Coursing through their childhood veins were hopes of making Croke Park on All-Ireland day but both would also later harbour hopes of a life immersed in a professional sport too.

Eimear got her chance first when crossing codes eight years ago after being identified by IRFU talent scouts and a globe-trotting career in the Sevens sport commenced, visions of an Olympics at once fleeting but then unrequited.

Ailish soon made the same journey but via a different path and half a world away.

Signed by Adelaide in 2019, she won the AFLW Premiership title in her first season, the first Irishwoman to do so, while the Crows also reached the recent Grand Final in Melbourne, though her side lost to Brisbane, featuring Tipp’s Orla O’Dwyer, in front of nearly 23,000 supporters as normal life continues apace Down Under.

For Eimear, whose teaching profession required her to step away from the semi-professional Sevens circuit, the recently concluded Six Nations was a confection of expected wins and an inevitable defeat, performed in ghostly Covid-restricted stadia, and in a sport that struggles still for credibility and traction in this country.

She remains an ‘elite athlete’ but one unrewarded for her endeavours.

“I’m still a professional,” she insists, unwaveringly.

Ailish is now immersed in a still nascent sport but one which is at least semi-professional – salaries average €12k albeit many of the team supplement their income with other posts – and the female version of her sport has really begun to explode into the country’s consciousness despite only being conceived in 2017.

Irish rugby has struggled to attain such a consistent, straight-line development; Eimear remains wholly committed to it, however, remaining in 15s as Ireland seek to set aside their 2017 World Cup flop by qualifying for the tournament later this year.

Their passions are twinned with not only the vicissitudes of victory and defeat, but the ongoing struggle of female sport to elbow its way to the forefront of public vision, especially if one wants to pursue a professional career.

“It’s disappointing there aren’t more professional opportunities for females at this moment in time,” says Ailish, appreciating the irony of having to travel thousands of miles to receive modest reward for her proficiency.

“But I think things are starting to move in the right direction, to happen and change. Just the nature of sport I had chosen to play is quite limiting in that it’s an amateur sport.

“It was never going to be a professional dream, even though the dream is to play professional sport, all day every day and get paid for it.

“But I’m extremely privileged to be in Australia right now. I never thought I could see the say that I could play professionally as a woman.”

Eimear’s passionate pursuit admits no such scenario, for now at least, as women’s rugby lags behind.

“Professional is just a name,” she nevertheless insists. “Everything I do in my life is professional. I mightn’t have the title and I mightn’t have the payment, but everything I do is professional.

“Everything the girls on my team do is professional. Ask a GAA player and they’ll say the exact same thing: it’s just a label. Every decision they make goes around the game they play, even though it’s a hobby.”

In Irish rugby’s Herculean attempts to instil a viable structure, she does, at least, point to the enormous growth in her sister’s sport as a tentative template for her own.

“The AFL took a big loss initially financially by bringing in the women’s game but it has paid off.

“They took the risk of making them professional and putting them in big stadiums, they filled those big stadiums, they got more, they have a bigger player pool.

“Because they pumped the money into the game, the standard is higher and more people want to watch it and play it and you’re having a lot more people watching and attending games and participation so it’s really paid off for the AFLW and it is growing and growing at an awful rate.

“New clubs are popping up everywhere each year. In Adelaide, I know I think there’s going to be another team popping up next year and everywhere teams are popping up every year so it is definitely growing.”

Ailish agrees, and also alludes to the ‘split season’, whereby the women follow the men, as a boon; it was a fortunate circumstance for Eimear’s sport this spring.

“One thing they got very well was they didn’t coincide with the men’s season,” says Ailish.

“They had that on a bit of a trial this season, in terms of the end of our season and the start of the men’s season. Having a split season is something that has worked really, really well for the AFLW, just to get it off the ground and get it up and running.

“It gives football fans in Australia something to do all year around. The difference from the season that I started back in 2019 to the standard that is there now is just incredible, how it has risen so quickly and so much and just the support for the game has gone through the roof.”

The assumption that each woman will, now they are back in Clare, simply resume their GAA career is a lazy one; they are much too dedicated to their respective sports.

And the reality is, with Eimear now 30 and Ailish 29, their belated blooming at the highest levels of their sports may pave the way for many others to follow but also deny them the sustained, lengthy careers they may once have craved.

“Yes, it sounds great that people are talking about professionalism,” says Eimear of her sport’s glacial development. I’m a player who would love to be professional eventually, or who would have loved to start my career as a 21-year-old professional, but you have to be realistic.

“We all have jobs, careers, we all have partners and lives. It’s not feasible. If it happened in the morning I don’t think a lot of us would be able to do it, either.”

And so they will live in the moment, blazing their own individual trails.

Those that follow them will one day have cause to celebrate their legacy. For now, the Considines are too busy cementing their own.

Eimear and Ailish Considine were speaking at the launch of Aviva Ireland’s #LaceUpWithPride campaign