Mooney ‘was not aware’ of €300k walk payments

Noel Mooney has denied knowledge of the FAI’s €300,000 payment to the creator of a sponsored walk idea.

Mooney is currently caretaker general manager of the embattled association but worked on the “John Giles Walk of Dreams” before he left for UEFA in 2011.

Con Martin confirmed over the weekend that he was paid €5,000 per month by the FAI between 2011-2016. Interest in the annual walk from clubs waned after the first year’s event.

“I certainly was not aware of that,” Mooney said on Twitter in response to angry fans.

“My role was to organise the fundraising walks, 15 took place simultaneously around Ireland, in March 2011. We raised hundreds of thousands that was then distributed to grassroots clubs.

I was not an auditor or investigator. The FAI should be criticised when it has done the wrong thing.

Meanwhile, the FAI will today be grilled by a delegation of the Premier Clubs Alliance (PCA) about the latest controversies.

The group, representing the 10 top-flight League of Ireland clubs, met at a Dublin hotel yesterday, where it was decided pressing questions will be posed.

Given the weekend revelations about the payments to Martin, while salaries and redundancies were being imposed on staff, the matter of former directors remaining on the board is to be raised.

A governance report recommended that a maximum of two former directors should stay.

FAI president Donal Conway, who spent 14 years at the top table, and schoolboys’ representative John Earley, with four years’ service, had their positions on the board ratified at last month’s AGM.

Former chief executive John Delaney has been on gardening leave since April while a series of investigations are ongoing.