A new book argues Roy Keane helped shape modern Ireland itself
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Who is Roy Keane and why is he significant in Irish sport?
The Pat Kenny Show on Newstalk.
Few figures in Irish sport have cast as long a shadow as Roy Keane. Now, to some, he's the embodiment of elite standards and uncompromising honesty. To others, he represents something else, a kind of cultural hard edge that seeped far beyond football. A new book argues that Keane's influence didn't just shape teams, but helped to shape modern Ireland itself. We need to talk about Roy. The keenification of modern Ireland is written by Dave Hannigan, contributor with the Irish Times and based in New York. And he joins me now on the line. Dave, good morning and welcome. Good morning, Pat. Now, let's talk about your title, first of all, and that word, the keenification of modern Ireland. What do you mean by that?
I guess what I was trying to capture with that word and that kind of quirky title was how he has been the national obsession, the national argument, if you like, for nearly four decades now. We've been obsessed with Keane in one way or another since 1990, since his days as a kind of a teenage footballer at Nottingham Forest, right up to the current phase of his life, the grey-bearded influencer phase that he inhabits right now. Now, the intersections that you had with Roy Keane, I mean, you're in a very good place to write about him because your lives did cross many, many times. Yeah, I mean, I grew up, I'm nine months older than Roy Keane, but I grew up playing soccer against him. So I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Cork, the same Cork that he grew up in, and I met him on the playing fields.
He played for a very famous, all-conquering, successful team called Rockmount. I played for a less successful team, but I did run into him a lot and was defeated by him a lot. I did train with him a couple of times at a kind of a seven-up soccer school that was run one Easter by Billy Bingham, the then Northern Ireland manager. So I had a lot of intersections with him. I saw him and his team. You know, they were everybody in the whole city looked up to that team and, you know, they were the benchmark for all the rest of us. But he was not the only great player on that team. It was a team of like all stars, if you want. And any one of them looked like they could make it. He just happened to make it in a bigger way than any of them.
Now, he was small and later on he disgracefully grew a mullet. But this is pre-mullet days. He was a small teenager and that kind of made for a difficult to predict that he was going to ever make it as a footballer because he was so small. Absolutely. There were a lot of English scouts, the Irish scouts, the people in Ireland, the scouts in Ireland who worked for the English clubs, a lot of them looked at that Rockmount team and they sent over some of those players to England on trials and some of them got contracts over there. But Roy Keane, the knock on him always was that he was too physically too small and too light and he wouldn't be able to cut it, which was obviously a ludicrous argument because there's way more competition.
to football in size and physique. But that was the kind of the lazy response of scouts when Keane's name came up. Yeah, and if you think of the Messi's of today and the Modric's, you know, you don't have to be a towering Ronaldo to be a hugely influential player. No, but I also think this helped Keane because it gave him a chip on his shoulder. You know, not that any Cork person ever needs a bigger chip on their shoulder, but it gave him a chip on his shoulder in terms of he always felt that he had something to prove. And that kind of informed the way he played the game, even from his mid-teens onwards. Now, there's something extraordinary. He went on a FOSS course to teach football.
What does the term 'keenification' mean in the context of modern Ireland?
Yeah, in the story of Roy Keane, like in the fairy tale rise of him when he gets to Forest in 1990, the makings of him before 1990 is he goes on this fast course, which every League of Ireland club was allowed to sign two young players and send them to Palmerston in Dublin for five days a week, residential.
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