by Kevin Egan

By the time extra time got under way in last Saturday’s Glen Dimplex All-Ireland senior camogie quarter-final between Kilkenny and Waterford at Croke Park, the majority of the packed house of 82,300 were in the stadium to see the Cats prevail thanks to two Katie Nolan goals.

For the vast majority of camogie players, an audience of that scale is unprecedented – but for one Mayo player, it would be a comparatively slow day.

Broadcasting out of Monksland outside Athlone, iRadio covers a territory of 15 counties and recent JNLR figures suggested that a little under 100,000 people tune into their daily 10am show, hosted by Sharron Lynskey.

It will be a small fraction of that crowd who will make their way to Glennon Brothers Pearse Park to see Lynskey and her Mayo colleagues take on Monaghan in the All-Ireland Junior Championship final tomorrow (2pm, live on the Camogie Association’s YouTube channel) but even so, the excitement and tension she’s feeling in advance of the game is on a different level to when the microphone is put in front of her every morning.

“Truthfully, I am far less nervous doing that than I am for any match, never mind an All-Ireland final!” she says.

“When I’m on air I’m in a flow, it’s a music show, fast-paced, fun and light-hearted. The training that we get in radio is that you address one person, so I kind of always just think you’re talking to one person, and it’s a lot less daunting.

“When I pare it back like that, that’s what I’m doing, I’m up there talking to myself, which other people would deem as a bit cracked, and I think you have to be a little bit, to be in this industry

“You see the crowd that’s in Croke Park for games like the ones last Saturday, and it doesn’t even sync with the idea that that’s the amount that I’m supposed to be talking to every day.”

In the world of Gaelic games, any job that’s outside of the standard nine-to-five can be the death knell for a career, and for a lot of Lynskey’s early twenties, that was the case for her too. But after serving her time on the graveyard shifts at night and on weekends, the opportunity to move to a daytime show opened up a world of possibility.

A nudge from home was all that was needed then to get back in the fray with her home club.

“When my work was weekends, early mornings, late evenings, there wasn’t a hope of going back to play with Tooreen. I tried it for a little while but I was making the odd game here or there, I just couldn’t commit properly, so I cut the cord and transferred to a football club in Dublin.

“In 2021 I got the daytime show and I transferred back home, but initially I felt it’d be an easier transition to go back to football because camogie’s a more skilful game, and I was playing that bit of football in Dublin. Then about a year in, I was like, ‘Sure I’ll try the camogie,’ since it was all the same girls, and then once I kind of got back into camogie I was like, ‘I way prefer this.’”

Although she had played on development squads, it wasn’t until 2024, at 30 years of age, that Lynskey made her senior debut with Mayo as goalkeeper. Mayo didn’t field in 2025 but there was a renewed drive to fly the green and red colours in 2026, and in her own words, she had “grown my fitness and was ready to play outfield” and so was in at full-back berth when Mayo beat Monaghan, another side returning to adult fare though after a much longer absence, in this year’s Division 3B League final.

Perhaps because her window to play inter-county is that bit shorter as a result, she’s hugely appreciative of having this opportunity, and has been happy to sacrifice some side gigs to make it happen.

“After Covid when everything reopened, I was DJing as well. I would be out until 2 or 3am and then dragging myself out of the bed for a game and then wondering why I was injured!

“I still get offered gigs, Galway and Westport would still have a nighttime scene and there would be work in Castlebar as well. I’ve said no to most of it.

“When you say that you would turn down paid work for a volunteer sport, some people are looking at you as if you’ve two heads, going, ‘Why do you do that?’ but I was getting very burnt out there for a bit and I just had to work out, what do I actually enjoy?

“The radio show, that’s the day job and it’s fun, and very social hours, and I do still DJ some teenage discos - I love doing them because they’re finished at 11 o’clock.

“I think the worst part though is now I see some of the girls that I was DJing for coming up through our club now and I’m like, ’Oh, that’s a very strange dynamic!’”

Now living in Claremorris, she is happy to make sacrifices for the privilege of representing club and county.

“To be honest, when the girls have mentioned it about coming into the county, I didn’t need much arm twisting because I thought, ‘I’m not going to get many more opportunities to stick the Mayo jersey on me.’

“When girls have played county all the way up along from a very young age, you can become desensitised to how big a deal it is. There’s only three clubs so most of the girls have played county all through, they’re kind of used to wearing a Mayo jersey. But that is still such an honour and after being away, I was fresh to that honour, I felt it was a bigger deal than maybe the girls thought because they’d been in the fold for a long time.”

And if there was any doubt in her mind about the path she’s chosen, one moment during the group stages of the championship proved to her that she had made the right call.

“We were in MacHale Park for the last Monaghan game and there was something I hadn’t I hadn’t seen before.

“Young girls were coming up to us on the sideline asking us to sign hurls. When I was playing underage hurling there wasn’t that; I didn’t have someone to watch in MacHale Park so even just seeing how much it’s come on in that short enough space of time, that’s well worth it.

“You think of the DJ gigs, or anything else you could be doing, and all you can say is, ‘Yeah, I’ll happily kick those to the side if it means being on a pitch with the girls.’”

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