'It’s important to be happy playing football and see where it takes you'

Roma McLaughlin is settling into life at her new club Fortuna Hjørring and says before thinking about the possibility of the World Cup, her immediate priority is to be enjoying her football.

The Greencastle native trained with her new teammates for the first time on Monday having signed an 18-month professional contract in December.

The chance came about when the Danish club were in the lookout for a box-to-box midfielder and before she knew it, McLaughlin’s four-and-a-half years in the United States and Central Connecticut State University had come to an end.

Roma McLaughlin from Moville Community School, in action against Sarah Geaney of Christ the King Girls Secondary School from Cork at the Umbro FAI Schools Senior Girls Cup Final in 2012

“I will miss it a lot,” she told DonegalLive from Denmark this week. “There were so many memories and so many friends made since going over there first at 19.”

Now 24, McLaughlin made her senior debut as a Peamount United player for Sue Ronan’s Ireland in 2016 against Portugal and still has the photos with her family from Tallaght on her phone.

Although she speaks fondly of her time in Connecticut - where she studied Exercise Science for four years and qualified as an Exercise Physiologist - it didn’t seem likely to be on the radar for national team managers. The rising standard of players lining out for Ireland basically meant it’s either full-time or forget-about-it.

Roma McLaughlin of Republic of Ireland with supporters following the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup Qualifier match At Tallaght against Slovakia in 2018

However, McLaughlin helped the Blue Devils win the NEC title four times, where she was also named as the NEC Midfielder of the Year twice and earned a recall in 2021 under Vera Pauw.

The former Moville Community School student was part of the Republic of Ireland squad the night they defeated Scotland 1-0 at Hampden Park last October, with substitute Amber Barrett from Milford scoring the only goal to seal a place at the Fifa Women’s World Cup for the first time.

“I turned to Amber on the bench and said this game was set up for you,” says McLaughlin, in reference to the match being played just four days after the tragic explosion in Creeslough where 10 people lost their lives.

Barrett’s mother Jacqui is from Doe Point, just outside of Creeslough, and as soon as the ball hit the net in Glasgow, she poignantly reached for the commemorative black band on her left arm. That week the four Donegal members of the Irish party - Barrett, McLaughlin, Letterkenny native and Heart of Midlothian midfielder Ciara Grant, as well as Carndonagh’s Niamh McDaid, a sport scientist at STATSports, who McLaughin knows from her Illies Celtic days - all flicked through their phones as details of the tragedy unfolded to kept one another updated.

Republic of Ireland players and staff, from left, Amber Barrett, StatSports technician Niamh McDaid, Roma McLaughlin and Ciara Grant celebrate with a Donegal flag the Fifa Women's World Cup 2023 play-off match against Scotland at Hampden Park in Glasgow

“Amber is such a character,” McLaughlin said. “Her scoring the goal in Scotland was unbelievable. Right up there with the best ever. It was so nice for her to score after everything that happened.”

Barrett and McLaughlin spoke of playing on the continent, in her case with FFC Turbine Potsdam and FC Köln, where sessions are in German, meetings are in German. Another Irish international, Kyra Carusa, captains and runaway Kvindeligaen leaders champions HB Køge. Fortuna Hjørring are third at the midseason break with fixtures set to resume in late March.
Having arrived in Hjørring, a town of 27,000 people in north-east Denmark some 40 minutes from Aalborg and somewhere it “rains even more than it does at home,” on Friday, McLaughlin is still finding her barings.

“It’s a professional set-up here and the club has three houses here,” McLaughlin, who has been studying for her Uefa B License, says. “There’s the pitch, the training centre with an academy just right on the doorstep. Everything is communicated through English and I’m just getting to know everyone. It’s a great set-up and everyone seems so nice. I went for a wander at the weekend and everything is pretty close, inside of a kilometre or so."

As a little girl in Inishowen, Roma McLaughlin used to look up to the likes of Moville’s Niamh McLaughlin, the current Donegal captain and LGFA Players’ Player of the Year, who is five years her senior and played from Greencastle FC up as far as the final of the Uefa Women's U-17 Championships, where Ireland lost to Spain on penalties in 2010 in Switzerland.

“She was the player we would go down and watch and the one everyone talked about,” Roma says of Niamh. “I played a little Gaelic football with Moville, only really to help out and was never part of the county panels.”

Ireland will open their World Cup on July 20 at the Allianz Stadium in Sydney against the tournament co-hosts Australia, with 45,500 due to be in attendance, in what is bound to be a sea of colour.

Amber Barrett and Roma McLaughlin of Republic of Ireland celebrate following the Fifa Women's World Cup 2023 qualifying group A match between Republic of Ireland and Georgia at Tallaght Stadium in 2021 as Kate Keaney from Donegal town watches on

“Playing for Ireland was always at the back of my head but perhaps the fact I was in America, it was unlikely,” Roma McLaughlin said. “But getting recalled into the squad under Vera, well, it was almost like getting called up for the first time. Yes, of course, the World Cup is my goal now. For me, it’s important to be happy playing football and see where it takes you. I’m excited and happy to have got the chance to play full-time here.”