Joys Niteclub on Baggot Street was, according to an article published after it closed in 2014, “the funniest, sometimes sleaziest, sometimes chicest, most glorious and longest-running late, late, late, night club in Ireland. Every great city has a Joys”.

The article went on to reference the eclectic mix of people that could be found in Joys late at night and, indeed, early in the morning.

“Joys was favoured by politicians and journalists unable to sleep,” one writer recorded in his memoir. “The music was vintage pop. The clients were generally older, the lost and the lonely: middle-aged men wearing Marks & Spencer jumpers, slightly younger women wearing either cardigans or slightly daring low-cut blouses. Lots of married men prowled the joint, seeking someone who would understand them.”

There were plenty of others who ended up in Joys over the years and one of them encountered the writer of that memoir on an evening in 1986. Naturally there are differing accounts of what happened. 

Eoin Hand and Eamon Dunphy grew up a few streets from each other in the north inner city. They played for Ireland together. At the age of 34, after a successful season as manager of Limerick, Hand was appointed Ireland manager. Dunphy, who was initially supportive, soon became his fiercest critic.

Hand would say that their enmity began when he was a player at Shamrock Rovers and Dunphy was part of John Giles’s coaching team and in charge of youth development. But in Irish football, the overlapping worlds are small and the opportunities for resentments and grudges are plentiful.

On a night in Joys after Hand had left the Ireland job, Dunphy, according to his memoir, had shown up in the club with Colm Toibin. 

“Eoin Hand approached our table out of the gloom. He asked if he could join us. ‘Sure.’ I gestured him to a seat and introduced him to Colm. He was drinking red wine. After a few minutes’ small-talk he filled his glass to the brim. With a muttered ‘Cheers’, Eoin leaned closer to me. Then he threw the wine in my face. It seemed to happen in slow motion. ‘I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,’ he said, rising from the table.

When he published his own autobiography, Hand would insist it was beer not wine. 

“Dunphy was standing in the middle of the floor,” Hand writes. “I walked over and emptied my glass of beer over his head. Dunphy was shocked and went in search of the club manager, Frank Conway, to get me thrown out. Conway questioned me. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ I replied. ‘Someone must have nudged my elbow by accident and I spilled the glass’.” 

In his book, Dunphy said he asked the owner of the club to throw Hand out. He replied, “Didn’t you cost the man his job? ‘What was he supposed to do?”

*****

Last Monday, Stephen Kenny arrived at a studio in Dawson Street for an interview in our Experience series. Kenny’s career has been dominated by the struggles and the rare successes of Irish football, of which he has contributed more than his fair share. “I’ve won more trophies than anyone,” he said, but only to make the point that winning trophies is not how he judges things.

Those who support him often do so, not just because of what he is doing and has promised to do, but because of what he represents.

His life and career has been in this country except for a brief spell in charge of Dunfermline in Scotland, a time when Kenny began for the only time to chart a career path rather than articulate a vision. He reached the Scottish Cup final but was sacked a year into the job.

He is at his best with a vision and it is what is most compelling when he talks about Irish football. His critics would say that it is a shield, that the young players, the good football, the radical departure are handy words to use to keep people from focusing on results. That criticism ignores how important everything Stephen Kenny wanted to do when he got the Ireland job was to the future of Irish football and, critically, it ignores how bad things had become.

Stephen Kenny. Photo: Bryan Meade

*****

In January 2003, the Great Room at the Shelbourne Hotel hosted a scene of Irish football celebration. It was six months after Saipan. Mick McCarthy had departed as manager a couple of months before and Brian Kerr had been appointed Ireland manager and for many in the room, it wasn’t a press conference, it was a victory.

Kerr was one of them. It seemed like he knew the name of every person in the room. For those who believed that the only way forward for Irish football was a manager steeped in the game in Ireland, this was a rare victory. “This is the biggest job in football. For me, it is the biggest job in the world,” Kerr said.

*****

There is a chapter in Michael Walker’s book on Irish football, entitled “Losing”. It opens by noting the four years from 1968 to 1972 when the Republic of Ireland didn’t win a single game, anywhere, for 20 matches. In that time, the FAI were finally persuaded to abandon the selection committee which had been used to pick teams. This necessary and, at the time, radical decision at first didn’t appear to have improved matters. Mick Meagan was the first Ireland manager who had total control over who was picked for the team. He managed Ireland for 12 matches, picked all the players, and lost nine of them. He won none. Liam Tuohy, who would later have Kerr and Noel O’Reilly as his assistants on an infamous night at Elland Road, took over.

The Irish football community is a small one, geographically and psychologically. It had outposts across the country, but Dublin was, for better and for worse, the heartland. Hand and Dunphy grew up near each other. In his memoir, Dunphy talks about his father meeting Liam Brady’s mother on a bus when he was being most critical of Brady. “Paddy, what’s Eamon doing to Liam, would you have a word with him?”. There was tension too, he says, with the Hand family.

This intimacy led to protectiveness when under attack but also could become territorial.

This small urban community historically viewed the rest of Ireland suspiciously, and was viewed suspiciously in return. In his autobiography, John Giles recalls the bewilderment of a Christian Brother when he expressed no interest in the possibility of playing Gaelic football for Dublin. “So what do you want to do?” the brother asked. “I want to play for Manchester United,” Giles said.

The Ban was part of this distance but it mattered less to those who didn’t want to play Gaelic games in the first place. Giles had to give a commitment that he would play Gaelic football in secondary school while Liam Brady was expelled from school in Whitehall for choosing to play an Ireland U-15s match rather than a challenge game in GAA.

It was notable that when Jack Charlton took over, he fell out with the blue bloods from the Dublin football community – Liam Tuohy, Frank Stapleton, Liam Brady, Ronnie Whelan, Dave O’Leary and the one who may always have been at an angle to the rest, Eamon Dunphy.

Liam Brady, Frank Stapleton, David O’Leary and John Murphy at Dalymount Park in 1973 after signing for Arsenal. Photo: Connolly Collection / Sportsfile

“I didn’t know anybody in Ireland,” Charlton would later say. “I’ve appointed Maurice Setters as my assistant, he’s well placed, living in Doncaster,” he pointed out at his first press conference, an acknowledgement that England was where it was important to be when trying to assess Irish international football.

Tuohy quit when Charlton came into the dressing room of a youth match at half time and offered some advice on how to play the game which Tuohy disagreeed with.

Charlton would appeal more to the people who hadn’t considered football as part of their lives before success came. He was a rural man and he was drawn to rural Ireland as rural Ireland was drawn to him. Sceptics might have felt they didn’t understand. “The Garryowen tactics of the Irish football team under Jack Charlton are totally unsuited to the demands of international football – particularly at home,” Liam Tuohy wrote during Charlton’s first campaign. The Irish football community had suffered much for their love of football, the least they could ask for was that it wouldn’t be confused with another game. They felt there was another way. They have never stopped believing there is another way.

*****

In November 1999, Ireland were drawn against Turkey in a two-legged play off with the winner qualifying for the European Championships the next summer.

Ireland managed by Mick McCarthy had, in most people’s eyes, already blown qualification a month earlier when they conceded from a corner in Macedonia in the final seconds of injury time. 

Ireland had lost play-offs for the last two tournaments and the general view was that it would happen again, especially when the complexity of the trip became known.

Ireland would play the first leg at home and then embark on a journey which, even by the pre Saipan standards, seemed to have been chosen as a test of endurance.

The Ireland team as well as officials and journalists, of whom I was one, would fly to Istanbul from Dublin, then transfer to a coach and head for the port. There they would take a catamaran ferry across the Sea of Marmara where another coach would collect the squad and take them the 45-minute drive to Bursa, where the game would take place.

As we crossed the Sea of Marmara, one Irish player staggered towards the toilet as he struggled with seasickness brought on by the catamaran cutting through the water. 

The sense of distance was heightened when it became clear that the second leg would not be shown on television in Ireland. The Turkish FA had sold the rights to a television station who asked Irish television stations for £1 million for the rights. RTE said they expected the Turkish station to blink. A couple of days beforehand, they did. Now the price would be £2 million.

So Ireland were far away and embarking on a mission which, if it failed, would lead to further criticism of Mick McCarthy. 

McCarthy had received plenty of criticism since he’d been appointed Ireland manager at the age of 36 to take over from Jack Charlton, who had made him captain. He had changed the style of play but he was also the continuity candidate.

McCarthy insisted he didn’t read newspapers but sometimes well meaning friends would call him and tell him what had appeared in the newspapers. On the morning of the game I was in the lobby of the hotel about to play in a match among Irish and Turkish journalists. McCarthy saw me in my shorts. “The things you see when you’re out without your gun,” he said.

The game ended with an Ireland exit and a mass brawl where Tony Cascarino took on riot police as well as some Turkey players. 

On the long journey home that night across the Sea of Marmara, Cascarino went his own way at Istanbul airport, returning to Marseille and retiring from international football. “All the best Cas,” Roy Keane shouted out as Cascarino headed for another departure gate. Keane was still on the trip as we approached dawn standing on a bus taking us from the plane that had landed at Dublin to the terminal.

These journeys would be part of Keane’s case when he complained over the next two years about what the FAI asked of the Ireland players. But when it fell apart in Saipan other factors were driving him too.

In the fallout, McCarthy resigned. In the tension, some English-based journalists suggested that the criticism of McCarthy was because he hadn’t been born in Ireland. Kerr was the popular choice to take over, although not John Delaney’s.

*****

Kerr took over and the celebration was as if Irish football was finally being rewarded and could find another way, He had to deal with Delaney who was never an ally. But soon within Dublin football, it was common to hear from those who had stood and cheered at the Shelbourne Hotel that Kerr had changed. He may have done, it would have been impossible not to have, but was a glimpse into the suffocating nature of the community as well. 

Kerr lived in the country, he didn’t have friends telling him what was in the papers, he knew what was in the papers and on the television and radio. He told me once how he was bemused that people wondered what he was doing in the airport when they’d see him there. The life of the Ireland manager was in airports travelling to England. It was why Maurice Setters had been well placed, living in Doncaster.

****

When Stephen Kenny was appointed as the next but one Ireland manager in November 2018, it was part of what John Delaney called “a plan and a pathway” for Irish football. Mick McCarthy would be the Ireland manager again and Kenny would take over after the European Championships in 2020. Immediately, some people spotted a flaw in the plan and the pathway, albeit a flaw which seemed to ignore certain truths about the Irish football team.

Stephen Kenny applauds the supporters after the draw between Ireland and Serbia at the Aviva Stadium. Photo: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

The flaw was what would happen if McCarthy was successful and then had to step aside having led an Irish team to success at the European Championships? The reality would soon become more apparent. Four months later, the Sunday Times broke the story about John Delaney’s loan to the FAI and the association began to unravel. A year later when the European Championships were postponed because of the pandemic, Mick McCarthy’s second spell as Ireland manager came to an end, not with the rage and controversy of Saipan, but with the jaded resignation that defined much of the Covid era. 

*****

Ireland lost all three matches at the European Championships in 2012. The most notable achievements by the larger delegation were the pictures of John Delaney enjoying himself at the squad’s base in Sopot, the beautiful spa town on the Baltic coast.

The dysfunction of Irish football seemed to be captured in those moments and while Trapattoni’s football was particularly wearing, the solution was always to find a manager who excited the crowd rather than look to do something more radical.

Radical was challenging, radical put pressure on everyone, whereas if you have a manager getting paid a couple of million a year – especially if it’s been partially funded by a sponsor – there’s no reason that he shouldn’t have all the answers.

Trapattoni had a fundamentalist approach and he governed by personality. It was some personality but while being in his company could be exhilarating, watching the football his teams played never was. 

Trapattoni remained immune to whatever charms Irish football felt its players held. His point of view wasn’t hard to sympathise with in some ways. When James McClean, who had made a bright start to his Premier League career with Sunderland, was introduced as a substitute for his Ireland debut at Lansdowne Road, the roar from the crowd was such that Trapattoni said he thought “Messi or Pele” was coming on.

Stephen Kenny. Photo: Bryan Meade

Trapattoni also considered criticism from the Irish media a source of wry amusement. He assumed that journalists were friends with the players they championed (there could be no other reason for wondering why one midlevel Irish player should be in the team ahead of another) and he dismissed the idea of the League of Ireland as a serious competition. “In Ireland there is no league. Our players play in England. In Sweden there is a league. In Austria there is a league.”

This enraged people within the League of Ireland, but probably had no impact on the wider Irish sporting public, who were more worn down by the football Trapattoni’s Ireland played and rarely watched League of Ireland football either.

*****

It happened that the two years that followed the announcement of Kenny’s future appointment were perhaps the most depressing in the long depressing history of the FAI, an association memorably described by Michael Nugent as a “perpetually exploding clown car”. 

Not for the first time, the events off the field were more compelling than whatever took place on it, although a Saturday afternoon in Gibraltar when the FAI scrambled to come up with a plausible exit strategy for John Delaney while the Irish team were struggling to beat Gibraltar seemed to sum up the position of Irish football.

The FAI was close to bankruptcy and on the field, it seemed depressing and, at best, uninspiring. The most uplifting scene was when Irish supporters protested during the Georgia game a few days after Gibraltar. The fact that they were even permitted to do so told its own story.

Irish football was in a corner. Suddenly a radical might be the answer.

*****

After he completed his interview on Monday, Stephen Kenny was planning to spend the rest of the week in England watching Ireland players in action. There may come a time in the future when an Ireland manager spends more time watching the players he selects around Europe or at matches in Ireland. But geography is history and there will always be a sense that the English game is the natural progression for Irish footballers and from some, a question about those who stayed in Ireland.

So when Stephen Kenny or Brian Kerr or Eoin Hand are appointed, it becomes a referendum on Irish football. Are the managers good enough, do they have authority and can they make their ideas work at international level?

It is an idea that is less common today because players work with coaches from around the world whose credentials are made clear on the training ground not through their name or past record in the league. It was what Jason McAteer was getting at when he made his comments recently about Kerr, although the response demonstrated how old-fashioned it appeared.

Kenny’s story is an Irish football story. It is a story of the football clubs in the League of Ireland who are always struggling for exposure and recognition. It is a story too of the people who love those clubs and who feel, with some justification, that the only future for Irish football is one where self-sufficiency is central to the story. But his story is intriguing too because, just as he has with Ireland, Kenny did in some ways with Tallaght Town, the club he took over in his 20s. There he had a vision of a side that connected with the place he’d grown up and which had a population of 100,000 people who loved football. 

But it is a story too of how hard it can be for a manager to do the job in this country.

For Ireland, Kenny has a vision of exciting the Irish public with a dynamic, expansive side. It could be argued that he has fulfilled at least some of that vision, even if the most important part, the results that protect a manager, have been absent.

When Kenny was a candidate for the job after the departure of Martin O’Neill in 2018, the idea of what he offered captured the imagination of the public.

What he had done with Dundalk in the League of Ireland and in Europe had been noticed far beyond the natural League of Ireland constituency.

The succession plan unveiled in 2018 was awkward and dysfunctional but it did guarantee Kenny the senior job. There was an understanding at that moment that Irish football needed to change. 

Kerr was among those who supported Kenny and the Ireland manager in this interview spoke sadly about how a man he considered a friend has become one of his most high profile critics.

The story of the men who tried to change Irish football from the inside is one of men who tried and usually failed. They had no luck, they caught no breaks and yet it seemed that luck was only part of the story.

“That does piss me off,” Hand told The42 in an interview in 2017. “When ignorant people say it all started with Jack. They haven’t a clue. Okay, Jack was the one that got the breaks, like Gary Mackay scoring the goal for Scotland to beat Bulgaria.”

Hand’s time was cursed by bad luck and in Charlton’s first competitive game, Frank Stapleton won Ireland a penalty away from home to get a draw against World Cup semi-finalists Belgium.

People feel Kenny has been unlucky, right up to the moment Ireland were drawn agains France and the Netherlands, but being third seeds in the draw had less to do with luck.

But these are stories too of how hard it can be for a manager to do the job from the inside and escape the suffocating nature of the criticism.

Those who tried and failed are all around. None of them got the breaks, all of them deserved better than they got. All of them knew it was the biggest opportunity they would get.

“International jobs can finish people,” Kenny said towards the end of our interview. He doesn’t know how the next year will go but he knows what he wants it to look like. He knows too, when he looks around, how the story so often ends.