BROTHERS CONOR AND Kieran Joyce are busy with their careers as professional rugby players but they dedicate much of their spare time to another passion.

Originally from the West Midlands in the UK, both came through the Exiles system and played underage rugby for Ireland, with their parents hailing from Connemara and Donegal.

25-year-old Conor came through the ranks with Ulster and now plays for English Championship side Jersey, while 21-year-old Kieran is in Connacht’s academy and made his senior debut this season.

Jacob Stockdale with some of the Noggin Sport team. Source: Noggin Sport

The Joyce brothers are also the brains behind Noggin Sport, a community interest company that sells clothing to raise money for mental health charities.

So while some of their team-mates head home from training for a game of Fortnite, Conor and Kieran are often straight onto their laptops to deal with the latest batch of orders for their popular beanie hats, or to respond to people who have reached out from the ever-growing Noggin community.

With the likes of Ireland flanker Sean O’Brien and several GAA stars lending their support to Noggin, that community is growing and the Joyce brothers are hoping their message can make a difference.

“Our aim is to help people and make people realise that it’s ok to talk about how they feel, that mental health and mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of,” says Kieran, who also spent time with Ulster’s sub-academy.

“Everyone has different experiences but at some point or another, everyone goes through tough times. People have self-doubt and go through tough experiences so as we’ve got more and more clubs involved, the outreach has been fantastic.”

Kieran suffered with mental health issues during his time in Queen’s University Belfast, leaving him with first-hand experience of dealing with mental illness and an understanding of how difficult it can be to know who to turn to for help.

Kieran has made his first two senior appearances for Connacht this season. Source: Billy Stickland/INPHO

Encouraged by an entrepreneurship module in university to identify his passions, Kieran honed in on sport and mental health.

“I went home to Conor and we thought we could do something to combine the two,” he says. “Conor came up with the fantastic name of Noggin and the idea of combining sport and mental health and trying to help people. That’s where it was born.”

Noggin launched in 2017 and took off quickly.

“People connected with it,” says Conor, who made six senior appearances for Ulster before joining Jersey two seasons ago. “Everyone knows someone who has been affected by mental health issues in some capacity, so it’s been unbelievable the amount of support we’ve had for it.

“Around the time we were starting, we lost our uncle, who took his own life. That spurred us on to really go for it and try to make an impact, try to connect with people as much as we could so things like that don’t happen as much.

“We’re no experts in mental health but we’d try to advise people to go and see people who are trained in being able to help.

“We receive lots of messages from people opening up to us, which is great.”