Not many people have been footballers, senior businessmen or chairmen of the Labour Court, let alone all three. Finbarr Flood tells Catherine Cleary about his eventful life - and his memoir.
He started out with two young readers in mind when he sat down on a miserable January day two years ago to write about his life. After a "chastening" brush with death, Finbarr Flood had decided that he wanted to leave some record by which his two grandsons might be able to remember him if he was gone before they were old enough to have stockpiled their own memories.
When the family document became a fully-fledged memoir he wanted to call it In the Right Place at the Right Time, because luck was a big player in his life, but he decided on In Full Flood. His wife, Anne, has not read it. She cringed at one extract in which he described the misery of life as a teenager in the 1950s, when dancing was the only way to meet girls. He was a long strip of shyness with two left feet and a crushing inferiority complex. She thought that kind of thing would tarnish his image.
It is unusual to interview a captain of industry and see the boy who was too thin to get his first job until a friend of his father's put a heavy foot on the scales during the medical. It is a very rounded picture of a self-made man written, he says, to try to encourage anyone stuck in a mundane job to believe they can fulfil their potential.
Flood, who is 67, walked into the Guinness brewery as a 14-year-old messenger and left as managing director, more than 40 years later, to take up the chairmanship of the Labour Court.
He grimaces a little when asked if it's a rags-to-riches tale in the mould of Bill Cullen's It's a Long Way from Penny Apples. "It's not really that at all. I was lucky, in that society changed and you were on the top of a wave, being carried forward."
Now he gives a lot of talks at universities, "and I'm quite shocked at the people who are coming out who may be academically well prepared but there's no work done on them as people. I was trying to get across to people that they're better equipped now than I was starting off, and I believe I have fulfilled my potential. But at least half of them in those classes won't fulfil theirs."
The most vivid parts of the book, and the parts he enjoyed writing most, are those describing his childhood and career at the brewery.
If books came with scratch-and-sniff covers, then the sweet burnt smell of roasted barley and hops would adorn In Full Flood. He writes with a fondness of a lost world where a benign employer ruled a workforce in a way that now seems almost charitable. At the same time he is clear-eyed about the toughness of life and the class distinctions - an elaborate caste system full of petty snobberies - that separated brewery employees from each other.
The strangeness of the system is best captured in his description of work in the "scald bank", one of the many early tasks that he loathed. The scald bank was where empty beer casks were returned for cleaning, and it was as steamy and dirty as it sounds. The labourers opened the casks and checked for "foreign bodies". The coopers then had to check them. If the empty casks smelled sweet they were good. A sour smell meant a bad cask. The only problem was that the coopers were one of the elite groups at the brewery, and they refused to bend down to take a good sniff. Instead they stood with straight backs, and the labourers had to lift the heavy wooden casks to their waiting noses.
The brewery hierarchy was strictly delineated between the salaried staff and the wage-earning workers. Flood queued with hundreds of other boys for the January messenger-boy exams; success, for many, would still mean a life of labouring and entering through a separate door from the staff.
The smell of roasted hops that used to fill the streets around St James's Gate has largely disappeared, sealed in by new technology. The huge vat, with its 29-double-decker-bus capacity, into which people could peer at the black swirling beer, has been decommissioned. The brewhouse department, which once employed 400 people, is now operated by four or five. They sit at consoles and control the computers that regulate the brewing.
"It's hard to imagine a world like that existed," Flood says. "It was a city within a city, and it was also a city that had a major influence on the world outside. The excise duty from Guinness alone would pay for the Army, and then you had £200 million [ €255 million] being spent on barley and purchases in the country. The loss to Ireland of the Guinness presence would be enormous.
"The actual employment and care of the workers was tremendous. The type of work that was there was labouring work. You went in in a particular position, and you were never expected to get out of it."
At the time he joined there were 4,500 employees. "People came to do a job, like painting or whatever, and they just stayed." One of his early tasks as a directors' messenger was to leave out the slippers in the morning for one manager, to leave out newspapers and pens for others and to light their cosy fires.
When he left the brewery, the number of staff was down to 900 and the company had more pensioners than employees. He believes it was a close shave that Diageo, the global parent company, did not shut down St James's Gate, sell the 60-acre (24-hectare) site and move brewing operations outside Ireland.
He oversaw three major rationalisation programmes, the last of which was aimed at protecting St James's Gate by closing down Park Royal, Guinness's London brewery. "I had this belief, or worry, that Guinness would not have a major reason to be in Ireland. As you look at the globalisation there was no reason. The Irish profits would be a small part of the make-up. Companies are at their most vulnerable when they're most successful financially, because there doesn't appear to be a problem, so everybody goes for the soft option. And the seeds of disaster are sown in that success period."
At meetings of senior managers Flood began to float the idea that the company could get a 50 per cent increase in production in Dublin for a £30 million [ €38 million] investment. "We bit by bit, subversively in the organisation, made it clear we could do that. The logic is that you could get £200 million [ €255 million] for the sites in Park Royal. So you try to make sure [ the downsizing] doesn't happen to you."
The antidote to the brewery job that he hated in the early days was his career in football; his love for the game was fostered by his aunt Cathy. At the height of his playing career with Shelbourne, he kept goal in the 1960 FAI Cup final with three broken fingers on his left hand. His little finger never set straight, and the bone still juts out at an angle.
The brewery's chief medical officer wanted him to have it amputated, but he refused. It has become a trademark. He found it useful in union negotiations as a tactic for getting the floor. He would put up his left hand, wave the mis-shapen finger, get everyone's attention and then say his piece.
During the most mundane years of his brewery career, life had sparkle at weekends when he travelled first to Wales and then to Scotland, where he was billed as the "man in black" in goal for the Scottish team Morton.
After an injury in 1967 his playing days were over. His brewery career took off with a promotion to the staff; he returned to football, as part of Shelbourne's management team, in the 1990s. This led to a seat on the executive of the FAI during one of its most turbulent times. The controversy about the appointment of Mick McCarthy and other turmoil left him so frustrated that he resigned. He ends the chapter dealing with the FAI by saying that in later years he was approached and asked to apply for the chief executive's post after Brendan Menton departed. "I did apply but, on 'mature reflection', then withdrew my application."
"It was a very bad time. The extraordinary thing was that four or five things seemed to happen at the same time, none of them necessarily linked, but they all seemed to hit the FAI at the same time and created an even worse picture than was the case. But it's amazing how you get caught up with something like that; you lose your sense of direction, and you suddenly find you're in the middle of things and say, What am I doing here?" he says.
"The FAI became a multimillion-pound business overnight, and the people who were running the FAI were being asked to operate as people at very senior level would in a multinational organisation, having to make very serious big-business decisions, and the pressure was enormous on people in those situations. I'm not sure that people had the necessary experience to deal with it."
In 1994 he was asked by Marian Finucane whether he had not just landed the most difficult job in the country as chairman of the Labour Court. He says that he loved every minute of the job and that it had a refreshing lack of politics behind the scenes compared with Guinness.
For a while his wife had to remind him each morning when he left for work to remember to be statesmanlike. "I had terrible trouble in the court, sitting there and not getting involved. My management style would be to be out there, talking to people. I believe a managing director's role to be 70 per cent talking. In some organisations I think people should have to pay €5 every time they write a memo."
Now he has what some would describe as one of the worst jobs, heading the committee to implement the Government's decentralisation programme. "With all this negative stuff that it's about to crumble, what people are missing in all that is that you have 10,500 civil servants who have put down their names to go," he says. He concedes that more than half of those requests are from civil servants who already live and work outside Dublin and want to transfer to other non-Dublin locations. "But if the Government were to suddenly say they're abandoning it all, if you think there are problems now - then wait.
"Assuming that things continue as they are, it will happen. It will not be on the time scale that was envisaged when it was announced, but that flexibility on the time scale is also to facilitate the moves of people going."
Writing the book has brought Flood closer to his father, although when he began it he realised how little he knew about him. His father was a reserved man who did not like visitors to the house, and if he thought relations might be about to call he would put a copy of the Evening Mail in the letter box of their Stoneybatter cottage and turn out the lights. The family would whisper in the glow of the firelight until the visitors had knocked on the door and left, their footsteps fading up the street.
"It's only since I started writing the book I realised that in many ways I'm a loner. That would seem strange to people I know. But although I've lots of friends, mentally I'm a loner."
One evening after work at the Labour Court, Flood collapsed at home. He was taken to hospital and diagnosed with diverticulitis. A short while later they found an aortic aneurysm.
"It was a chastening experience. Obviously, I was very concerned and upset about leaving my family. I was more concerned for that than myself. Initially I was quite frightened, but then I began to think about all the things I was going to miss and all the things I was going to lose, and I thought that life was too good to be leaving it."
Now, healthy again, he is busier than ever, having done consultancy work with more than 30 firms and headed regeneration projects at Fatima Mansions and St Michael's estate, in Inchicore, as well as chairing Shelbourne FC, where he will oversee the sale of Tolka Park this year and negotiations to share grounds with Bohemian FC.
Is he worried about exposing his life to public scrutiny? "The only thing that will bother me is that people writing about it will say it's a load of rubbish. I've had a very lucky life. I've had three of the best jobs in Ireland: managing director of the most famous brewery in the world, Labour Court, Shelbourne - best football club in the country."
He loves being a very involved grandfather to his daughter Susie's sons Josh and Alex. The youngest boy, now two and a half, spent his first 17 months in and out of Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, in Crumlin. "I think when you get into that environment you really see what life's about."
In Full Flood, by Finbarr Flood, is published by Liberties Press, €13.99. Proceeds will go to the ear, nose and throat department at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children Crumlin