Public Relations Officer Danny Lynch: As Danny Lynch prepares to step down, Tom Humphriestakes us through some of his defining moments
Danny Lynch's craggy, familiar face is framed on this grey November day against the glittering opulence of Croke Park behind him. He finishes another story that leaves you laughing, drawing you in with his perfect phrases and his great, mischievous cackle. Then he pumps your hand and says, "Well, old stock, that's it," and off he hurries, back to work.
He leaves you standing there as he vanishes into the Mother Ship. It's hard to imagine Croke Park without Danny Lynch. Or Danny Lynch without Croke Park. But Danny is moving on, leaving us all standing here. After a couple of decades during which he has been a beacon helping the GAA to define itself as it emerged through the fog of cultural uncertainty into this strange period of national affluence, he has had enough.
He leaves behind no greasy slick on the floor. He has been the least oleaginous public-relations person in history. The friendship and kinship he has offered so many of us who write about the GAA has been fierce and honest and always accepted on the basis that Danny reserved the right to give you a kick in the backside or a terse phone call if necessary.
Danny - though the association often took positions the public defence of which seemed like cruel and unusual punishment for such a smart man - was always in tune with the body he served. As he said himself at his interview for the job, you have to have it in the gut. His visceral attachment to the GAA and the strangely unworldly fascination ordinary people still hold for him made him the right man in the right place.
Not that he has always been beloved. When radio-phone-in culture decided the Trips to Tipp were licensed debauchery he received used condoms in the post. Journalists who have come up against Danny acting as bouncer guarding the doors to the GAA's privacy often refer to him testily as Petty Officer Lynch. He was once called an urban terrorist at a community meeting when Croke Park was being planned.
Yet, the difference in the public perception of the GAA from the time Danny Lynch commenced working in Croke Park to the time he leaves will be immense and incalculable. The other two traditional pillars of Irish society, Fianna Fáil and the Church, have been variously discredited and ridiculed in that time.
The GAA has had its moments, but has come from a far dowdier place. (And by the way, for an urban terrorist, perhaps the best tribute to Danny's lightness of touch would be the fact the three stands that make up the great horseshoe of Croke Park were built without a single objection going in to An Bord Pleanála.) During the great upheavals of the RDS debacle, rule 21, Rule 42 and so on, it has been Danny Lynch who has been front of house taking the slings, the arrows and anything else that could be directed at him.
But the love and understanding was in his gut and he took it all. If he had mixed feelings he kept them to himself.
In the gut.
He remembers once as a young fella thinning mangles in the fields just outside Dingle, straightening his back and complaining to his father about the gruel of the work. His father told him he had three choices: these mangles, shovelling muck in Camden Town or sticking to his schoolbooks. So he got a scholarship to university, but being the eldest of six decided to leave it be as the five coming after him were going to be in equal need of the opportunity and his father's mangles didn't bring in enough money to keep six kids loafing in academia.
THE GAAhad him by then anyway. He watched his neighbours playing for Na Piarsaigh in Dingle and couldn't understand why the entire Piarsaighs team weren't also the Kerry team. When the meitheals were in working the fields the sole topic of conversation the whole time was football. Was O'Connell better than Paddy Kennedy? Or vice versa. It all filtered through him.
He had relatives who had been famous in the green and gold. Bill Dillon once lent him the watch he got for captaining Kerry in the 1947 All-Ireland in the Polo Grounds. Bill had a passion for beagling and Danny was running with the drag for a beagle race and needed to know how far ahead of the beagles he should be for the next four or five miles. Somewhere along the way the watch fell off Danny's wrist and was lost forever.
Bill Dillon had a famously short fuse, but on that day was exhilarated by a day with his dogs. "Ah so what," he said by way of reprieve.
Danny tells great stories all freighted with the love of Kerry and the love of characters.
The first team he ever captained as a kid, Paddy Bawn Brosnan filled the cup they won with lemonade.
Once a neighbour borrowed Danny's father's bike to go to a match 32 miles away in Tralee. A cardinal sin, the bike was a day or two late being returned, and the silences were frosty until Pere Lynch could hold his curiosity no longer.
"So, Joe, what was it really like in Tralee?"
His neighbour shook his head: "Well, I was going through the Bull Ring and I shouted 'Up Dingle' and a woman hit me a belt of a baby. Twas the only thing she had handy."
He learned very early the truth of all politics being local. As a husky 12-year-old he was playing with Dingle's under-16 team when they got to a final in Castlegregory, the winners of which were to be presented with medals rumoured to be pure gold and a cup that would make the Sam Maguire look like a thimble.
So desperate were both teams to win that the game was abandoned because of fighting. Danny was one of seven shoehorned into the back of an old Morris Minor which was creaking its way back over the Conor Pass that evening. He broke the dejected silence.
So what's going to happen now? The driver was Michael Begley, who would later be a Fine Gael TD. In the passenger seat was Danny's neighbour Pádraig Lynch.
That's for the West Kerry board to decide, said Begley.
More silence. Next question.
And who are the West Kerry board?
Well, said Begley, I'm the chairman and Pádraig here is the secretary.
Dingle had the match replayed at home and won. Danny still gets needled about it when he talks to men from Castlegregory.
HE HIT DUBLINafter a stint with the Kerry minors of 1969 and went to St Pat's for a few months, but his first exposure to teaching practice was enough.
He played in turn for Erin's Hope (legally), Clanna Gael (illegally) and Civil Service, who told him if he joined soon he would get a good trip to North America. "I'd never seen a plane before let alone fly on one."
He played his first game for the club in Toronto. The following year he actually joined Civil Service as a legal player.
He was a junior executive in the Civil Service by then. The job title had suggested swivel chairs and red telephones to him, but he found his niche among the dusty, herringbone files and the arcane routines.
He became an information officer, the civil service term for PRO, the difference being that "my remit was only to give information, not to rationalise anything. Peter Jay, who wrote Yes Minister, was spot on. That was how it operated."
The Lynch flair for lateral thinking was soon evident. The big day of the year for most of the Ministers was the day of the Estimates speech. The Minister would go to the Dáil and give a lengthy speech rationalising and explaining why he wanted this and that in the budget. The Opposition spokesman would then stand up and pick holes in the Minister's argument and discredit him as much as possible.
Having worked among politicians for a while, Danny got to notice that the most nervous operator on the day was the Opposition spokesperson, who knew very little of what was coming and tended to cover this with bluster and aggression in his response.
So soon Danny was writing the Minister's speech on the Estimates and also writing the opposition spokesman's response and then scripting the reply from the Minister.
Everyone sounded well briefed and articulate. Inevitably, the best-laid plans went awry, but that story is for when Danny writes the memoirs.
His Civil Service stories deserve a volume on their own. Gemma Hussey once complained to him that Avril Doyle was getting all the photo opportunities.
"Well, Gemma, 'tis like this. With a face like that I can stick her up a ladder or down a hole and they have a picture."
When the Phoenix Park had been revamped and kitted out with gaslights and horse-drawn carriages, Bord Bainne, who had shared some of the costs, tried to muscle in on the launch. They invited Maxi along in a miniskirt and make-up to the photo opportunity. Danny, on behalf of the Office of Public Works, had to make Maxi vanish.
"Maxi, how would you like to be the first woman to take a trip by horse-drawn carriage in the Phoenix Park for 120 years?"
"Yes, please."
So he slipped the jarvey 20 quid and told him to make sure Maxi was gone for an hour.
The GAA was fertile ground for a man who could think on his feet. Famously, his first press conference had a handful of journalists at it: the correspondents of the Irish Press, the Irish Independent, The Irish Timesand RTÉ plus a young fellow who never said a word.
When it was over, Danny was approached by a senior correspondent of one of the daily papers who nodded in the direction of the young fella: "There's a new paper out called the Star. Should they be allowed into these things?"
He started out in the job without even a sheet of paper. No brief or direction. After about a week in Croke Park, a girl, Deirdre Gray, came up to him and said she thought she was going to be his secretary. That was the press commissariat for another 10 years or so.
There will never be another time like it for the GAA or any other sports organisation. Danny was front of house taking bullets for events as disparate and desperate as the RDS saga; Rules 21 and 42; Seán Boylan, Tommy Dowd and the Sam Maguire being refused entry to an All-Ireland lunch in Croke Park the day after Meath had won it; thousands of Offaly fans staging a sit-in on the Croke Park turf after the Jimmy Cooney timing error; the International Rules atrocities.
He tells stories of the behind-the-scenes meetings. A lonely Saturday in Croke Park being interrupted by a call from Mo Mowlam. A discreet meeting in the early 1990s with unionist leaders making the front page the next day because the barman in the pub happened to be an international boxer who took a phone call from a journalist about boxing and chattily mentioned who had been in. "Front page the next day, GAA Chiefs Meet Unionists. You always got promoted to a chief in stories like that."
Sometimes he made it up as he went along. When Princess Diana died, every do-gooder in the country was on to Croke Park looking for games to be cancelled that weekend. Danny told them all the policy of the GAA was to cancel games only for the deaths of Irish heads of state and then, to amuse himself further, added the wrinkle that an exception had been made for the death of JFK: "I knew he died in late November and there'd have been nothing on so nobody was going to contradict me."
He wrote the words that made the papers. On Rule 21 he wrote the line which Seán McCague uttered and which resonated most that day: "There is never a good time to die. There will be no good time to get rid of this rule, but this may be the best time."
In a meeting with British army chiefs and the RUC, it was Danny who explained that Crossmaglen was to GAA people what a totem pole was to Native Americans. It was Danny, with Paddy Teahon, who nailed down the £60 million the Government gave to Croke Park for the GAA, and it was Danny who had two speeches ready for his president to deliver as he stood up to address Congress the next day still not knowing if the terms would be accepted.
AND HE HAD FUN. He remembers a function in Fermanagh that he attended with Jack Boothman during Boothman's presidency. Boothman was famously irreverent and garrulous. He made uproarious conversation during dinner with the man beside him, and when the speeches started, Boothman's neighbour was asked to speak and was introduced as the local bishop.
Boothman, a Church of Ireland man, was not pleased he hadn't known who it was he was speaking to and turned to his PRO. Danny's amused shrug disarmed him.
"Could ye at least get yeer feckers colour coded," said Boothman.
He was there on good days and bad days, but for those who know Danny, word of the thing he will take away when he goes next year comes as no surprise.
"What I would carry most with me is the friends I made and the memories I have. The media people I dealt with - many would be very close friends of mine. And the officers of the association and members of the public around the country. That's been a great thing, to have made so many friends."
LIKE DANNY in the last 20 years, the GAA has changed while remaining essentially the same. He takes justified pride in how perceptions of the association have altered. He loves being away somewhere out of the country on the weekend of a big match and looking out the window of a hotel or an apartment and seeing the flow of county jerseys going by, symbols of pride which leave a trail telling him where he can go in Lanzarote or New York or wherever to see the game on TV.
He tells a story about coming out of Castleblayney one fine autumn morning and the head gasket on his car blowing. Within minutes of his opening the bonnet a dozen or so cars had pulled up, all GAA people who recognised him as a GAA man.
He was brought to a garage whose proprietor showed no signs of recognition till Danny thanked him profusely.
"Don't be thanking me at all," said the man. "Sure unless you were in Fianna Fáil or the GAA around here there would be nobody at your funeral."
It'll be a long while before Danny gets to test the truth of that for himself. He has a few projects in his head and he would like to travel a bit. South America holds a fascination for him, he says - "maybe because Che Guevara was a Lynch".
He was too, but Danny took more bullets and lived to tell the tale.
