The Brendan O'Brien Interview

HE spent almost 30 years making a name for himself in the game’s boardrooms — the last five sitting at the head of the FAI’s table — but the temptation to label him as a ‘football man’ doesn’t sit comfortably on Bernard O’Byrne’s shoulders.

It’s easy to see why.

Though best known for his time at 80 Merrion Square, the beautiful game is just one tributary in a life that has flowed in all sorts of interesting directions either side of his white-knuckle ride behind that famous green door. There have been the positions with Coca-Cola, Nestle Ireland and Cement Roadstone Holdings; the business consultancy and his spell as chief executive of the Citywest Hotel & Leisure Group.

None of that comes up in an interview destined for the ‘toy department’ but he emails later to say that he is a member of MENSA and has a fondness for theatre and pub quizzes. He mentions all that just in case he comes across as some sort of sports anorak but it is through the games we play that Joe Public has come to know of him and he was wooed back by his first love earlier this year when the vacancy for chief executive with Basketball Ireland arose.

It’s in his blood, see. Dad Jim was a GAA “fanatic” from Wicklow and a second cousin to the Rackard brothers who spearheaded Wexford hurling’s golden era in the 1950s while mum Patsy played cricket in the Civil Service league. His sisters Rita and Martina were camogie players while Bernard and his brother Justin tried their hand at anything that involved a ball. Soccer, Gaelic football, rugby, basketball, golf: you name it, he’s had a go at it but his infatuation extended beyond the confines of the pitch.

Though born in Inchicore, the family moved to Tallaght when it was far from the bustling urban centre it is today. Back then it was a greenfield site in both a literal and a sporting sense and O’Byrne was barely out of his teens by the timed he had helped found St Mark’s GAA Club and he was the chief architect behind a soccer outfit known as Belgard Athletic too.

The GAA was an integral part of his life at the time. He met his wife Tina, who was the chairman’s daughter, through St Mark’s and represented the club at a Dublin county convention before a new coach arrived and let it be known in no uncertain terms that there would be no tolerance of “double-timers”. As the only soccer player on the panel of 30, the inference was clear. O’Byrne walked away without a word.

“That was a seminal moment. I felt after giving so much, played, trained, fund-raised … I just thought I didn’t need it. It was very unfair. I never played Gaelic after that. You get upset by things and I was coming to the end of my playing days anyway. All he had to do was not pick me for a few weeks and I probably would have drifted off anyway.”

In a way, it was incredible that he developed any affinity for GAA given it was force fed down his and his schoolmates’ throats in the schools of Inchicore and St James’ Street. The Christian Brothers “beat the GAA out of a lot of people” in those days but O’Byrne and others still enjoyed it and just as well. He was identified as a GAA player early on and had to tog out whether he wanted to or not. “If you didn’t play you literally got beaten up by the leather strap.”

Gaelic’s loss was to be soccer’s gain.

Belgard’s at first. The club soon mirrored the growth of the surrounding area and O’Byrne’s involvement was all enveloping. His mother used to say that the club was in his car and it was. His first motor was a Ford Capri. It was Belgard’s kit room, transport and dressing-room. Gear bags, nets, footballs and lime for the pitch were everywhere.

“You either get sick of that or you find that you like it and I liked it. You don’t make a conscious decision to do it, you just drift into it, and I would be the type of person who wants to see things through and be a success. I was club secretary for years as well so you are involved with registrations and disciplinary cases and making sure everything is right and that was a good foundation.”

Michael Hyland certainly thought so. A future president of the FAI, Hyland was occupying the same role with the Athletic Union League when he asked O’Byrne to lend a hand. He thought ‘what the hell’ and agreed to give it a year. That led to another year and another until nine had passed and suddenly he was chief executive of the Football Association of Ireland.

He was just 42 at the time and his youth was visual evidence of an organisation that was in the midst of a painful regeneration after the ‘Merriongate’ ticketing scandal and the resultant ‘Night of the Long Knives’ when a number of senior officials fell on their swords but O’Byrne’s ascension to the throne hadn’t come without its own difficulty and it was one that could have derailed his path to the top.

O’Byrne was the FAI’s chief security officer 18 months earlier when English hooligans rioted in Lansdowne Road and the friendly between the Republic and England had to be abandoned. The FAI didn’t escape its share of the criticism in the days, weeks and months that followed but the majority of the blame was ultimately directed elsewhere.

“I was extremely lucky not to have the deaths of anybody on my conscience, which it obviously still would be today, but I do say it wasn’t through any fault of mine. We were misled all the way by the English FA and by the Gardaí. In the tribunal that followed, one of the papers summed it up as a yellow card for the FAI, a yellow card for the FA and a red card for the gardaí. We were misinformed and some of the decisions taken by people were bad decisions.

“Professionally, the English FA were a disgrace at the time. Sean Connolly was the [FAI] secretary at the time and he agreed to meet them first thing the next morning to see how we would address it. They said they would and then ran for the plane the next morning. They left the country while we were sitting in a hotel waiting to meet them. No contact. They just ran for the airport, Bert Millichip, etc. Unbelievable.”

His background in the business world told him that the FAI was a “shambles” when he took over in 1996 but at least the only way was up. Some of the archaic structures and practises were addressed but the roller coaster still had one or two dizzying laps to complete. Aside from everything else, O’Byrne had to contend with the threat of NATO air strikes before an Irish game in Belgrade and an earthquake in Turkey prior to the Euro 2000 play-off in Bursa.

Those were the headliners but there was never a dull moment.

“No. It was always in my head from halfway through my five years there that I would sit on the bed in the morning getting up and I would just know that at least one thing was going to happen that day and I would have no idea where it was coming from. That was a daily thing.

“At the height of the Eircom Park thing, Christmas Day was the only day that I either didn’t get a call or make a call on everything that was going on so when that all stopped the reality of the pace of all that hit me. It was like running into a wall.”

That wall was Eircom Park.

O’Byrne had championed the FAI’s own stadium in the face of significant political opposition from Bertie Ahern and the government of the day who were pushing for a national arena in Abbotstown.

O’Byrne stuck to his guns, even when serious opposition materialised inside the FAI in the shape of current chief executive John Delaney, Brendan Menton and others. Doubts were expressed over costs and other details and the debate got nasty with O’Byrne having to defend allegations over misuse of an FAI credit card before the project was eventually shelved and his stewardship fatally compromised with it.

It took a lot more politicking — another nine years and a temporary tenancy at Croke Park — before Irish football finally had a new home. O’Byrne has been to the Aviva Stadium and accepts the fact that it is a fine stadium, but nothing has happened in the last decade to make him change his mind that Eircom Park was the right solution at the right time and his ire is reserved for those outside the football family’s tent.

“It was brought down by mischievous self-serving forces — not within football as we all know — whose plans after Eircom Park melted away because they were built on sand and not properly costed. It was an ego trip that people were on. We wanted Eircom Park to belong to the FAI, to be a multi-functional stadium with streams of income coming in on which we could build the game around the country.”

It took him a while to adjust once he stepped off the merry-go-round. It was three months before the physical exhaustion lifted and he could contemplate working again. Nearly four years slipped by before he stepped back into the shoes of a sports administrator for a brief stint as chief executive with St Patrick’s Athletic who were in serious financial difficulties at the time, and his current posting with Basketball Ireland is yet further proof that he is far from deterred by a challenge.

Morale at the organisation was in its boots after a financial crisis that saw over half the staff let go and the representative national sides pulled from all international competition by the time O’Byrne took charge of a sport he had played briefly in school before those same Christian Brothers demanded his full devotion for the native code.

In a funny old sort of way, that has helped. He had risen through the ranks of the junior game in football and that background would always label him in a sport beset by factions but he came to basketball as an independent, as someone without an axe to grind or an agenda to push, and that held out the promise of independence and the advantages that went with it.

He talks animatedly of his hopes and dreams for the game. About the huge playing base in the schools, the drive to attract sponsorship and the ambition to expand the Superleague to a 12-team affair played in front of packed houses across the country. What he likes most is that he is preaching to the converted. His initiatives and suggestions are being listened to and the scope for success is obvious for a global indoor sport in a country where rainfall is part of the national psyche.

Bernard O’Byrne is back where it all started for him in Tallaght — St Mark’s and Belgard Athletic are just ten-minute drives away from the National Basketball Arena. The stakes and the scope of operations are bigger now than then but the passion remains the same.