Obituary: Finbarr Flood

Born on the Oxmantown Road, Dublin in 1938, an area then known as 'Cowtown' because it housed acres of pens where cattle were held before being driven on the hoof to the North Wall to be exported to Britain, he was influenced by his Aunt Cathy to take up football at an early age, playing with local clubs Munster Victoria and Kirwan Rovers before joining Shamrock Rovers juniors.

On a trip to Liverpool as an 11-year-old, he and a group of boys went into a shop to buy postcards, and while chatting to a local woman, she guessed he was a goalkeeper because of his lanky build. He was, in fact, playing right-corner forward but decided to change position and played in goal with considerable success for the rest of his sporting life.

In later years, he often spoke of the community spirit in Dublin at the time, regretting how it has changed in the intervening years. "People took pride in success achieved by anyone in the area - nowadays people don't seem to know the neighbours living next door, and what is more, they don't want to know them."

At the age of 14, he got a job as a messenger boy in the Guinness brewery in St James's Gate. Because of his long, lanky build, he didn't make the 'height to weight ratio' required - but a friend of his father put his foot on the weighing scales to ensure he made the grade.

"In the early days, I wasn't attracted to the brewery, I just wanted a few bob, it was as simple as that," he told journalist Alan Condon in an interview many years later. "I was often fined a shilling for looking contemptuously at my superiors."

In the 1957 and 1958 football seasons he played for Sligo Rovers juniors and in 1959 switched to The Virginians, a soccer team based around the Players Wills factory in Dublin where the won a Junior FAI Cup medal when they defeated Swilly Rovers of Donegal in the final.

The following year, 1960, despite three broken fingers, he played in the FAI Cup Final for Shelbourne when they defeated Cork Hibernians 2-0 in Dalymount Park. He emulated the Russian goalie Lev Yashin, who trained in a sandpit and dressed all in black - earning himself the title 'The Man in Black'.

Flood later played with Holyhead Town in north Wales, going over on the Mail Boat on a Friday and coming back on the 3am boat on Monday in time for work in the brewery. With another Shelbourne player, Paddy Turner, he then joined Greenock Morton in Scotland, flying over to Glasgow every weekend. The team won 12 matches in a row and Flood was living "a celebrity lifestyle" as a footballer, in contrast to his mundane life in Guinness.

"Football kept me sane during a part of my life when my work at the brewery was monotonous and soul destroying," he said later. While Guinness, which was then headquartered in Dublin, was a paternalistic employer with good pay and conditions, medical care and other benefits, it also had, even in the early 1960s, what Flood described as a "rigid power structure".

This was a polite way of saying that virtually all the top and middle management positions were held by Protestants while the vast majority of workers were Catholic.

However, he had the good fortune to come to the attention of Major General Sir Charles Harvey, a decorated veteran who had served in both world wars and was assistant managing director of Guinness, with responsibility for personnel from 1946 to 1961. He took a keen interest in Flood's career and helped him to move upwards through the ranks, to assume the title of head of personnel when Harvey retired. On the football field, he returned to Sligo Rovers, playing in 1964 and 1965, but he suffered a serious injury to his right knee which ended his playing career.

In later years he trained underage football teams, notably in Dalkey and Ballymun. He said that one of his proudest achievements in football was as manager of an underage team in Ballymun who lost every single match until the last game of the season, which they won 2-1.

He was appointed managing director of Guinness in 1989 and when he retired from the position in 1994, he was appointed deputy chairman of the Labour Court, becoming chairman in 1998. Although he moved to Rathfarnham, he never lost his connection with Dublin's inner city and was involved in regeneration projects in Fatima Mansions and St Michael's Estate in Inchicore.

He was also appointed chairman of Shelbourne Football Club after it ran into financial difficulties in the early 2000s and he helped steer the club in a new direction. He wrote his autobiography In Full Flood in 2006 and was conferred with an honorary degree by the Dublin Institute of Technology in 2012.

Finbarr Flood was married twice, to Ann, who predeceased him as did his daughter Sandra, and secondly to Anne who survives him, as do his children Barry and Susie.