Delaney’s history of generosity

But there are themes in this episode which have been seen before in Mr Delaney’s career. These include his propensity for generosity, his quiet modesty about this quality, and previous experience of the courts.

First of all, let’s acknowledge Mr Delaney’s generosity. In 2011, as the country was gripped with an existential crisis, he took a pay cut, unprompted and against the wishes of the board of the FAI.

Acknowledging the pain and suffering being felt by the multitudes, Mr Delaney reduced his salary from roughly €450,000 to €400,000. He said at the time that the board didn’t want him to do it. However, his selflessness ensured that his salary was no longer roughly three times that of his counterparts in the GAA and IRFU, but was still about twice what the taoiseach was being paid.

The following year, he did it all over again. This time, his reward tumbled to €360,000. This was while many other figures whose remuneration from representative or public bodies was in the same stratosphere as Mr Delaney’s were coming in for severe criticism. But the FAI thought their man was worth every penny.

“The board believe it’s justifiable,” he said after that year’s AGM. “They didn’t want to reduce the salary. It’s something I did voluntarily last year and this year.”

Those who knew John Delaney the man would not have been surprised at this further gesture. In 2014, the INM media group released a documentary on him, entitled John The Baptist. The film included contributions from the great and good about the qualities that summed up John Delaney’s character. In it, his mother Joan remembered an incident from John’s childhood.

“John is full of heart and he is soft,” she said on camera. “One day, this woman came and I’d give her four or five bundles of stuff. She said: ‘I need a pair of shoes for my young fella.’ And the next thing was, John, who was small, sat down, took off his shoes and handed them to the woman. He has a huge heart.”

This generosity, as expressed through giving away his clothes to those in need, was also on display at a match in Macedonia in 2011 when he threw his tie into a crowd of Irish supporters. The following year, at a match in Poland, he emerged from a bar without his shoes. However, it is unclear whether he gave his shoes to a shoeless man or whether his shoes were taken from him.

In 2015, it was revealed that, five years previously, Fifa, led by Sepp Blatter, had given a sum of €4m to the FAI as a form of compensation for Thierry Henry’s handball in a World Cup qualifying match in 2009.

The money had been fully accounted for in FAI accounts under “banks and loans”, but there was no reference to its precise provenance.

Certainly, it made the financial health of the FAI look better than it was, and many might have assumed that could only be down to having a gee-whizz €360,000 honcho running the organisation. Mr Delaney has also previously moved to stop stories about him emerging in the media.

In 2015, a video caught him in a pub near the Aviva stadium singing a song about IRA hunger striker Joe McDonnell. Two British newspapers were first onto the story but they promptly received solicitors’ letters warning them of legal action should they publish.

The letter to The Guardian stated: “My client’s position is simply that it is not him singing in the video. If you take the decision to publish, legal proceedings will follow, as it will undoubtedly cause various issues for my client.”

As it turned out, it was him singing, and the main issue it exposed was his brutal singing voice. At the time, Mr Delaney put the legal threat down to “some confusion by a third party”.

Last Saturday, his efforts to stop publication also included a third party. His counsel told the court that the cheque in question was private as it could only have come from an in-camera family law proceeding.

The judge rejected this line of defence and pointed out it could have come from a number of sources.

Among the questions that now arise for Mr Delaney is how he could have declared the cheque in family law proceedings, yet failed to do so explicitly in the accounts of the FAI. After all, this was a matter to do with his highly paid job rather than any personal issue. There are other questions that will be asked next month when Mr Delaney appears before the Oireachtas sports committee.

However, in keeping with his generous nature, Mr Delaney revealed on Sunday that he is donating his annual €160,000 that he receives as a vice president of Uefa — on top of his FAI salary — to the association.

It is unclear whether this latest gesture was something he thought long and hard about over an extended period, or whether he decided at the weekend it would be the right thing to do. Perhaps someone on the Oireachtas sports committee will ask him.