Peter O’Mahony reveals how ‘bad business’ meeting with Graham Rowntree ‘fuelled a resentment’ and left him ‘raging’ with Munster
Retired Munster captain Peter O'Mahony and, inset, his former boss Graham Rowntree
The controversial fallout from Graham Rowntree’s short stint in charge of Munster has reignited following the publication of an extract from Peter O’Mahony’s forthcoming autobiography.
Rowntree was sacked in October 2024 after Munster arrived back from a two-match South African tour, bringing an end to the former England prop’s two-and-a-bit seasons as head coach at the Irish club.
The ex-Leicester front-rower had succeeded current Bath boss Johann van Graan in the role in Limerick in 2022, and Munster went on to win the United Rugby Championship at the end of his first campaign in charge the following May.
That trophy was a first for the province since their 2011 league triumph, but the optimism generated by this unexpected breakthrough success after a 12-year wait didn’t last and Rowntree was unceremoniously sacked 17 months later.
“Getting nowhere…”
Rowntree’s tenure was heavily criticised by Conor Murray when the long-serving Munster and Ireland scrum-half published his autobiography in September 2025, and the retired prop, who now coaches in Japanese rugby with Urayasu D-Rocks, is back in the firing line following the teaser released ahead of the launch of O’Mahony’s book.
After captaining Munster to their URC final success away to the Stormers in Cape Town, O’Mahony went on to feature heavily in Ireland’s run to the quarter-finals of the Rugby World Cup in France.
The back-rower’s central contract with the IRFU was set to expire at the end of the 2023/24 season, and he had told his agent that he wanted to stay on at Munster the following season. While the IRFU would make a contribution, they would no longer fully fund O’Mahony’s salary due to his age, meaning that Munster would have to cover the balance.
According to the All In extract published in the Sunday Independent ahead of this Thursday’s book launch by Penguin Sandycove, O’Mahony’s agent was “getting nowhere” with Philip Quinn, Munster’s chief operating officer, and the player then learned that Rowntree wanted to meet him.
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The summit, which took place just over three weeks after Ireland’s World Cup elimination, didn’t go well. “Very quickly, alarm bells started ringing,” O’Mahony reported.
“Conor (Ridge, the agent) had been in touch with Philip Quinn about extending my contract to 2025, so it was a surprise when Wig [Rowntree] said, ‘I thought you were going to come in and tell me you were finishing in July.’ If that’s what he thought, he hadn’t got the message from management.”
The situation flustered O’Mahony. “Wig, perhaps out of the best intentions, wanted to tell me himself that Munster would have no room for me when this season ended. I didn’t understand how he could think I’d go from playing 80 minutes in a quarter-final of a World Cup to being f**king useless for Munster six months later, but that’s what he was sitting there telling me.
“He was talking to me as if I’d missed a season and a half, played a few games and was now wandering in hoping Munster would roll the dice again. He didn’t want Munster to take that bet.”
Rowntree went to dismiss O’Mahony’s claim that the IRFU would contribute to his salary in 2024/25, insisting instead that he wasn’t capable of playing on even though he believed that he could compete for a place in the 2025 British and Irish Lions tour.
“Wig told me that my body wasn’t good enough to play rugby next season. ‘You’ll thank me for this’, he said. ‘Your body’s broken up. You’ll thank me for this next year,’ he kept telling me. He might not think I had a young man’s body any more, but he was speaking to me like I was a child.”
The conversation left O’Mahony furious. “I was raging now. All the frustrations, all the effort of not just playing for Munster, but the admin, the meetings, the meetings about meetings, sorting stuff off the field and all the other things that come with being a lifer – all of these things fuelled a resentment.
“There was a reasonable way to say to a 34-year-old, who had played for Munster since he was 18, that there was no contract extension beyond the summer, but this wasn’t it.
“From where I was sitting, Munster were being asked to put their hand in their pocket for the first time in a long time and they had nothing there. And the silence from the club in response to my agent’s request, followed by this meeting, seemed to be a pretty bad way of handling it.”
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The confrontation then ended with Rowntree allegedly throwing a pen across the floor of his office and telling O’Mahony to go and pick it up and show how stiff he was. “I’m like, ‘You’re f***ing joking me.’ Immediately he said, ‘Forget about that, that was a joke. You’ve read it wrong.’
“I’ve spent my adult life at the club, I said to myself, and this is what it’s come down to now: Wig throwing a pen across the floor for me to fetch like a f***ing dog… The meeting had ended.
“I knew this day was coming, I knew, as every professional knows, that the end will not necessarily be pleasant, but I couldn’t have imagined it would be handled like this. This is business, I told myself afterwards. It’s just f***ing business. But I thought it was bad business.”
O’Mahony went on to captain Ireland in their March 2024 Six Nations title-clinching win over Scotland, playing his last Test that July in South Africa. He retired from playing for Munster in May 2025, by which stage Rowntree was seven months gone from the club.