“There’s a need to get athletics back on the pages of newspapers and on screens,” he says.

“For the last 20 years athletics has slipped from being a top-tier sport in this country to something markedly less. That’s such a shame, because it has been such a big part of Ireland.”

It’s the chief reason Byrne has for the past three years poured his energies into a single goal, a book that captures the history, personalities and vast array of achievements by those in Irish athletics.

His finished work, Winning for Ireland – How Irish Athletes Conquered the World, was launched in a suitable setting yesterday at the national indoor track in Abbotstown, a finish line of sorts for a man who has dedicated much of his life to the promotion of athletics. Byrne spent 40 years covering the sport for the Irish Times, and throughout that time he noticed a void in its annals, one he hopes this book can fill.

Far from being a collection of stats, medals, dates and times — the kind of information that could put even the greatest athletics anorak into a coma — his approach was focused on people, personalities.

Each of his 26 chapters is centred on a prominent figure in Irish athletics, the history and anecdotes of the time woven neatly around their accomplishments.

From Dr Pat O’Callaghan to Ronnie Delany, John Treacy to Derval O’Rourke, Catherina to Sonia, Thomas Barr to Fionnuala McCormack — chances are that if they’re an athlete who has made their mark in green, their tale is here.

Digging as far back as 1856, Byrne charts the fluid, fractious nature of the sport here, examining how it helped forge an identity for Ireland on the global stage in the wake of Irish independence.

“All the news agencies were interested in athletics and football,” says Byrne.

“We got very little favourable message abroad except through the medium of sport, and those sports did more than anything to project the new Ireland.

“By bringing old people alive again, it will revive memories. My great hope is some young fella will read a copy of this, take up athletics and become a great athlete themselves.”

Setting about his marathon task, Byrne’s focus was to draw people in in the same way he would as a journalist: by putting the people front and centre.

“It’s a highly personalised history, it’s not facts and texts. It’s about the lives of people and by doing it this way I feel I’ll get more people interested.”

And given his subject matter, there was no way to dance around the friction that so often undermined the growth of the sport, from its inclusion and subsequent separation from the GAA to a troubled stand-off surrounding the Tailteann Games to the division and conflict between the NACA and BLE, which eventually joined to form the current governing body, Athletics Ireland.

The majority of the more recent athletes featured are distance runners, with profiles of many of the Irish greats who made an impact on the American sporting landscape in the latter part of the 20th century.

As Ronnie Delany put it at yesterday’s launch: “They showcased Ireland to American people in a manner which was invariably a great credit to our country. The contribution of our country to that position of pre-eminence in sport, as illustrated in Peter Byrne’s book, ought to be a source of real satisfaction for all of our people.”

But through his work Byrne has seen the standing athletics once had, and what it now has, despite the success of Thomas Barr, Ciara Mageean and a raft of junior athletes in recent years.

“I feel that the people who make decisions and people who write the agenda are unable or reluctant to evaluate the relative merit of local sport and international sport,” he says.

“As a result, athletics has ceased to be a premier-division sport and that is grossly out of sync with the history of our country. There’s a great effect athletics has had on this country that needs to be acknowledged and repaid.”