ATTENDANCES AND the standard of football may be on the up, but there’s one thing the League of Ireland doesn’t have today — and that’s someone quite like Ollie Byrne.
The former Shelbourne supremo was one of the most colourful characters in the domestic game’s history.
”The way he spoke to and abused people, if there was a HR executive in the club, and it was nowadays, he’d be in the bleedin’ Labour Court every day,” Andy Byrne, Ollie’s nephew and former Shelbourne director tells The42.
“People either loved or hated him. I don’t think there was anyone in between. And in a lot of cases, people loved and hated him at the same time.”
Shelbourne, for the Byrnes, was a family business.
Andrew, Andy’s grandfather and Ollie’s father, served as club chairman between 1945 and 1956 before passing away in the early 1980s. Ollie became a board member in 1976 but it wasn’t until roughly a decade later that he fully assumed control and became the most influential figure at the club.
As a youngster, Ollie briefly played for UCD but a problem with asthma meant his dreams of becoming a top-level player never came to fruition.
After studying law in college, he subsequently got involved in the music industry as a manager and promoter, working with acts including Thin Lizzy, Skid Row, and Deep Purple.
Shelbourne was a passion around this period too, though he initially served in a volunteer capacity, with duties such as selling raffle tickets and organising events.
“My grandfather [Andrew] was a legal clerk, one below a solicitor as such, a very intelligent man and worked for a couple of big solicitor firms and Ollie actually went to become a solicitor,” Andy says. “And the day of the exam, he didn’t bother going in.
“He had a brain there. I would regularly be in Tolka in the mornings because I worked there with him for 15 years. And the phone would ring and it might be someone from another club or the FAI: ‘Listen, we have an issue. What do the rules say about this and that?’
“He knew the rules inside out, and he also knew how to get around them.”
Joe Casey, the former chairman of Shelbourne, who remains on the board of management, remembers one particular case.
“You’d be appealing a decision against you and he’d win more than he lost — the famous one is the Marney situation. He found an unregistered player in the Pat’s team and we ended up winning the league [because of that technicality].”
Andy believes his uncle followed Andrew into Shels “as a sort of an apology to Granda for not finishing as a solicitor”.
Ollie’s ambitions with Shels were interrupted by what his nephew jokingly refers to as a “little holiday at the expense of the Department of Justice”.
A controversial figure, Byrne found himself before the courts more than once. In 2006, he escaped conviction after apologising for assaulting Roddy Collins over remarks the then-Shamrock Rovers manager had made on the radio. He was cleared of a breach-of-the-peace charge arising out of a confrontation with St Patrick’s Athletic supporters in 2003. The owner claimed that when he gave two fingers to rival supporters, he was merely indicating that the score was 1-1.
Out of all these incidents, it was the 1985 spell in jail for receiving stolen cigarettes, from which he was released after 12 months, that ostensibly had the biggest impact.
“When he came out, he got more into Shels because he stopped drinking,” says Andy. “Before he went into jail, he had a heavy drink problem, heavy smoker. But he stopped overnight [shortly following his prison stay reportedly after Shelbourne player Robbie Gaffney told him to "cop on"]. And when he came out then, Shels became his life, it was his release.”
The somewhat healthier lifestyle left Ollie with a renewed sense of focus.
“He had his cans of Diet Coke every morning and during the day. He would always have a six-pack of Diet Coke there in the office and his diet was the worst in the world. But football was his [main] vice, from 6am to 12am, it was Shels, Shels, Shels.”
As Byrne’s obituary in The Irish Times noted: “Ollie often spoke about retiring before the job took its toll on his health but few who knew him ever believed he’d be able to walk away.”
Andy agrees: “He never went on holidays. I remember, he didn’t look right and his blood pressure was through the roof. And the doctor says: ‘Right, you need to take a couple of days off.’
“So the next morning, I was in the place and there’s no sign of him and I thought: ‘Ah great, he’s after taking the day off.’ Half nine, he arrives in: ‘I had a lie-in, that’ll do me.’
“In his head, having a three-hour lie-in [was enough] and he was probably awake at six anyway, looking at the newspapers and reading what was being said and making little notes because he’d come in the next morning having been at home with three or four foolscap pages of stuff written down.
“He had woken at maybe two in the morning, thinking: ‘I need to ring Alex Ferguson, I need to ring Howard Wilkinson,’ who he had a very good relationship with. Ring Wilko, and see if [Leeds will] come over and play us.”
And while money was often tight, Byrne was persuasive enough to frequently convince people to part with their hard-earned cash.
“He caught me once or twice,” Andy says. “You’d stupidly mention: ‘I’m going to get my mortgage cheque.’ You’d walk out of the bank and he’d be standing outside: ‘Listen any chance of a lend of a few quid, I’ll give it back to you twofold.’”
On the other hand, Ollie was also capable of undue generosity: “There were regular instances where players were struggling for money or something like that. He’d ring them up and ask: ‘Are you alright?’ Blah blah blah. ‘There you go, there’s a few quid.’
“The gas thing was the time when Shels were really struggling and some of the players had to take them to court over the non-payment of wages, Owen Heary actually said it afterwards, the lads were in bits over taking Ollie to court, that’s how much of an effect he had on them.
“When the court case was over, he turned around and said to them: ‘Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.’”
Yet for all Byrne’s eccentricities and flaws, he was undoubtedly one of the League of Ireland’s most influential figures of the past 50 years.
At the time of his arrival, the team were playing at Harold’s Cross, the league felt stagnant, and crowds at Shels were poor while results weren’t much better.
Byrne’s friend Tony Donnelly funded the purchase of Tolka Park. Shels had regularly played there for decades but it was only in 1989 that they acquired Home Farm’s long-term lease from Dublin Corporation on the stadium.
Great success ensued. When Byrne took over, Shels had not been champions of Ireland since 1962. Under his watch, they won six league titles, four FAI Cups, and one League Cup.
Yet domestic glory was not enough for the ambitious owner.
“We did too much initially, and we’re probably in some ways still suffering [today] from rushing into things,” says Andy.
“The long-term projections weren’t thought about. It was a case of: ‘Let’s get into Europe, let’s qualify for the group stages.’
“But if you reach Europe, have you got the players to qualify for the group stages?”
The European dream was not an unequivocal failure, however. There were some memorable nights, notably in 2004, when they faced Deportivo. The Spanish side had reached the Champions League semi-finals the previous year and held them to a scoreless draw in the first leg at Lansdowne Road before a creditable performance in the away match amid a closer contest than the eventual 3-0 scoreline suggests.
Yet just two years later, Shels were on the brink of financial collapse.
Prior to this disaster, Byrne had agreed on a deal to sell Tolka Park to the directors of Coneforth for between €25 million and €30 million according to a Sunday Business Post article.
Plans for a new stadium to be built were in place before a significant hitch occurred in the form of the property bubble bursting.
“The first crash happened and things went on the back burner a bit,” says Andy. “At the time, the wage bill was around €40,000 a week, which is crazy money, if you think about it, if you were getting [a couple of thousand] people in the gate at a tenner a head every two weeks only.”
The stress of this situation coupled with Byrne’s relentless work ethic increasingly had an impact on his health.
“He never turned off. And the problem was that when things were going wrong, it affected him. And he wasn’t the sort that would talk to anyone about it.
“People didn’t realise how bad things were. He signed over the power of attorney to me when he got sick. I managed to sit down with him one day, and he wrote down the [substantial] debts that we didn’t know about.”
Nonetheless, even the prospect of death was not enough for Ollie to take a complete break from his footballing duties.
“When he was in St Luke’s Hospice, he’d be on the phone to me three or four times in the hour. I’d go: ‘Ollie, it’s in hand.’ He just had to have that input. He couldn’t let go.
“But he had to know everything was being done and he had that attitude: ‘If I don’t do it myself, it won’t get done.’
“Nowadays, you probably would describe it as ‘obsessed’. To him, it wasn’t an obsession, it was a love.”
That love was perhaps more mutual than Ollie realised as even figures who many perceived as his enemies showed their support when news of his illness became known.
“Everyone used to think that Pat Dolan and Ollie didn’t get on. Pat and Ollie actually had a quite good relationship. They played games. Ollie would ring Pat and say: ‘Listen, I’m going to have a pop at you in the paper this week.’
“Pat would reply: ‘No problem. I’ll do the same with you next week.’ But Pat came to see him numerous times in the hospital. And Pat was good when he passed away. A lot of people didn’t see that.”
Less than a year after their court case had been resolved, another perceived enemy, Roddy Collins, was among the many to visit Byrne in his dying days. A genuine fondness and respect ostensibly existed between the two men beneath the veneer of antipathy.
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One recurring theme from speaking to people about Ollie — much more so than your average board member, he was generally loved by players.
This is particularly true of Mark Rutherford, who had three stints at Shelbourne during his career, and was sometimes jokingly referred to as Ollie’s ‘son’.
But Byrne’s effect on Rutherford was genuinely life-changing. When he first moved to Ireland aged 19 from his hometown club Birmingham City in 1991, it was meant to be a one-month loan.
“He was like a father figure to me,” Rutherford says. “He treated me so well whenever I was feeling down or homesick.
“And Ollie always made sure there was a club there for me when I did leave Shelbourne. It wasn’t because of Ollie I left, it was usually the new manager who came in and had his own ideas.
“There was a real soft side to him that I’d seen so many times. I remember one time when I left Shelburne, he had tears in his eyes saying he didn’t want me to leave.
“I had success every time I did move clubs and Ollie helped that out.
“My parents divorced when I was about nine years old, so I didn’t have my dad to do those kinds of things for me.
“There was only one move, from Newry to Bohemians, that Ollie had no part in. I always remember seeing him a couple of days after. I was stuck in traffic and he was in the taxi next to me and he was saying to me: ‘Why did you join Bohs?’
“And it came back on him then because that 2000-01 season, I helped Bohs win the league. We pipped Shelbourne on the last day. Ollie always brought that up.”
Rutherford was one of the many people in football who visited Ollie in the hospice not long before he died.
” I remember seeing Andy and his brothers outside, and them saying to me: ‘Mark, he probably won’t recognise you. Go in and have a chat anyway, he’ll hear your voice.’ And it was surreal going into him, he could barely talk. But I said: ‘Ollie, it’s Mark, I don’t know if you remember me.’ And straightaway, he says: ‘Of course, I remember you, Mark, I’ll never forget you.’ And that’s always lived with me since. Those last words: ‘I’ll never forget you.’
“And he was so sick, he just about got out his words: ‘Would you not go play for Shelbourne again?’
“He passed away in August 2007. The following January, I spoke to Dermot [Keely] about joining Shelbourne. And it was my best season, I enjoyed it so much.”
The one-time homesick teenager has now lived more than half his life in Ireland and has a family here.
“I never would have thought I would stay here so long when I first met Ollie,” he says. “He was the main reason, he made me so welcome here.”
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Rutherford viewed Byrne in an unequivocally positive light, but for others, there were shades of gray.
Joe Casey was just a fan initially. In 1998 while purchasing season tickets, he got chatting with Byrne, who saw him as a good fit for the club’s board owing to his background as an accountant.
“I put him down as the best and worst thing that ever happened to Shelbourne,” says Casey.
“You couldn’t really get an inch with him, he was a very single-minded, determined individual.
“No matter how much logic you tried to put into the conversation, you weren’t really getting the answers you wanted from him, but you accepted that because you knew he wasn’t doing this for anything but the betterment of the club. He wasn’t doing it for himself, he died with absolutely nothing.
“He lived with his sister and he didn’t end up in any [long-term] relationships, Shelbourne was his life, love, everything. And he died because of Shelbourne.”
Byrne’s grand ambitions for the club, Casey explains, enabled them to reach great heights, but also resulted in their subsequent steep decline in the form of relegation to the First Division and years of being consigned to the periphery of Irish football.
But although they were on a destination to ultimate disaster, Casey says it would be “wrong” to deny that he enjoyed the ride.
“Funny story coming back from the second leg of the Deportivo game. We were talking on the plane about what it would have been worth to get to the Champions League group stages and a figure of around 15 million [was estimated]. Of course, Ollie pipes up: ‘We would have to spend 20 million on players.’
“We made about 600 grand on that European run, we’d make more money nowadays, but me being an accountant [I remember] we made a loss of 1.7 million instead of 2.3. Ollie deemed that to be a success.”
Casey also backs up Andy’s recollections over Ollie having an uncanny ability to persuade people to part with their cash.
“He borrowed money from every director on the premise that it was going to be paid back. But you were put under massive emotional pressure. You might get a call on a Friday morning: ‘I’ve no money for wages, what am I going to do?’
“‘Can you give me three or four grand, I’ll pay it back out of the gate receipts.’ And of course, you’d never get it back.
“When he died, a lot more of this came to the surface — [the many] people he had borrowed from. And unfortunately, the seven of us who were left on the board had to deal with those problems over a number of years.”
2006 will go down as surely the most incredible season in Shelbourne’s history, as the club won the league despite ongoing problems over players not being paid.
Shels spent the next year in the First Division due to their grave financial issues but somehow were crowned top-flight champions just before the demotion.
“There’s one funny story about the wages,” recalls Casey. “‘Nutsy’ [Pat Fenlon] was manager. Basically, he was told by the players: ‘We’re not playing unless we get the wages before the match starts.’
“The way the wages were done in those days, you were basically paid by cash in an envelope. Ollie did all the envelopes up with the names and gave them to Pat in the dressing room.
“So everybody played the match. When the game was over, they opened the envelopes and there was nothing in there. The lads just laughed.”
Casey also remembers how Ollie’s time in the hospice didn’t prevent him from making big calls without the knowledge or approval of his fellow board members, though by then he lacked the power to follow through on them.
“We had no manager at the time and Stephen Geoghegan went in to see him and he promised Stephen the job.”
Needless to say, the Shels legend was not ultimately installed as manager.
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Casey has been involved with Shelbourne for a quarter of a century, but Shay Weafer has an even longer association with the club and by extension, Ollie.
He was even there during the infamous 2-2 draw with Waterford on 5 November 1978 when Ollie punched the referee.
Like Casey, he feels Ollie’s legacy in football was mixed.
“He was a great football man and had a great knowledge of the rules, but he certainly wasn’t a businessman,” Weafer says
“When the Donnellys took over Tolka Park, they entrusted Ollie with a lot of things, and eventually when they sold it, they gave him full control and it’s like a kid with a ball: ‘It’s my ball, I’m going home, there’s no match.’ And that was the way he treated it.’”
Weafer also recalls those long, intense car journeys home with Ollie after matches.
“I used to bring him home every match in Tolka and drop him off in Terenure.
“He’d be arguing until the cows come home because of a referee’s decision.
“You’d say to him: ‘Ollie, where was your centre half, it was a free header?’ But he wouldn’t realise that. He’d never see it. He’d leave, bang the door. He would be only gone 10 minutes, and would ring me: ‘Meet me in the morning, we’ll have some breakfast.’ I’d meet him and we’d have another chat again. That’s the way he was, you couldn’t fall out with him if you tried.”
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In contrast with Rutherford, Ollie’s relationship with Mick Neville, another much-loved Shelbourne player, was often tempestuous.
“He sacked me about three or four times at Shels,” Neville recalls. “I’d go out the door and he’d go after me then or he’d ring you an hour later as if nothing had happened.”
Yet for Neville, the positives far outweighed the negatives.
“Fellas would be having problems off the pitch. And he’d get involved, get fellas jobs, loads of stuff like that.
“He’d give you the shirt off his back — that was his problem.”
Neville also believes Ollie was “ahead of his time” in many ways.
Following the star’s retirement from playing, he gave Neville a job as a development officer for Shelbourne to start up a schoolboy section at a time when underage football was far less of a priority for League of Ireland clubs than it is now.
He recalls the dreams Ollie had of taking Shels to the next level.
“He brought me one day out in the car to the garden centre in Donabate. He said: ‘This is where the new stadium is going to be.’ He actually thought he was going to get that and that they would have roadways out to it.
“He could see the vision. But he brought me out there and I just saw empty fields.”
The former player also remembers Ollie’s somewhat atypical attitude toward money and wages.
“When I joined Shels, I didn’t know what way signing-on fees worked or anything like that. We were playing Swindon in a friendly in Tolka when he used to get all the teams over. I came off at half-time and I got a call then: ‘Would I go to turnstile 15?’ And Ollie was standing there with a bag of cash. I was getting fivers and tenners, so it was mad stuff, but that was him.”
Ultimately, Neville thinks of Ollie Byrne as less an administrator and more a football fan.
“In the cup final, Stephen Geoghegan scored the winner against Pat’s, we were all diving on top of Stephen,” he says. “I look around and Ollie’s running down the pitch. He had little Stephen the Greek with him. He used to be his electrician at Tolka Park. He was standing beside you on the pitch, mad stuff. Just pure passion. It was his greatest love — Shelbourne.”
