STUEY BYRNE WILL celebrate his 50th birthday on 4 November and life is still all-go for the four-time League of Ireland winner.
The last of those titles with Shelbourne came 20 years ago.
Both of those milestones are, ostensibly, the hook for this chat in Dublin city centre. Of course, it quickly becomes apparent there is far more below the surface once you scratch beyond some of the glory and controversies.
Everything feels quick.
No sooner had we met just around the corner from the Dockers Pub on Windmill Lane, where he works as a software developer for a tech company, than we had scurried our way up Pearse Street, ducked under the train tracks and down an alley onto Westland Row for a coffee in one of his favoured spots.
We get a table facing the counter, and before we’re settled, he’s already left the table and bolted out the door. He’s showing a turn of pace to chase after two tourists who had left some earphones behind. He catches up with them near the entrance to Pearse Street station.
When Byrne returns he shrugs. “They (the headphones) were already there before they arrived. They’re not even theirs.”
He’s laughing, but yet he seems dead serious when he says the chocolate powder on his cappuccino has put him off. The coffee is still finished a few gulps later. In the space of four minutes he delivers the following zingers of self-assessment.
“There are times I hear myself speak about football and I just think I can’t listen to myself anymore. Then I think, ‘Who the fuck wants to listen to me?’”
As one of Off The Ball’s senior analysts for Republic of Ireland games, there are still quite a few.
“After seven or eight years I wonder do people want something new? Are they sick of me? Imposter syndrome. I’m riddled with it. Maybe it’s a good thing we all have some. Keeps us on the straight and narrow.”
Stuey Byrne with St Pat's. Dan Sheridan / INPHO
Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO
He says he doesn’t see himself as “aggressive or assertive” and loved “making emotional connections” with teammates to try and understand them.
So why not try to become a manager instead of deciding against continuing his Uefa B coaching licence?
“Management would have killed me. I can be too intense. I can go down dark holes. And I have a love/hate relationship with football. I can only take so much of football.
“I can only take so much of my fucking self! I’m sick of myself sometimes. I’m sick of everybody sometimes. I don’t even think I was ever that good at football.”
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The chocolate powder had been scraped off the foam and the coffee was not even lukewarm by this point.
No one at Shelbourne would go along with his own grim post-mortem of his abilities. But then football is only the smallest fragment of what has shaped him as a man.
His four children – two boys and two girls – are aged between 13 and 24. He remembers the night he found out he was going to become a father for the first time. “I was playing for Longford Town in Tolka Park against Shelbourne and I had been sent off for losing the head with Wes Hoolahan.
“I thought I had put him in the stand by going through him but he just got up and laughed. He got on with the game and I was in the absolute height of it. Then I went home and was told I was going to be a father. I was still in the absolute height of it.”
Nuala O’Sullivan was the woman staring back at him. Byrne has known the love of his life since he was four years old. She lived 10 doors down on Cedarwood Road in a kind of Glasnevin/Ballymun/Finglas triumvirate.
It’s the same road that Bono grew up on, albeit he was 16 years older. “I’d defend Bono until the end of this earth,” he says.
Byrne played guitar and wrote songs from the age of 14. He wrote and performed an album just before the Covid-19 pandemic. “I always preferred to write than sing as it was more cathartic to write.”
He was still afraid to talk to Nuala, his sister Kelly-Anne’s best friend, by this point. He had other issues to contend with at home. His father and mother separated in his mid-teens. As the eldest sibling, he remembers learning to cook dinners and would take his younger sister to school on the back of his bike as his mother went to work.
It was that same bike that he later took up by the handlebar and smashed into his mother’s old silver Peugeot 306 in a fit of adolescent anger at how his own life was panning out.
“The windscreen was destroyed. I had a switch. I smashed the bike into the car six or seven times. I needed to go, I wasn’t focusing on me at this point.”
Byrne remembers he was around 19 or 20 at this stage. One of his closest friends in football from Home Farm at the time offered him a couch to stay on in his apartment just off Church Street and Capel Street in north inner city Dublin.
“Colin O’Neill, Collie, an amazing person,” Byrne says of the man who would go on to coach UCD and the Shamrock Rovers women’s team.
Their lives would remain intertwined but it was Nuala who ensured Byrne straightened out. They became an item and he moved in with their parents for a year. He spent a year in college at Coláiste Íde and O’Neill helped him get a job as a technician in an architect’s firm.
Nuala worked as a pharmaceutical technician and within a year, they were able to buy their own two-bed place in Swords.
Life was becoming clearer and football more manageable. “If it wasn’t for Nuala, I’d have quit at 20 after falling out with Mick Lawlor at Home Farm. I remember putting my foot through the dressing room away in Monaghan and told him I was done. My plan was to go away and just write music.”
Stuey Byrne (left) with former Longford Town teammate Vinny Perth. Ciaran Culligan / INPHO
Ciaran Culligan / INPHO / INPHO
Stephen Kenny brought him to Longford Town instead and he would, of course, later become the source of such ire that it would lead to one of the League of Ireland’s most infamous post-match interviews.
Kenny was manager of Derry City in ’06 when his side were vying for the title with Shels. Dublin City went bust that season. Results were expunged, there were further issues with suspended players being fielded in games, points were lost.
Kenny spoke out, Shels were on the brink of going bust just two years after that dramatic Champions League play-off with Deportivo La Coruña, yet they still triumphed dramatically before the gates were closed on that great team forever.
Byrne has been working on a project of his own about that time for the last two years. There will be more to come on that front.
He has been immersed in that period of his life almost to the point of neglecting his wife and kids. “It will be worth it.”
He knows there will be no surprise party for the 50th next month.
“No.”
Definitely?
“No. I’m sure.”
Really?
“No.”
He will have a meal with his family and share wine with two of his oldest friends, Chris and Lorcan O’Connor, who also grew up 10 doors down in Cedarwood.
“Nuala is 50 in January so we might do something for that. Maybe we’ll go away.”
Byrne is open, engaging and genuinely interested more in what you might have to say than what you hope he will.
“I’m not trying to present myself as Mother Teresa or that sort of thing. It goes back to being in a dressing room. I feel like I was a good judge of knowing what people needed.
“You can let a person know you are there for them and are willing to help just by acknowledging them in a certain way.”
And just like that, the conversation has passed in a flash, one that will leave a lasting impression as we head back into the howling, rainy streets of Dublin.
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Stuey Byrne at 50: Shelbourne hero reflects on life and football ahead of milestone moment
STUEY BYRNE WILL celebrate his 50th birthday on 4 November and life is still all-go for the four-time League of Ireland winner.
The last of those titles with Shelbourne came 20 years ago.
Both of those milestones are, ostensibly, the hook for this chat in Dublin city centre. Of course, it quickly becomes apparent there is far more below the surface once you scratch beyond some of the glory and controversies.
Everything feels quick.
No sooner had we met just around the corner from the Dockers Pub on Windmill Lane, where he works as a software developer for a tech company, than we had scurried our way up Pearse Street, ducked under the train tracks and down an alley onto Westland Row for a coffee in one of his favoured spots.
We get a table facing the counter, and before we’re settled, he’s already left the table and bolted out the door. He’s showing a turn of pace to chase after two tourists who had left some earphones behind. He catches up with them near the entrance to Pearse Street station.
When Byrne returns he shrugs. “They (the headphones) were already there before they arrived. They’re not even theirs.”
He’s laughing, but yet he seems dead serious when he says the chocolate powder on his cappuccino has put him off. The coffee is still finished a few gulps later. In the space of four minutes he delivers the following zingers of self-assessment.
“There are times I hear myself speak about football and I just think I can’t listen to myself anymore. Then I think, ‘Who the fuck wants to listen to me?’”
As one of Off The Ball’s senior analysts for Republic of Ireland games, there are still quite a few.
“After seven or eight years I wonder do people want something new? Are they sick of me? Imposter syndrome. I’m riddled with it. Maybe it’s a good thing we all have some. Keeps us on the straight and narrow.”
He says he doesn’t see himself as “aggressive or assertive” and loved “making emotional connections” with teammates to try and understand them.
So why not try to become a manager instead of deciding against continuing his Uefa B coaching licence?
“Management would have killed me. I can be too intense. I can go down dark holes. And I have a love/hate relationship with football. I can only take so much of football.
“I can only take so much of my fucking self! I’m sick of myself sometimes. I’m sick of everybody sometimes. I don’t even think I was ever that good at football.”
The chocolate powder had been scraped off the foam and the coffee was not even lukewarm by this point.
No one at Shelbourne would go along with his own grim post-mortem of his abilities. But then football is only the smallest fragment of what has shaped him as a man.
His four children – two boys and two girls – are aged between 13 and 24. He remembers the night he found out he was going to become a father for the first time. “I was playing for Longford Town in Tolka Park against Shelbourne and I had been sent off for losing the head with Wes Hoolahan.
“I thought I had put him in the stand by going through him but he just got up and laughed. He got on with the game and I was in the absolute height of it. Then I went home and was told I was going to be a father. I was still in the absolute height of it.”
Nuala O’Sullivan was the woman staring back at him. Byrne has known the love of his life since he was four years old. She lived 10 doors down on Cedarwood Road in a kind of Glasnevin/Ballymun/Finglas triumvirate.
It’s the same road that Bono grew up on, albeit he was 16 years older. “I’d defend Bono until the end of this earth,” he says.
Byrne played guitar and wrote songs from the age of 14. He wrote and performed an album just before the Covid-19 pandemic. “I always preferred to write than sing as it was more cathartic to write.”
He was still afraid to talk to Nuala, his sister Kelly-Anne’s best friend, by this point. He had other issues to contend with at home. His father and mother separated in his mid-teens. As the eldest sibling, he remembers learning to cook dinners and would take his younger sister to school on the back of his bike as his mother went to work.
It was that same bike that he later took up by the handlebar and smashed into his mother’s old silver Peugeot 306 in a fit of adolescent anger at how his own life was panning out.
“The windscreen was destroyed. I had a switch. I smashed the bike into the car six or seven times. I needed to go, I wasn’t focusing on me at this point.”
Byrne remembers he was around 19 or 20 at this stage. One of his closest friends in football from Home Farm at the time offered him a couch to stay on in his apartment just off Church Street and Capel Street in north inner city Dublin.
“Colin O’Neill, Collie, an amazing person,” Byrne says of the man who would go on to coach UCD and the Shamrock Rovers women’s team.
Their lives would remain intertwined but it was Nuala who ensured Byrne straightened out. They became an item and he moved in with their parents for a year. He spent a year in college at Coláiste Íde and O’Neill helped him get a job as a technician in an architect’s firm.
Nuala worked as a pharmaceutical technician and within a year, they were able to buy their own two-bed place in Swords.
Life was becoming clearer and football more manageable. “If it wasn’t for Nuala, I’d have quit at 20 after falling out with Mick Lawlor at Home Farm. I remember putting my foot through the dressing room away in Monaghan and told him I was done. My plan was to go away and just write music.”
Stephen Kenny brought him to Longford Town instead and he would, of course, later become the source of such ire that it would lead to one of the League of Ireland’s most infamous post-match interviews.
Kenny was manager of Derry City in ’06 when his side were vying for the title with Shels. Dublin City went bust that season. Results were expunged, there were further issues with suspended players being fielded in games, points were lost.
Kenny spoke out, Shels were on the brink of going bust just two years after that dramatic Champions League play-off with Deportivo La Coruña, yet they still triumphed dramatically before the gates were closed on that great team forever.
Byrne has been working on a project of his own about that time for the last two years. There will be more to come on that front.
He has been immersed in that period of his life almost to the point of neglecting his wife and kids. “It will be worth it.”
He knows there will be no surprise party for the 50th next month.
“No.”
Definitely?
“No. I’m sure.”
Really?
“No.”
He will have a meal with his family and share wine with two of his oldest friends, Chris and Lorcan O’Connor, who also grew up 10 doors down in Cedarwood.
“Nuala is 50 in January so we might do something for that. Maybe we’ll go away.”
Byrne is open, engaging and genuinely interested more in what you might have to say than what you hope he will.
“I’m not trying to present myself as Mother Teresa or that sort of thing. It goes back to being in a dressing room. I feel like I was a good judge of knowing what people needed.
“You can let a person know you are there for them and are willing to help just by acknowledging them in a certain way.”
And just like that, the conversation has passed in a flash, one that will leave a lasting impression as we head back into the howling, rainy streets of Dublin.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
League of Ireland LOI Stuey Byrne up close