The GAA sporting legend, Denis Joseph (DJ) Carey (54), passed another milestone in ignominy on Monday when Judge Martin Nolan sentenced the twice-named Hurler of the Year to 5½ years in prison.
In July, the former Kilkenny captain pleaded guilty to 10 charges of using fraud and deception to cheat people out of money. The people named in the charges were just a sample of his victims in an extraordinary campaign of deception that lasted at least eight years and probably longer.
Carey still looked a strong, fit man in court, though his lawyers have said the fraudster – who falsely claimed he needed money to pay for cancer treatment – now has “genuine” heart issues.
Regarded as one of the greatest hurlers ever, Carey’s entire adult life has been lived in the spotlight, with his prowess bringing him to national attention while he was still in his teens.
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He came from a family steeped in the GAA. His granduncle, Paddy Phelan, won four All-Ireland medals with Kilkenny. His aunt, Peggy Carey, won four All-Ireland medals with the Kilkenny camogie team. His brother, Martin, was a substitute goalkeeper with the Kilkenny team while his sister, Catriona Carey, played hockey for Ireland and was a member of the Kilkenny camogie team.
Carey played for Kilkenny’s senior hurling team from 1989 to 2005, with his contribution making him not just a hero in his native county, but one of the most famous people in the country.
The early years of glory and fame were succeeded by high-profile stories of business failure and financial turmoil, and then of infamy.
Such was the media interest in Carey during his sporting career that his personal life was treated as national news. In 2003, on the day of the All-Ireland final, with Carey captaining the Kilkenny team, national newspapers reported the breakdown of his marriage to Christine, with whom he has two children.
A Sick Man: DJ Carey and his cancer con
A year later, his relationship with successful entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den star Sarah Newman became the subject of extensive media coverage.
Starting out as a story of glamour, romance and material wealth, it morphed into a story of a broken relationship mired in property debt.
In a newspaper interview earlier this year, Newman said she broke up with Carey in 2012 after a businessman in the K Club in Co Kildare – where the couple had a home – told her he had donated money to Carey to help him fund his alleged cancer care.
It was the first she had heard of Carey’s false claims. When she confronted him, she said, he lied to her, but she did not believe him.
During the mid-2010s, the former couple were before the High Court with AIB seeking to execute a multimillion-euro judgment against them.
Newman, who last year married Henry Digby, Baron of Offaly, was declared bankrupt in the UK in 2016, while the following year Carey secured a deal with the bank that saw his debt written down to just €60,000.
By that stage, his former golf-resort properties in the K Club and Mount Juliet in Co Kilkenny had been sold and the proceeds used to greatly reduce the €9.5 million the bank was owed.
The fraud charges he has pleaded guilty to stretched from January 2014 to September 2022 but do not cover all his victims. Others who were cheated chose not to press charges, with these including the Gaelic Players Association, which Carey helped found and which is reported to have given him money from its benevolent fund.
When Carey appeared before Blanchardstown District Court in 2023, he was granted free legal aid after the judge was told he had “no income whatsoever”. Since then, he has been signing on regularly in the Garda station in Athlone and reportedly living in a room in a shared house in the midlands.
It is a long way down for a man who was part of All-Ireland winning Kilkenny teams in 1992, 1993, 2000, 2002 and 2003.
He was Hurler of the Year in 1993 and 2000, and won nine All-Star awards. Since retiring from play, he managed the Kilkenny U21 hurlers and was a selector for the county senior team.
Even at the height of his fame, Carey was worried about money and the success of the business ventures he ran (which eventually failed).
“When you’re pulling the hair out of your head on a Sunday during a game wondering where a cheque is going to come to meet the bank on Monday, that’s when it’s tough,” he told The Irish Times in the late 1990s.
