Brian Kerr tells a story about his father. Frank Kerr was a champion Belfast amateur boxer in the 30s whose day job was at the Dunlop factory on Upper Arthur Street. Frank, deft with his hands, strung tennis rackets and laced footballs for Dunlop.
On February 1 1930, Frank laced the ball that was to be used that afternoon when Northern Ireland hosted Wales in the Home International Championship in Belfast.
The game was to enter football folklore because the Irish won 7-0 and a man called Joe Bambrick scored six. In an era when there was one ball per match, Frank Kerr not only laced the ball, he carried it to the game and presented it for play.
"Bambrick's ball, that was my old father's part in Irish football history," Brian Kerr recalled. He smiled proudly.
The lace and Joe Bambrick are ties that would bind Brian Kerr to the core of Irish football even if he had not made his own name in the game. Today, sadly too late for his father, Kerr is the manager of the Republic of Ireland, the first "Irish Irish" manager of the Republic since the pre-Jack Charlton days of Eoin Hand in 1985.
Kerr is now 51 and though considered "a real Dub" - Frank moved south during civil strife - he has been given an all-Ireland perspective by his Belfast-born parents and the memories passed on by his father. That is uncommon on the divided island. Just as rare, Kerr was prepared to talk about it.
Tonight at Lansdowne Road, Kerr's Republic host Croatia in a friendly, having just established leadership of World Cup qualifying Group Four ahead of France.
Almost two years into the job, these are good times for Kerr and his developing squad. The World Cup campaign is progressing, Roy Keane has been re-assimilated after Saipan - "that's a word, 'assimilated'," Kerr said - and the manager is hopeful about the next generation of Irish players.
The night before our conversation he had witnessed the 19-year-old Dubliner Willo Flood score his first Premiership goal for Manchester City. The next day Kerr saw Stephen Elliott score for Sunderland; a couple of days later he was in Edinburgh to see Alan Maybury play for Hearts.
This is Kerr's new itinerary, though he knows nearly all the current Irish squad, having been their coach at various youth levels from 1996. The success he had at youth level - European championships at under-16 and under-18 level in 1998 for example - with individuals such as Damien Duff and John O'Shea made him first choice to succeed Mick McCarthy.
Now he is national manager, "surprised by the new fascination of people who have known me, sometimes for 20 or 30 years". That is how long Kerr has been around Dublin football, or, as he still refers to it, soccer.
Football in the Republic of Ireland remains Gaelic football. Soccer, as Kerr said, "was a garrison game" - played in British Army garrisons around Ireland before independence. Even after that, football and cricket were regarded as un-Irish, and when Kerr was at school in the 60s soccer was still banned in the playground.
"At the Christian Brothers school it was a time when the ban was still in place," Kerr said. "The majority of the brothers would turn a blind eye but if the caretaker appeared we'd have to pick the ball up and run with it, as if we were playing Gaelic.
"It frustrated me more that there was no competitive soccer at secondary school. There was lots of recreational soccer, but shortly after I left school in 1970 the ban was lifted. Now school soccer has a profile in Ireland, and respect, though not as much as Gaelic or rugby.
"One of the great changes in Irish society has been the respect given towards soccer from people who would have had a very scornful attitude towards it. Until the 1988 European Championship, until people travelled to the finals and the whole thing took off under Jack Charlton, people all around Ireland had low interest.
"Then suddenly we were playing England, Germany, Russia, three of the great powers in Europe in terms of economy, war, football. We were in there; that had a major impact. Now almost every village in Ireland has a soccer team. That's a dramatic change."
The scorn Kerr spoke of had historical roots, he said. "I would think it was traditional, going back to Cromwell, the plantation, historical stuff."
Kerr said "pockets of resistance" remained. It will affect the soccer team's chances of playing at Croke Park, the 80,000-capacity Dublin stadium built and rebuilt by the Gaelic Athletic Association.
The GAA's resistance to the cultural encroachment of soccer is proving steadfast and, with Lansdowne Road about to undergo renovation, Kerr's team will have to play elsewhere, possibly in England.
"The Croke Park issue is for the GAA," he said. "They have made a fantastic job of it. In one way I personally would like us not to be in the position where we ever need to play at Croke Park. They have it, they've done it, let them use it.
"I can understand why the GAA would not want to go down that road and I respect that totally. Given the politics of Ireland, particularly in the north, the GAA people there would be the most hurt by allowing the garrison game into Croke Park.
"And that's fair given the difficulties those people had all those years, the persecution they had, the [British] Army taking their pitches for helicopters. How they survived, I don't know."
Those last words were a turn of phrase. Kerr does know how people kept going because he was one of those who made regular journeys into Northern Ireland. As a decade-long manager of Dublin's St Patrick's Athletic in the League of Ireland, he visited clubs such as Linfield and Portadown.
Symbolic power
Kerr recalled the Blaxnit Cup, a cross-border tournament in the 70s that could not survive the troubles, and he looked forward to the Setanta Cup, a similar competition beginning next year.
He believes in the symbolic power of sport and there is a fragile hope that a get-to-know-you-better cup is a starting point for an all-Ireland league and, from there, who knows.
"A lot of people from the south have never had that interaction with the north - and vice versa. Those that did come down were maybe shocked at the lack of interest in the conflict, perhaps to a frustrating degree.
"Far be it from me to give a definitive answer, but the hardest thing might be for the non-nationalistic people of the north to accept change. Could they put their political opinion to one side? I just don't know if they could see any benefit.
"But in terms of football you can say, 'Well, we do all right at rugby and we're all together.' Look at something like boxing - my father always said the boxing team was mixed even though there were big political problems then. There was a Father McLoughlin with the team and for some of the lads that must have been difficult. But they got over it - sport.
"But then football is the sport of the working classes and those involved in the conflict in the north were the working class."
That brought Kerr back to his father. Ironically Frank's father had been in the British Army and Frank had travelled the globe, collecting friends along the way.
"There were always people staying in our house, sleeping on the floor, a fella from Sierra Leone, I remember. My old father had a great belief about the decency of people who had been through war and conflict."
