Brian O’Driscoll has revealed that he received death threats following a viral Orange Order parade video.
The rugby star was filming his Shoulder to Shoulder documentary in Armagh during the summer and faced huge backlash after a video of him playing a Lambeg drum at an Orange Order parade went viral.
The drum is predominantly used by Unionists in Northern Ireland and is regularly played by the Orange Order on July 12th.
The father-of-two opened up about the backlash he received on RTÉ Radio One this morning: “One of the masters of one of the lodges came over and said ‘you’ll have a go at the Lambeg’ and I was like ‘sorry what was that?'”
“I kind of had a split second moment of ‘what am I going to do here?’ Can we just pause time and let me just think about this? But I just said you know what, I’m just going to go with the flow here,” he continued.
“I thought this guy is asking me and I’m sure they don’t typically ask anybody to come up and play their drum, particularly a Catholic from the south or a Republican,” the sports star said.
“So I said OK and I went over and next thing I know it’s on my neck,” he continued.
“I saw the cameras come out and the phones coming out and I just thought ‘oh I’m in trouble here,” Brian revealed.
The rugby player said that although he faced a lot of criticism for the video, he doesn’t regret it.
“Obviously there was a big fallout from it that evening, but I woke up the next day and I thought to myself ‘if I was put in the same situation again, would I do it again?’ And I absolutely would,” he admitted.
Brian then revealed that he even received a death threat because of the video, but didn’t seem too concerned about it as he joked that he actually felt flattered.
“I had one (tweet) from someone in Portadown saying ‘don’t come to Portadown in your Irish jersey or we’ll have eight lads there to give you a hiding and your family will be watching,'” he said.
“I kind of thought, first of all, that it was an inadvertent compliment they felt the need to get eight lads to give me a hiding. I thought four would have done the job,” the former rugby player laughed.
Shoulder to Shoulder is set to be released on October 12th on BT Sport 2.
