Beyond peacekeeping duty
Even in the day job as head of the Labour Relations Commission, sport is all around Kieran Mulvey.
His office on Haddington Road offers a marvellous view of the Dublin skyline, with the Aviva Stadium down the road and its extravagant, futuristic rollercoaster-style edifice most strikingly catching the eye.
“It was almost literally built by import,” he says, before pointing to the port in the distance. “I’d come in for work in the morning and I’d see the trucks coming off the dock because they only had particular times during the day they could work on it (the stadium redevelopment). And then I’d watch these guys abseiling up here (the side of the Aviva) to put those panels into place.”
He used to be able to see Croke Park as well from up here before the new Treasury building went up but it’s a place he knows and loves well.
His first pilgrimage there was for the 1962 All-Ireland final featuring his native Roscommon and boyhood hero Gerry O’Malley. Ever since, he has delighted in bringing others there for the first time.
Back in August, the American federal mediator Scot Beckenbaugh and his South African equivalent attended the Cork-Dublin All-Ireland hurling semi-final with Mulvey. Beckenbaugh was critical to resolving the recent NBA and NHL lockout disputes where millionaire players and billionaire owners nearly tore their leagues apart for a few dollars more.
He was mesmerised by the relentless pace and skill of the game and teams but the real jawdropper was when at half-time Mulvey showed him the player pen pics and their occupations.
These guys playing in front of 65,000 would be back to their real jobs in the morning.
Often through the years when Mulvey himself would be back to work on a Monday morning he’d still find himself buzzing and chatting about the previous day’s exploits in Croker with a friend and colleague.
When he was appointed chief executive of the Labour Relations Commission back in 1991, Kevin Heffernan was chairman of the Labour Court.
“Once we’d talked about the different disputes that were up in front of us, we’d chat about what happened to that team in that game on the Sunday. Kevin took great pleasure in telling me about Roscommon’s several misses. I’m sure he’d be like that with any Mayo friends of his if he were still with us today. ‘What’s the point, lads?!’ Kevin would be like that. He’d focus in on your dilemma and pain with a wry grin on his face.”
He was a hard man but he was a fair man, too, Mulvey observed, which is why he thinks his old friend was both such a good GAA manager and Labour Court chairman.
“Kevin never got into the complexities of a dispute. He had what I would call a practitioner’s view of what needed to be settled. There would have been a view in the past that you gave the company the principle and the workers the money; in other words the company always won but the men got the money which meant they weren’t worried about the money!
“But the core of all disputes is finding that nugget of knowledge or information from listening to the parties which will settle the dispute. And Kevin would be able to do that, to say ‘Look, I’ve heard enough now. We need to get down to business. The fact you’re all here means you want this settled. It’s time to stop the noise and use the time more productively.’”
Like Heffo, Mulvey played both hurling and football in his youth, but hardly with such distinction.
He once won a county U14 medal hurling with Roscommon Gaels but it wasn’t like he played for the county.
His greatest claim to fame in football is to have shared a pitch with the late great Dermot Earley (“On or off the field, in or out of uniform, you could not but be impressed by Dermot Earley. He had a presence you’d want in a general or Chief of Staff. He wasn’t just one of the greatest players never to win an All-Ireland, he was one of the greatest soldiers this country has ever produced”).
To have made it onto the field at all in those days was a bit of an achievement when he looks back on it.
Recently he opened the fantastic new facilities of the Cherry Orchard football club in Dublin. It’s completely wheelchair-friendly; dressing rooms, showers, the lot. “In our time you togged out in the back of a car with your arse to the wind,” he laughs. “And when we took out our football boots, they weren’t all different colours like they are now, they were all the same brown, and you went into that field with the wind and the rain you were drenched before you hit a ball. And there were no physios, no doctors and no encouragement, just a manager shouting every kind of abuse at you!”
It regularly makes him grin, the hardship, the fun. He played soccer in UCD in his time there when The Ban was still in its pomp but that wouldn’t stop him returning home on the Saturday evening to play for the Gaels the following day.
“Coming back then on the train on the Sunday night, God almighty, your legs and your body would be wrecked. And if you didn’t get a seat on the train, it was really torture!”
He played a bit of everything. GAA. Soccer (“I had a reputation for being a bit overly-physical,” he grins). A bit of cricket in his youth. Shortly after he became the youngest general secretary of a trade union in his role with the Irish Federation of University Teachers, he was invited to join the Trinity College staff hockey team.
He’d be very catholic — in the best sense of the word — in his interest in sport which is why he is so ebullient about his role as chairman of the Irish Sports Council for the last three years.
“Sure it’s the best appointment in Irish public life!” he simply, boldly, proudly, declares. “You are assisting in promoting the best of Irish sport, from the lowest level of participation with, say, a junior club, to the highest level at Olympic performance. You are in a pivotal position to assist 59 sports and governing bodies, to promote Irish sport internationally, something that provides employment, entertainment to Irish people, which helps keep people healthy, active, away from crime. It’s humbling and a privilege to be entrusted with that.”
He hasn’t given up the day job, of course. He doesn’t know if that’s because he knows nothing else or every incoming government can’t get anyone else but he’s still there down in Haddington Road, often burning the midnight oil, to try to maintain the non-disruption of public services and his and Ireland’s record of having one of the most peaceful industrial countries in the world.
All the same he tends to fit in about 10 evenings a month for his work with the ISC. When he gets a chance to get some lunch he tries to link up with someone in sport, maybe one of the chief executives of the major national governing bodies — a Philip Browne just around the corner, John Delaney, Paraic Duffy, Swim Ireland’s Sarah Keane, cricket’s Warren Deutrom... It’s a major commitment, chairing the ISC, even for someone with no family obligations, but for Mulvey he can’t think of a better way of doing the state some more service.
He doesn’t travel to international events, thinks it would be inappropriate to do so when money is so tight in both Irish sport and Irish society in general. The one exception was for a few days in London late last summer when he took in some of the Paralympics and witnessed Jason Smyth sprint to gold.
“I can’t describe the pride and pleasure of seeing the tricolour going up in the Olympic Stadium that evening. I mean, if that doesn’t bring tears to someone’s eye, they’re not human, they’re not Irish.”
He seems particularly proud of the progress and success of Paralympics Ireland, of John Treacy’s belief in it and support in it. Treacy has been ISC chief executive for 17 years. Mulvey has served on enough state bodies to know a chairman and chief executive need to work well, that you can’t have two centres of power. Treacy and he work well together, mainly because Treacy works so hard — and so far ahead.
“John’s very quiet, patient, very workmanlike. He takes the long-term view. And I think that probably comes from his training as an athlete, the loneliness of the long-distance runner, if you will. That builds into you qualities of endurance and foresight that probably isn’t possible in a team sport. He believed in Rob Heffernan a long time ago so he supported them. The talent identification scheme he has helped establish and force NGBs (national governing bodies) to get into high performance is underplayed.
“Okay, sometimes you can have difficulties and disagreements but the long-term value he has added to Irish sport cannot be calculated. The faith and belief he invested in Paralympic sport, the potential he saw, was pivotal to the success they’ve had.”
Further evidence the ISC has been doing more than a good job is the fact the council recently lost such a valuable member. Finbarr Kirwan was poached by the US Olympic Committee to be the high performance director for track and field, swimming, equestrian, wrestling and shooting. In wanting to know how Ireland still performed with so little money, they wanted the Irish guy who could make the most of their considerable money.
Money is even more scarce for the Irish Sports Council now. The budget saw their funding cut from €43m to €40m for 2014. That’s back to 2006 funding levels. Just as Ireland is starting to make real strides in a range of sports it’ll be a struggle to maintain, let alone increase, the current levels of international success and general participation.
“We’re winning medals in a range of sports that we never have before. Our boxers have been consistently winning at the highest level. In sailing we’re succeeding at the highest level. In show jumping we’re winning medals. Ten years ago cricket was hardly known in Ireland; now you have 10,000 people in Malahide for a one-day international against England when it was the Irish [players playing for England] that beat the Irish.
“But we need to broaden the range of sports we’re entering and excelling in even more. It can’t always be boxing.”
He sees sports with great scope for improvement. We were a rowing nation, he claims, and can and should be again. Our female underage athletes are particularly competitive and promising. He’s been encouraged too by how Basketball Ireland has steadied its ship under the stewardship of Bernard O’Byrne. But all these sports need seed money. Every sport needs money. Sport itself needs money.
“We will be seeking to convince the Government that if any monies become available before the publishing of the Book of Estimates that we will get some of that money. One or two million euro would make a big difference to us. For example, in the Ministry of Agriculture, Simon Coveney got €54m for the greyhound and horse-racing industry. He got €55m last year. There are 27,000 people associated with the industry in Ireland, there is a turnover of €1.4 billion. Sport has 40,000 people associated with employment in it. It has a turnover of €2.4bn. And we get €40m to run it. There is a dichotomy there that has to be bridged.
“I’m a pragmatist. I know the pressure ministers are under, especially when they are cutting all across Irish society. And I think the Government have done a very good of getting the capital programme for sport restored. But I think there will be an opportunity before Christmas or in the New Year where we will be able to see if other funds have gone unspent within the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport and we believe both Minister Leo Varadkar and Michael Ring are very sympathetic to what we are undertaking.”
Mulvey also believes the Government should consider relieving the sports council of some long-running capital costs. Like Santry Stadium. Like the swimming pool in Limerick, a commitment the state made when there was no National Aquatic Centre in Dublin.
“We might be saying, ‘Look ministers, you’ve got capital funding; would you not take that off us?’ Because that is capital rather than concurrent funding. It would save us up to maybe €1m a year and help us maintain programmes that are worth maintaining.”
One of those is the player grants for inter-county GAA players. He knows there are people in the department who resent it but Mulvey feels the state is obliged in some way to acknowledge how they contribute to the emotional and indeed economic well-being of the country.
“I would find it very difficult to rationalise giving tax-free arrangements for professional players and not recognise the contribution of our amateur players in our national games. It (the scheme’s funding) is a lot smaller than it was, down now to less than €1 million, but we have an agreement with the GAA and GPA which I feel we should honour.”
Interestingly, he thinks that bond itself between the GAA and GPA was hugely enhanced by the Cork GAA dispute that Mulvey got drawn into five years ago.
In the day job, he has an expression: a talkout is better than a walkout. By the time he was asked to mediate, players had already walked out. Leading GAA officials felt he could get people to both talk and sort it out. Paraic Duffy, encountered Mulvey, during his work with the ASTI in his time as a secondary school principal. Christy Cooney had sat on the board of the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland with Mulvey. As it would turn out, while the GPA and Páirc Uí Chaoimh struggled — and still struggle — to come to an accommodation, the GPA and Croke Park found a way to work cohesively.
“Cork to me was a seminal point in my career. It showed to me the importance of mediation and how the skills you have in industrial relations are transferable. And I also think the GPA would not be within the GAA family as they are now without that Cork dispute. I think the GAA itself reacted positively and said, ‘Look, they’re our players at the end of the day, let’s resolve this and bring them into the family.’”
He admits he was a “neophyte” when it came to the intricacies of Cork GAA politics. When he became more familiar with it, he saw the nub of the issue.
“On one hand you had a group of young dynamic, articulate, educated players against a management system that was a feature of the GAA itself. And the younger players felt that management were taking a more hierarchical, benign attitude towards them. It was a difference that was essentially generational.”
It was personified in the figures of Donal Óg Cusack and Frank Murphy. Mulvey remains in contact with Cusack through the GPA grant scheme and hugely admired him. So was it possible to admire and respect both Cusack and Frank Murphy? “You had to,” he says emphatically, almost fondly. “Because both of them came from it with a real love of the games. They both come from it wanting to be professional, of wanting the best. They were both halves of the same egg really, they were just approaching it from different sides.”
So that’s why he doesn’t cringe when he thinks of those seemingly interminable nights in that interminable winter.
Yes, he refused to get involved in the dispute that would follow that one the following winter. It was bad enough to have to offer arbitration and recommend the removal of a good man like Teddy Holland as football manager. He didn’t want to be put in a position where he might have to recommend the same about Gerald McCarthy.
“I had so much respect for Gerald McCarthy. A man who won five All-Ireland medals? Who was on a Cork team that was as good as the Kilkenny team of the last decade? What was I going to say to him?”
But, no, Cork was an experience, an education, in a life full of education and experiences.
That’s why he likes the day job. Say what you want about the participants and leaders of any dispute, but they’re interesting people, leading interesting lives, passionate about something that takes up so much of their time — work. Sport is like that too, which is why he volunteers to help smooth out the various differences in its domain too.
The hassle is a privilege; problems, a challenge. A job he was made for and a job made for him.
