Donegal athletes to be featured in new BRÚA documentary series on TG4

Four Donegal athletes are set to appear on a two-part TG4 series, which will air later this month.

BRÚ tells the story of four young Gaeilge-speaking amateur sportspeople, all dealing with the pressure of elite-level sport over the course of a season alongside their busy everyday lives.

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There’s a footballer in the form of Róisín Nic Ruairí; an athlete, Fódhla Nic Pháidín; a boxer Kaci Rock and a golfer,
Pádraig Ó Dochartaigh, and they all share the same will to win and dedicate themselves to their sport.

Róisín Nic Ruairí is the Donegal Ladies football captain. She was called up to the county senior team quite young and was made captain last year at a young age. Born in Glasgow, she moved to Donegal when she was five. She first played Gaelic football to make friends and realised she had a knack for it.

She has had a winner’s mentality since she was a young child, and dreams of winning the All-Ireland with her county. She is a fitness trainer and runs fitness classes in Rannafast, Donegal, and plays club football for a local club, Naomh Muire CLG.

Fódhla Nic Pháidín is from Derrybeg in Donegal and played all sorts of sports as a young child, including football and running at her local athletic club. She decided one evening to give the long jump a try and quickly showed a talent for it. She decided to concentrate on jumping, showing promise in both long jump and triple jump.

She’s a schoolteacher in Dublin. Now, alongside her teaching job, she trains several nights a week and heads home to Donegal at weekends to train at the club she represents, Rosses AC. Having had to take time away from the sport, she is back playing catch-up as she tries to get back to competing at the top.

Kaci Rock is a young boxer in her early twenties. She was born in Belfast to a Dublin father and a Belfast mother. Her father was a champion boxer, Jim Rock, and from an early age, Kaci was hooked on boxing herself. They moved to Wicklow when Kaci was three, and it was from here that her own boxing journey began.

She has won multiple National titles through the age brackets and dedicates herself full-time to her sport, travelling to Belfast to train at her club, Holy Trinity ABC. She hopes to go on to win an amateur world title and an Olympic medal in her weight class, before turning professional.

Pádraig Ó Dochartaigh is a young elite amateur golfer from Gaoth Dobhair. A winner of multiple top-level youth tournaments, he was struck down with a bad wrist injury at 19, when competing in a Pro-Am tournament in Europe. He was playing amateur golf full-time until the injury.

He plays golf out of Gweedore Golf Club and has competed in tournaments throughout Europe and in the Middle East. In Brú, he embarks on the road back from his wrist injury. After surgery, he goes through physiotherapy and rehab to build the wrist back up, as well as the rest of his upper body, hopeful of getting back to the level he was at before the injury, winning international tournaments and working towards turning professional.

The story is told over two episodes. In episode one, on Thursday, May 21, at 9.35pm we meet them all and hear about their lives and their aims for the season ahead. To achieve their goals, they must apply themselves to training regimes as tough as time allows.

In episode two, a week later, we see them compete in various tournaments and see the impact their progress throughout the season has on them. The series was produced by Brassneck Productions Ltd with funding from TG4 and Northern Ireland Screen’s Irish Language Broadcast Fund.

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