FAI CHAIRPERSON ROY Barrett hailed Packie Bonner as a man of “significant integrity” as the former goalkeeper made a return to the FAI as a board member. 

Bonner served Ireland for 30 years as a player, goalkeeping coach, and Technical Director but lost the latter job in 2010 as part of a wave of redundancies at the FAI during John Delaney’s tenure as CEO. 

He has now returned to 11 years on, having yesterday been ratified as an independent director on the Association’s board. 

“My impression of him is absolutely that he is a man of significant integrity”, said Barrett of Bonner. “What he brings is just a store of knowledge and a wealth of experience in all things relating to football in Ireland having played the game, having been part of the FAI previously and obviously in terms of the work he’s been engaged in with Uefa so he has a huge amount of knowledge.

“He has a huge interest in the development of the game in Ireland, the development pathways for our players, high performance and how we look at it that so I think Packie will clearly have an input into all of that.

“But first and foremost Packie, like the rest of us, is a director now and will fully participate in all aspects of the board and the board decisions. I’ve a high regard for Packie, I’ve been very impressed by him throughout this process as I have with the other directors as well.” 

Six independent directors and six elected, football directors were ratified to the FAI board at yesterday’s virtual EGM, with Gerry McAnaney and Paul Cooke wining votes against David Moran and Ursula Scully to retain their seats as President and Vice-President respectively. The other football directors on the board are Richard Shakespeare, Joseph O’Brien, and the newly-elected Tom Browne. Barrett and Bonner, meanwhile, are joined by another four independent directors: Catherine Guy, Liz Joyce, Gary Twohig and Robert Watt. 

Barrett, meanwhile, sounded a note of cautious optimism on the return of fans to games, though did not give any firm dates. 

“We’re definitely on the pathway of returning. The extent of that will depend on how the pandemic develops over the next number of months. Certainly, over the next number of months, I’d expect a number of trials across a number of sports and take the learnings from those, and see what impact they have. Assuming they’re successful, progressively we’ll get back to more and more crowds. 

“We were expected to have 20% capacity [at the Euros] in June and we couldn’t achieve that. We’ll have to wait and see how things develop. Clearly, things are looking more promising. So, we’d be hopeful.”