![\"Niamh](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/KWBZ6JBVFYMLHCJXBS5OB3IPMI.jpg\")
Niamh Crowley (left) and Niamh Donlon after Dublin’s win over Meath in last year’s All-Ireland final. Photograph: Ramsey Cardy\/Sportsfile <\/p>\nNiamh Crowley has no difficulty whatsoever in articulating on the raft of new challenges in women\u2019s Gaelic football. Which is both refreshing and remarkable, given the 21-year-old spent parts of her late childhood learning how to speak all over again.<\/p>\n
Crowley is already a two-time All-Ireland winner with Dublin, first tasting success in her debut season in 2023 before helping Dublin win back the title again last August.<\/p>\n
She has also come a long way. As an eight-year-old, not long after joining her club Fingallians, she was diagnosed with Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, an extremely rare childhood epilepsy which also robbed her of almost all her communication skills and ability to express herself. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s thought to impact on just one in a million people. Crowley has only recently come to understood how rare it is, and last year became an ambassador for the I Am Number 17 campaign, which raises awareness around rare diseases in Ireland.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy aspect to that was having a rare form of epilepsy when I was younger,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s one in a million.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey reckon it [Landau-Kleffner Syndrome] went on from when I was about six up until 10. I would have experienced seizures, specifically nocturnal seizures. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was kind of lucky, I was still able to play football the whole way through, it never interfered with my football. But it would have affected my expressive and receptive language. So all the language I had learned up until the age of eight, all my vocabulary and speech, had kind of deteriorated and kind of disappeared over a while.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spent lots of time doing speech therapy, in and out of Temple Street. And of course an endless amount of hours at the kitchen table with my dad, going over vocab, and trying to learn all that language again.\u201d<\/p>\n
Niamh Crowley (left) and Niamh Donlon after Dublin’s win over Meath in last year’s All-Ireland final. Photograph: Ramsey Cardy\/Sportsfile <\/p>\n
Speaking at an event organised by Dublin GAA sponsors Staycity, Crowley has clearly regained all her confidence too, parts of which she also lost to Landau-Kleffner Syndrome..<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would have been really frustrating, because in my head I knew what I wanted to say, but I just had no vocabulary, and I had to learn how to speak again.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was really embarrassing because you\u2019re in school and you\u2019re nine, 10, and you\u2019re stuttering and you can\u2019t explain yourself, and people are kind of looking at you.<\/p>\n
\u201cLuckily I\u2019m now 12 years seizure-free, and I\u2019d say the key to that was the early diagnosis, and the fact that my speech therapist had come across one of these cases when she was working in England. It was gradual, but through all that work I was able to regain all my skills.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Dublin’s Niamh Crowley in action against Kerry’s Caoimhe Evans during last weekend’s NFL Division 1 fixture. Photograph: Andrew Conan\/Inpho <\/p>\n