One of the great stories of Irish domestic soccer dates back to the early 1960s when Shelbourne were on their way to winning the FAI cup. The team's goalkeeper, a young Finbarr Flood, broke three bones in his hand playing in the semi-final. However Shelbourne's reserve goalkeeper also got injured before the final.
There was nothing left but for Flood to go out with his hand heavily strapped and keep a clean sheet to win the trophy.
An Irish Times interview in 2006 to mark the publication of his memoir told of how his little finger never set straight and the bone continued to jut out at an angle. Doctors wanted him to have it amputated, but he refused. It became a trademark. He found it useful in negotiations with trade unions in his subsequent life as a tactic for getting the floor. He would put up his left hand, wave the misshapen finger, get everyone's attention and then say his piece.
This week Shelbourne, the north side Dublin soccer club he played for and later went on to chair, as well as the world of industrial relations and the brewer Guinness, mourned the loss of Finbarr Flood who has died at the age of 77.
Flood’s life was, in so many ways, remarkable. He walked into the Guinness plant at St James’s Gate in Dublin as a boy messenger in 1953 and left 40 years later as managing director.
In the meantime, while still working at Guinness in Dublin, he successfully pursued a parallel career as a professional soccer player, travelling at the end of a working week to play for clubs in Scotland and Wales.
On leaving Guinness, he became deputy chairman of the Labour Court in 1994, taking over as chairman in 1997. He later became chairman of Shelbourne during a period when the club came within 45 minutes of qualifying for the lucrative group stages of European Champions League – a development which could have transformed Irish domestic soccer.
Finbarr Flood grew up on Oxmantown Road in Dublin city in the 1940s and 1950s. He was educated at Brunswick Street CBS and, at the age of 14, went to work in the Guinness brewery as a messenger boy. Guinness in those days was an enormous employer in the city, with upwards of 4,000 staff.
His father and grandfather had worked previously for the brewing giant. Guinness was seen as a benign and paternalistic employer. However there were strict and regimented delineations between the different categories of workers.
About the time of the publication of his memoir, In Full Flood in 2006, he described the caste-like system that was in operation in Guinness at the time.
He spoke about working in the “scald bank”, one of the many early tasks he disliked in the brewer. The scald bank was where empty beer casks were returned for cleaning. 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.
Flood also spoke about being fined a shilling on a number of occasions “for looking contemptuously at my superior, a man messenger”.
Outside of work there was always soccer. Initially he played for Shamrock Rovers Minors and then played for Holyhead in Wales, which involved travelling over by boat on a Friday and returning on early morning sailing on a Sunday.
After his stint with the successful cup-winning Shelbourne team, he was signed by Greenock Morton in Scotland, where he spent a number of years travelling over each weekend after work in Guinness in Dublin.
He spent another five years with Sligo Rovers, again as a commuting player, until a leg injury put paid to his soccer career. Flood was 30 by then, married, with a family – but his career at Guinness was about to take off.
He was offered promotion from the manual operative grades to a clerical post in the traffic department. He had made the big jump being “staffed” in the company. By the time he left Guinness, he was managing director.
Guinness owner Diageo this week described Flood as a strong leader with great vision and conviction. It said that towards the end of his tenure with the company, “he was instrumental in securing the investment needed to transform St James’s Gate into one of the most modern breweries in the world, expanding and modernising the brewing and packaging operations onsite”.
After leaving Guinness, Flood was appointed as deputy chairman of the Labour Court and became chairman a number of years later. He oversaw the Labour Court at a time when its jurisdiction expanded considerably to encompass more employment rights legislation.
Flood later became chair of the regeneration boards at Fatima Mansions, St Michael’s in Inchicore and the Grangegorman Labour and Learning Forum, established in Dublin.
He was conferred with an honorary doctorate by the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2012. The FAI presented Flood with a Hall of Fame award at the FAI Cup Final in 2011, in recognition of his contribution to Irish soccer.
His first wife Ann died in 1985. He remarried and is survived by his wife Anne and children Barry and Suzie.