The Kieran Shannon Interview: Paddy Barnes

He’s nine months out from another Olympics in Rio. A third consecutive medal would be an unprecedented achievement for an Irish athlete. But another bronze would have little attraction to Paddy Barnes. At this stage the goal, the plan, is get gold and then go pro. “Everything I now do is for family, for Eireann. If I’m earning money I’m putting it away so she can grow up to be something," he tells Kieran Shannon

HE just read the news today, oh boy. About a man who made the grade, or at least enough to go to the States but not enough to be kept at home.

Paddy Barnes received Billy Walsh’s farewell text a couple of hours before meeting me here in the offices of a Dublin PR company, and though the news was rather sad, well, he’d feared as much when he hadn’t seen Billy laugh.