Republic of Ireland legend Niall Quinn: “If I don’t go to Kerry three times a year, I’d be like a car running out of petrol, y’know?”

“I was a professional football player for twenty years, but I never ached as badly then as I do now. Honest to God, I couldn’t move afterwards. I’ll never do it again... but I’m delighted I did it once!”
Niall Quinn is talking about his charity climb up Carrauntoohil in Kerry, which he agreed to after several glasses of something extremely cheeky.

“They caught me at a weak moment,” he laughs. “No, a guy I know was doing it in memory of his sister so I was honoured to be involved. I have to say, when we got to the top the 360° view was magnificent.

We saw beaches on one side, mountain ranges on the other. We were up and back in around eight hours, taking the most difficult route which is apparently also the most scenic. I was thinking it’d be like a stroll in the Dublin Mountains but, no, it’s a serious hike that you’d really want to be fit for.”

The Kingdom has long been the Dublin-born, Kildare-residing 58-year-old’s favourite bolthole.

“If I don’t go to Kerry three times a year, I’d be like a car running out of petrol, y’know?” he laughs. “We go down to Ballybunion, Tralee and Waterville. We play golf, have nights out with friends and eat well.”

Niall is also lucky enough to have two tournament golf courses on his doorstep.

“I used to be a 2 handicap but it’s out now to 6,” he rues. “My claim to golfing fame is that I once played with Seve Ballesteros at a pro-am tournament at the Heritage – something I’ve been milking ever since! I’m a member now at the K Club. Golf keeps us ex-footballers competitive.”

Although no longer as closely associated with the sport as he was, Quinner still enjoys a day at the races.

“I did Cheltenham 24 years in a row,” he smiles. “Now I go to Portugal, play golf in the morning and watch the racing in the afternoon. The one festival I do try and get to with friends of mine from England is our local one, Punchestown. It’s a gorgeous course.”

Niall and his wife Gillian are also both avid music fans who love going to grassroots gigs.

“We travel up every Sunday from Kildare on the bus and go to Sin É on the quays,” he reveals. “We do blues, jazz, country, everything! We also go to the Arthur’s Blues ‘n’ Jazz Club up there on Thomas Street near Vicar Street, which used to be the Robert Emmett bar. There’s always a great sense of occasion going to a gig in the National Concert Hall. We try to get the last bus home, but often have to jump into a taxi  because we can’t tear ourselves away from the music and the craic!”

Niall Quinn. Photo: Abigail Ring.

Former Emmerdale, Penny Dreadful and Game Of Thrones man Jack Hickey will be portraying Niall in Saipan, a biopic account of the infamous 2002 World Cup spat which will be out this summer, and also stars Steve Coogan as Mick McCarthy and Éanna Hardwicke as Roy Keane.

Will Quinner be going to see it?

“I’m delighted because the guy playing me is quite a handsome fella – my wife said, ‘He looks good!’ – but probably not,” he reveals. “I was there in the room and don’t need to be told what happened by someone who wasn’t. Good luck to them, though. Others might worry a bit, but I’m easy about it. I gave an account of it in a book I wrote, which got it all out of my system.

“I can’t remember whether it was a newspaper or a radio station but, on the 20th anniversary of Saipan, I was asked to look at six articles that had been written about it and to give my opinion on them. I thought, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a good exercise’, but they were all just bullsh*t. It was what people had heard from people who’d heard from other people.”

How do Niall and Roy get on these days?

“I haven’t seen Roy in a long, long time but I’m delighted he’s doing so well with his TV work. The day he came to Sunderland, I knew with his strength and power that he’d be box-office. He turned that sleepy club upside down and he’s doing the same now with his punditry.”

Although he didn’t play in it himself, Niall Quinn is a big flag-waver for the League of Ireland.

“It badly needs investment but, standard-wise, the games I’ve watched this season have been really good,” he enthuses. “I take my hat off to Bohemians for all the work they do in the community; they’re really proactive. They’ve got a proper soul. All the clubs do. Duffer has been a revelation at Shelbourne, winning the title and generally turning them into a really, really professional outfit. If you’ve never been to a League of Ireland game, do because it’s buzzing at the moment.”

Amen to that! As for the Ireland team, Niall is cautiously optimistic about the progress they’re making under Heimir Hallgrimsson.

“After Sean Dyche not fancying him, Jake O’Brien has looked really comfortable in the run of games he’s got at Everton and was great for us against Bulgaria,” Quinner opines. “Having left Spurs, which he had to do to get his career going, Troy Parrott has been showing his true potential at AZ Alkmaar in Holland. Adam Idah going up to Celtic has worked out excellently too and I’ve no doubt that it’ll come good for Evan Ferguson. He’s had a bit of a ‘mare at West Ham but he’s a good player. I also like the young lads, Sammie Szmodics and Chiedozie Ogbene, who are at Ipswich. Suddenly, there’s a real goal threat and competition for places that had been lacking a bit before.”

Of course, if things had panned out differently, Hallgrimsson might have Harry Kane, Jack Grealish and Declan Rice at his disposal.

“My annoyance at Declan Rice not playing for Ireland is finally starting to wear off,” Niall admits. “It’s taken a while though! From what I can see he’s a top bloke and a massive influence on the Arsenal team. He’s orchestrating things and also scoring some exceptional goals like those free-kicks against Real Madrid, so good luck to him.”

Let us not forget that before arriving at Arsenal in 1983, Niall was a senior Dublin footballer and very nearly ended up playing Australian Rules professionally in Melbourne.

“I was captain of the Dublin Colleges team that went over there,” he resumes. “We had a training day with Hawthorn who were the biggest club at the time. This really famous player, Dipper Domenico, said, ‘Okay, tall guy, you play up top and let me see how you go for the ball.’ When I went straight for it he laughed and went, ‘You’ve no chance. Here’s how to do it…’ And he showed me the trick of being side on and giving the defender a little nudge to get away from them, which I used throughout my football career.

“To cut a long story short, Hawthorn sent me a contract offer that because of a postal strike in Ireland took ages to get to me. By the time it did I was at Arsenal and Jim Stynes, a fellow Dub who became an Australian Rules legend, got my contract.”

Does Niall have a favourite GAA occasion?

“Yes, the Munster Final if it’s Tipperary and Cork,” he shoots back. “The Cork fans normally outnumber the Tipp ones by four or five to one. They hang around the town all day and night, and the hurling final is normally on a beautiful summer’s day. The intensity, the skill, the athleticism, the passion and what’s at stake… it really is one of the great sporting occasions.”

While soccer has been good to Niall, not all of his contemporaries have been so lucky with some of them suffering from physical and psychological conditions linked to their playing days. In April, he joined Johnny Giles and Liam Brady for an event in Vicar Street which benefitted the Irish Professional Footballers’ Benevolent Fund. Multiple studies show that ex-pros have been disproportionally struggling with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.

“I was talking about this recently to Peter Reid,” Niall reveals. “It is happening. There’s no point in denying it. My wife deserves a bit of credit here, because as this started to gain ground in the news over the last 10 years or so, she really pushed me into a pattern of doing quizzes and crosswords. I went back to college there in the pandemic, just to keep the brain active and to keep everything going.

“But I wouldn’t lie to you and say I’m not bothered about it.”

If you were at the Vicar Street event, you’ll know how famously Niall gets on with Johnny and Liam, who was his roommate and mentor when he first broke into the senior Ireland set-up in 1986.

“Liam was the star of the show in the ’80s,” Quinn recalls. “It was exhilarating for a young lad to be there and see this man, having an aura about him the way he did.  The way the waitress would go up to him and ask him if he wanted more tea or coffee. He held a very special place wherever he walked, whether it was in the café or on the street.

“In the dressing room, when he spoke everybody listened. He also had another side to him where he would stop to see how the young lad was getting on.

“He actually showed me how to shave,” Niall continues. “I left home at 16. I hadn’t started shaving. Nobody had told me how to. I was having a shave and I was cutting myself. He said: ‘What are you doing?

You’ve got to go up against the grain’, and he showed me.”

Finally, what would Niall consider to be his finest ninety minutes in any shirt?

“Well, in the early days I got a hat-trick against Crystal Palace – right foot, left foot and a header,” he concludes. “I was still trying to prove myself at Manchester City who’d paid a lot of money for me. We were in the bottom three, had nine games to go and after that Howard Kendall decided to stick with me for the run-in. I scored four in those nine games, only one of which was a defeat, and we finished right up the table. That’s effectively what got me on the plane to Italia 90 so it was a really big one for me.

The new edition of Best Of Ireland is available to pre-order now – also featuring Vogue Williams, Evanne Kilgallon, Niall Quinn, Andrea Mara, Robert Grace, Demi Isaac and more...