it a go, so I decided to take the plunge on that basis.”
The Donegal Town man is passionate about his sport and has lined out for his local club Four Masters throughout the underage ranks while has also been involved with the Donegal Town Rugby Club.
On his arrival in Barbados, McGroarty met various other Irish natives who had emigrated to the country and they all shared the vision of wanting to share the sport of Gaelic football to the island.
Niall and four other Irish individuals sat down to discuss their plans about developing the sport in Barbados and from this talk, the Trident Gaels GAA Club came into fruition and grew in strength from here.
“I hadn’t played football seriously since minor level, I might’ve played one year of senior and I was mainly playing rugby when I was here.
“Being out in Barbados, I met a lot of Irish people and we were all passionate about bringing a bit of Ireland over to Barbados. We thought that if we put a bit of structure behind it then we could make a team and we could teach people to play.
“It was about three months ago now that we all sat down and had the idea. I don’t know if we really thought it would happen when we said it out loud but it really started growing legs from when we had the first training session.”
From a club that began with a group of Irish individuals, others began to gather for the training sessions which were scheduled and people from places such as the Netherlands, Sweden as well as a host of locals took to the field to get a taste of Ireland’s native game.
With only a handful of the attendees at the first number of training sessions having experienced Gaelic football before, the rules and skills of the game would have been a challenge for a lot of them to grasp, with McGroarty expressing that it’s a very different game to what most sports that people internationally may see.
With this in mind, Niall and the rest of the Irish contingent decided to break the rules and skills down and implement a structure which would allow the people that were new to the game to pick up the basic skills on a week-on-week basis.
“That’s the big challenge to be honest. We set ourselves a target that we would have a full rules game by the end of the year and it was such a challenge even getting everybody up to the level of learning all of the rules because it’s very different to most sports that people see internationally.
“We put a bit of structure on it and we called it an eight-week programme to get people up to speed with the game. Every week we focused on a different thing such as hand-passing, kicking, defending and that sort of stuff, with the aim of building up to a full rules game at the end.”
With the Trident GAA Club having only come into fruition six months ago, they had planned to get incorporated as an official club by the US GAA board this month for the 2026 campaign.
Being incorporated as a club allows them to receive funding from the Global Games Development Fund which will benefit them dearly towards their continued development.
“We were hoping to get incorporated as a club in January. Our county board is the US GAA as that’s the nearest one and they were really helpful. They seem to have this annual funding scheme called the Global Games Development Fund.
“Through that they give money to international clubs to try and support them for different bits of gear that they need and that kind of stuff. By right, we shouldn’t have been allowed in the 2025 one as we weren’t officially a club but they allowed us to enter off the back that we were going to be incorporated in 2026.”
McGroarty continued by discussing the future of the club and what they intend to do in the coming year, mentioning his plan to bring together clubs from other countries within the region for a GAA tournament later this year.
“We put together a project of what we wanted to do and our goal is to try for a recruitment drive in January, to get more local players to bring the numbers in the club up and do a similar eight-week programme to get them up to speed with the rules.
“This is all with the aim of having a seven-a-side tournament in March. We’re hoping to have three teams from Barbados at that and we’re going to invite clubs from Mexico, Miami, Bermuda and Cayman.”
The funding programme which Niall mentioned will certainly help the development of Gaelic football in Barbados and benefit their training regime.
The scheme is granting Trident Gaels with new portable goalposts as well as some training equipment which will allow them to alter the pitch size depending on numbers.
“From where the GAA are supporting, we’ve asked them mainly to help with the gear. The biggest thing we need and they’re helping us with is the goalposts, we’re looking for portable goalposts so that we can make the pitch smaller so that we can play seven-a-side.
“Right now we’re limited to playing full pitch because we only have rugby goalposts so that’ll be a huge help. It’ll really bring forward what we’re doing in training when we don’t have a full complement of players.
“They’re also helping out with things like footballs, bibs and general gear for training so it’s great.”
In co-founding the Trident Gaels GAA Club, it has helped McGroarty transition into life in Barbados, expressing that the weekly meetings have been a great way for himself and others to build new connections.
“It’s been great. I think it was a great way to build connections and to meet new faces from people coming down to training. We’ve noticed that we had people that were new to the island, coming down to training to try and meet people.
“It’s great for me, it helps me to build my network of friends out there and we’ve a great community around football. We would have training and we would usually go out to the beach for a swim afterwards. It’s a great social outlet as well as being a sporting outlet.”
