Fergal Carruth: ‘Billy Walsh given six separate proposals’
We don’t like to air our dirty linen in public and we were faced with a situation where the Irish Sports Council were coming out with statements about us and comments about the IABA that were untruths… we felt that the time was now to come back out and give our side of the story.
[In February], Billy hit us with a bit of a bombshell. He said he was after being approached by Team USA… he said he asked them for “crazy money”, I think he put it… Billy asked us “what can you do for me in order to retain my services?
Through that, we were asking the Sports Council for their assistance in this matter and in fairness to them, they obviously wanted to keep Billy as well… Altogether we put together over six separate proposals.
There was a huge amount of boxing happening so Billy was out of the country for a long time… [the delay] was not down to the IABA. It may have been that Billy was waiting to see how the visa would transpire with the USA.
The meeting with the minister in September is more important… The (September 11) meeting in Athlone [was] with the minister and with the Irish Sports Council… and the meeting that we then had with Billy in the IMI in Sandyford was on September 14. They’re the important meetings because that’s where the deal was brokered by the minister.
That’s where it was agreed and when proposals and a deal is agreed with the minister, there’s a shake of hands and we move forward in agreement until October 19.
We listed our concerns with the proposal that was put forward [with the ISC]. On Sunday we then received a further proposal, say ‘Draft Two’ of the proposal, which did not address some of the concerns that we had brought forward. So on the Monday, we got back and said “this hasn’t addressed our concerns”.
The biggest one I suppose was the short-term assurance for us as an association for monies to meet the contract agreements for Billy… He is a full-time and permanent employee, whereas a lot of sporting contracts would be on a fixed-term contract basis… Our monies are listed to us on a year-to-year basis… and the increase in Billy’s salary was quite high, approximately 60%… If we raised that salary indefinitely, then rightly so a lot of our other employees could [make similar demands]… We wouldn’t have had the resources to deal with an issue like that and we tried to work around it; tried to keep Billy but also sustain the company… We had no problem raising Billy’s salary… we did want to keep him but we wanted to do it in a way that was sustainable for the company.
Unfortunately, for all of us working here [IABA], there’s not one of us on a pension… the company doesn’t have a pension scheme in place.
The simplified version of this is when we were constructing Billy’s new contract after the September meeting… We used the old contract as a template. So that clause of speaking to the media was in his old contract as well. So if he wasn’t worried about it in his old contract — or if he was — he could have come and spoke to us. He never did that.
It’s just an assurance level for the company…. he was never curtailed with the media to my knowledge… If it wasn’t an issue for him in his current contract, then why was it an issue in this one?
No. How could you say that your successful head coach was becoming a nuisance? Or that he would have an over-involvement with the senior team?
Yes. I met Billy out at the airport on the Friday (last week)… My confidence was that this deal was about to be done… I really did feel that he was going to sign the contract.
We’re getting into levels of detail where we should stick to the actual facts here. There was an agreement at this (September 11) meeting in Athlone, there was an agreement in place and for us to move on from that to the contracts not being signed is where we’re disappointed and what we regret. We did want to keep Billy and we tried our best to keep him.
There was a huge cloud of worry over the National Stadium yesterday, a huge cloud of worry because there’s people working in here, this is their full-time job because they’re bread winners for their families, and it’s the very same for the boxers.
The vast majority of our discussions in and around Billy’s contract was to do with remuneration... If there was other issues in there that Billy has highlighted since, I can talk about them, but if he hasn’t highlighted them, I don’t know what they are….
The picking of teams is a time-honoured tradition with the IABA and you would have to first consider our success to date – 16 medals out of 28 [Irish Olympic medals], seven in the last two Olympics — we’re not doing too badly… We have proposed draft changes to our selection process, which enables us to use more criteria in the section of teams. That will be a point-scoring matrix for [assessing rankings]… He [Walsh] would have been involved in the consultation of that [proposed system].
Their comments this week were very forceful in that regard… I’d really like if you put this in because for us, from the club into the HP, the young lad coming in on his first day is trained by a volunteer and that volunteer gives five or six nights a week into boxing, and not only doesn’t get paid, it costs a lot to be involved… they are consistently delivering to us champions that are of a level that can be brought over into our HP Unit… If it [the HP Unit] doesn’t have that feed in from all those areas, it’s built on pillars of sand. It will remain healthy for a certain amount of time, but without a blood flow, it will die and we will fight vigorously to maintain that. Nobody is taking that from us.
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