Back then, he was already in transit to America as Irish boxing’s administrators faced political scrutiny for their role in the loss of a man who would – within 12 months – be named World Coach of the Year. Now, just one week short of the sixth anniversary of his move to the US, Walsh sat in his Serbian hotel room watching what felt like the circus return to town.

Over the course of an hour and 40 minutes, four TDs and three senators quizzed John Treacy, Sport Ireland’s CEO, and Ciarán Kirwan, the IABA chair, in a way that – to Walsh at least – suggested broad ignorance of the latest chapter of turmoil ravaging a boxing association already pretty much renowned for internal conflict.

Despite a divided Board of Directors, a schism at Central Council level, the threat of losing another Director of High Performance and evidence of widespread disillusionment at grassroots level, the questions spoke mostly of constituency self-interest, one even attempting to explore an issue on freestyle kayaking.

Walsh was struck specifically by the deference towards the soon-to-retire Treacy and a desire to pay tribute to the man who has been head of Sport Ireland since it was established in ’05 and, before that, the Irish Sports Council since 1999.

The whole point of the hearing seemed to slowly blur and evaporate in the face of broadly empty, performative interventions. Much the same chaos that had driven Billy out of Irish boxing in 2015 seemed – to him – defiantly intact here.

Watching, he found himself feeling demoralised. And increasingly angry.

Back in 2015, an exasperated Sport Ireland chairman – Kieran Mulvey – threatened to review their funding arrangement with the IABA and Treacy now spoke of it being that body’s “strong view” that it was time for Irish boxing to adopt modern governance practices.

Six years on then, a “strong view” and yet another impending governance review (back in 2008 a Genesis Report recommended sweeping reforms within the Association).

Walsh remains in regular contact with Bernard Dunne, the High Performance director who has been on leave since September since lodging a formal complaint to the Association over a controversial ‘position paper’ circulated by an – as yet – unidentified source the previous April.

The paper, in Dunne’s view, sought to undermine his position just as qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics got under way.

And much of what Walsh has been listening to from the former WBA bantamweight champion runs along gallingly familiar lines. Namely, the sense of an enduring disconnect between the IABA and the very concept of High Performance; the daily tensions of trying to run a professional body within an amateur organisation; the culture of mistrust. Maybe above all – as he sees it – the “stress and duress” of working within an environment that feels endlessly snared with tripwires.

What Billy sees in Dunne’s predicament now is precisely what he remembers of his own.

“I can remember driving into the car park at the National Stadium back when things were getting really close to me departing,” he remembers of 2015, “and just by seeing certain people’s cars parked there… I would nearly get sick.

“That’s how bad I felt at the time. Because I knew they were trying to undermine me, trying to undermine everything we were doing in High Performance. So I recognise that feeling that Bernard has now because people were trying to undermine him even prior to the Olympics with that unsigned document.

“Like, you’re about to go to Olympic qualifiers, what a time to throw a curveball at your team?”

Asked what has motivated him to speak out now, the man who has been transforming US boxing, is unequivocal.

“A couple of things,” he replies. “One, a love of my country and my sport. Two, remembering the treatment that I encountered, treatment that left me spending many a lonely night in tears. I know that Bernard Dunne is going through that right now. And that isn’t a good place, psychologically, for any person to be in.

“The Government has got to stop this. Sport Ireland has got to stop it. Because, for me, this is about much more than Olympic medals.

“It’s about people and the endless ordeal of having someone trying to undermine you in a cowardly way behind your back.”

The IABA’s AGM, due to be held in Belfast tomorrow, has been deferred because of the extraordinary level of infighting which resulted in 25 of its most senior members in Leinster, Connacht and on the Dublin Board recently being expelled from the Association having withdrawn their support for Central Council.

With the names of five of those expelled already on postal ballots for election, the AGM deferral became necessary to facilitate the right of appeal.

Meanwhile, according to Walsh – of whom Treacy quoted an unidentified IABA official’s declaration at the 2015 Oireachtas hearing that the Association had “at least 20 people who could do Billy’s job” – morale in High Performance has seldom been more fragile.

An initial HP decision not to send a team to those World Championships in Belgrade was subsequently overturned with a virtual development squad eventually travelling to Serbia, all bar one of the seven boxers on the team then defeated in their opening bout.

The US, meanwhile, won two golds and two silvers having just enjoyed – with an entirely different team – its most successful Olympics since Atlanta ’96.

From his perspective, Walsh likens the Irish team sent to Belgrade to “bringing a bunch of schoolboys to do a man’s job!” Ill-prepared and inexperienced, they had little chance of making an impact, never mind winning medals.

And he is fearful now that Dunne, narrowly granted just a two-year extension to his contract last April, is about to be lost to the sport.

“Two Oireachtas hearings later and probably two Performance Directors gone and Sport Ireland are talking about having ‘a strong view’ on the IABA’s governance. It’s a joke, ridiculous at this stage,” he argues.

“If this is allowed continue, the goose that laid the golden egg will die. High Performance was set up in 2003 under the guidance of Gary Keegan essentially to get us back on track to winning Olympic medals. And it’s been a professional unit working inside an amateur organisation whose record on governance has not – to put it mildly – been great.

“I believe the board of Sport Ireland have serious questions to answer here, given they oversee the funding of the IABA. They keep talking about rapping the Association across the knuckles, but they haven’t done it.

“And it seems to me that the IABA just gives them the two fingers every time.

“Look at what’s happening at the moment, an Association that just seems to be eating itself apart internally because of politics, because of egos. These people are actually destroying the sport and it’s terrible to be on the outside looking in, watching it all implode.

“We hear there’s another governance review, but they’ve had several of those. To me, it’s all bull at this stage. When are we going to get serious about this?”

Walsh describes Dunne’s achievement in overseeing the qualification of seven boxers for Tokyo as “phenomenal” and says that the treatment of the High Performance director has left the unit’s senior coaches, Zaur Antia, John Conlan and Dmitry Dmitruk, deeply unsettled and frustrated.

“Go back to 2008 and remember what was done to Gary Keegan in Beijing,” he argues. “No accreditation for the man in charge of that team. He had to buy tickets to get in to see his own fighters box. Had to stay in an apartment outside the Olympic village.

“That’s 13 years ago!

“Then go back to Rio 2016 and the story of Michael O’Reilly’s failed drug test breaking at the boxing draw. Nobody in the IABA at home even had the courtesy to warn the coaches in the frontline over there of what was about to blow up in their faces.

“It beggars belief that you can treat people that way. But it hasn’t changed. The same culture remains, the same things being fought over. It’s outrageous. Ireland is about to lose another Performance Director, someone who had turned things around in a short space of time.”

Walsh says that hindsight will leave him forever grateful for the set of circumstances that drove him out of that environment six years ago. “I’m so lucky now that that happened,” he says. “And thanks be to God that it did.

“But that’s what really demoralised me watching that latest Oireachtas hearing. The sense that nothing’s changed and that no-one’s really interested in exploring what’s rotten within Irish boxing. It just felt a waste of time because the right questions were never asked.

“Our sport should be thriving with willing sponsors now, but nobody will touch it with a 40-foot pole because of what’s happening. So what was the value of those two Oireachtas hearings? No plan of action came out of either. It would have been just as valuable to head down to the pub for a few pints.

“Honestly, it makes my blood boil because there’s either zero self-awareness in the people running the sport here and they don’t honestly seem to give a damn what anyone on the outside thinks

“But remember one thing.

“Gary Keegan, myself and Bernard Dunne all come from grassroots boxing. We all boxed in a club, we were all involved in the running of a club. We know what it’s like to work all day, then go down to the club at night, open it up and let the kids in.

“We’ve all done that, we’ve done the fundraising to try and then bring those kids to championships.

“So we’re not outsiders. But High Performance is different. It’s not for everybody. The IABA seems to believe that everyone in a club can become a High Performance athlete, but that’s just not the case.

“Go down that road and you end putting time into boxers who don’t have that potential, who won’t ever make it. You end up training mediocrity.

“The IABA don’t get that because they don’t want to get it.

“Nothing’s changed. Somebody at Government level needs to do something here because our sport is being dragged into the gutter.”  

  

Counting down: How the conflict in Irish boxing evolved

MARCH 2021: It is decided on a narrow 4-3 vote to offer Bernard Dunne a two-year extension on his contract as Director of High Performance, the new deal due to expire 15 months before the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

APRIL: An unsigned ‘SWOT Analysis Position Paper’ is circulated among IABA Board members and within the general boxing community that is considered highly critical of Dunne and boxing’s High Performance Unit.

JUNE: It is announced that the joint Oireachtas Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport, Gaeltacht and Media wants to interview the IABA leadership.

JUNE: Due to ‘scheduling issues’, the planned meeting between the joint committee and leading IABA officials is postponed until after the summer recess.

JULY: Following decisions by Leinster and Connacht Councils and the Dublin Board to withdraw support from the IABA Central Council due to an ongoing delay in the election of two new members to the Board (something approved at the 2019 AGM), they are threatened with expulsion from the Association.

AUGUST: Central Council passes a motion to remove certain named individuals from membership of the IABA – a decision endorsed by an ‘independent membership panel’.

SEPTEMBER: Bernard Dunne lodges a formal complaint to IABA CEO, Fergal Carruth, naming two members that he alleges have tried to undermine his position in that controversial 1500-word ‘SWOT’ paper.

OCTOBER: A High Performance unit decision not to send a team to the World Championships in Belgrade is overturned when the IABA selects a squad to go into training camp with the UK team in Sheffield, after which a seven-man team travels to Serbia. All bar one member of the team loses in their first bout.

NOVEMBER: Members of the IABA hierarchy finally appear before the Joint Oireachtas Committee at a time when the Board of Directors is divided, Central Council is split and there is evidence of widespread disillusionment at grassroots level. Both Sport Ireland CEO, John Treacy, and IABA chair. Ciarán Kirwan, rubbish the controversial ‘SWOT’ paper circulated in April, Kirwan insisting that he has “absolute confidence” in Bernard Dunne.

NOVEMBER: Tokyo gold medallist, Kellie Harrington, expresses a hope that “we don’t lose him” in relation to Dunne who has now been on leave since August.

NOVEMBER: The same Leinster under-age boxing tournament is due to go ahead at two different venues as the feud between Central Council and excluded members of the Association intensifies.

NOVEMBER: The Association’s AGM, originally scheduled for tomorrow in Belfast, is deferred to allow the three provincial bodies appeal their expulsions. This is deemed necessary as five of the 25 people excluded are actually up for election despite, technically, being no longer being members of the Association.