Mulcahy’s sword play take him to the Kendo World Championships

Talking Sport with Stephen Glennon

DESCRIBED by some as “a moving mediation” and “a way of life”, the Japanese martial art of Kendo embraces a myriad of values including respect and integrity while also cultivating traits and characteristics such as self-awareness and perseverance.

One such student of Kendo is Daniel Mulcahy. Twenty-two years of age – twenty-three next month – Mulcahy is very much his own man; evident by the fact that he pursues a sport that it is not just on the periphery of the sporting landscape but is the proverbial lighthouse erected at the very brink.

Yet, for all that, we know this sport. Maybe not in its bamboo, timber on timber, snap on snap form but as bright lights cutting semi-lit arenas – all for effect – from the movie franchise that is Star Wars.

Mulcahy’s entry into the sport – or way of life, as he would designate it – came at an early age when he joined a friend’s father, instructor Patrick Maguire, at Galway Kendo Club, which was then based in Scoil Mhuire in Moycullen. That was in 2010.

Jump forward four years, and some may remember a superb front-page picture in the Tribune of Mulcahy and his club-mate Macdara Maguire at the opening of the Japanese Cultural Exhibition at Galway Education Centre, where the club performed their martial art demonstration.

Since then, Mulcahy has grown up and taken over the running of Galway Kendo Club, now based at St. Nicholas Parochial School, which they moved into Summer of last year. The class is small – about a half dozen or so – but it is vibrant.

“Kendo is not really visible in Ireland but, it is very popular in Japan where it originated. As far as I am aware, it is even more popular than Judo or Karate, although, I know, those other martial arts have expanded out internationally much, much more,” he explains.

In Ireland, approximately 120 practise the art, with the largest club in Dublin. Exponents are as rare as the Jedi. Around Europe, it is a similar case, with the exception of France, he outlines.

“The real powerhouse in Europe is France. I found a chart of the relative number of practitioners and the graph for Ireland is like, flat – compared to France which just peaks. There is like a few thousand people practising it. So, obviously, their Kendo is of a different calibre.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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