Delaney funds free bar on day FAI announce redundancies

THE FAI has said the money spent providing a free bar for Irish supporters in a Tallinn pub on Thursday night was provided by John Delaney personally and no cost was incurred by the association.

The organisation’s chief executive appeared at the Nimeta Bar (Bar With No Name) in the city’s old town around midnight when it was packed with Irish fans.

Having conducted an impromptu raffle for a small number of tickets he announced he had put €2,000 behind the bar and that Irish fans could drink for free until it ran out.

Delaney had conducted another raffle for around 10 match tickets amongst fans who turned up at the team hotel yesterday morning.

With more than 1,000 ticketless supporters arriving in the Estonian capital ahead of last night’s kick-off, some of the winners spoke afterwards of their delight at gaining guaranteed entry but others complained about the lack of a more formal system for distributing tickets that become available after the initial allocation sold out.

There was some surprise, meanwhile, at the decision by Delaney, who is paid more than €400,000 annually – roughly one per cent of the heavily indebted association’s entire turnover last year – to fund a free bar on the day further cuts were made back at Abbotstown, where two members of the FAI’s technical department, Paul Hamill and Declan McIntyre, were made redundant.

It is not the first time Delaney has bought a big round for travelling supporters. In October of last year when Ireland played Slovakia he paid around €5,000 for drinks for supporters travelling by train between Bratislava and Zilina after the organisation had prematurely announced the game would be in the country’s capital.

The association stands to make a gross figure in excess of €10 million if the Ireland team qualifies for next summer’s European Championship finals in Poland and Ukraine by beating Estonia over two legs but a significant percentage would be expected to go to the players – who took around 50 per cent of the roughly €6.5 million net profit from participation in the 2002 World Cup finals.

This time the guaranteed prize money would be a minimum of €8 million, with commercial bonuses, new sponsorships and revenues from games in advance of the tournament expected to boost that figure considerably.

The association, however, had debts of around €63 million in its last published accounts, most of which related to its share of the cost of redeveloping Lansdowne Road.