The left-sided player recounted some of his family history which made being drafted into the Irish squad special.<\/p>\n
“My grandfather was a Dubliner who emigrated to the US in 1958, started a family in the US, and I was born in New York City.<\/p>\n
“This was always a dream of mine, to represent this country, to do it for my grandfather. We’ve got a really strong Irish connection and roots.<\/p>\n
“My dad has always been a proud descendant of an Irishman and he’s always instilled those values in us. <\/p>\n
“My dad and my mum are super proud and I just want to do a job for them because they have invested so much in my career process.”<\/p>\n
O’Toole’s sister Jillian plays for Treaty United in the Irish Women’s Premier Division and she will return to Ireland to support her brother this week.<\/p>\n
“My fiancee and my aunt will be making the trip over and my sister will be coming back as well – her season just ended a couple of weeks ago. <\/p>\n
“I’ve been back [to Ireland] quite a bit. My sister plays football in Limerick, so I was here over the summer watching a match of hers and just always love my visits here.<\/p>\n
“My real interest [in playing for the Republic of Ireland] started growing a couple of years ago as I advanced with New York City and became a mainstay starter with the club.<\/p>\n
“That’s when the opportunity rang a bell and the discussions started back in February, I had conversation over the phone with Heimir.<\/p>\n
“He coached one of my current club team-mates at Jamaica previously so he contacted me and from there it was just about finding the right moment and it couldn’t be a bigger moment for it, so [I’m] really happy.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The left-sided player recounted some of his family history which made being drafted into the Irish squad special.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134941,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-134940","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}