After his stint with the senior team came to an end without qualification to the 2006 World Cup, it maybe would’ve been just a natural thing that the outgoing manager would no longer be involved with the Association, but only if he hadn’t had such success previously and become so important and so ingrained in the bigger picture for football in this country.

Kerr might well be the only person to lead an Irish team to major trophies – and he did it twice in one year in 1998, winning the Euros with the under-16s and under-18s, as well as finishing third in the ’97 World Youth Championships – but the impact of his work was felt right down to grassroots coaching, it was enjoyed by the League of Ireland and it was integral in the development of the very best prospects in their most crucial teenage years.

“I had worked and volunteered with the FAI for five years with Liam Tuohy in the early eighties where Liam had lots of success. We were at three European finals and a World Cup. We got the semi-final of the European Championships and it was brilliant.

And then I had nine, nearly 10, good years with a lot of success with the underage teams.

“It was probably a short spell with the international team but, you know…” you can tell it still hurts. “We weren’t far away.”

A decade and a half after cutting ties with him completely, every one of those organisms that Kerr was once breathing life into are in perilous condition.

The problems facing the domestic league have become compounded and, despite success stories and a decent production line of players in that time, it’s still struggling to get the recognition it should have from its own country. If it’s not an identity crisis that hangs over its head, it’s certainly an existential one as, most recently, Martin O’Neill led the way in reaffirming the idea that you can’t really be a top player until you’ve made it out of Ireland and into England.

Whilst, all along, the means are suffering, the end is a far cry from success at major tournaments – despite an apparent emphasis on capturing short-term satisfaction by whatever method - and qualification for two of the last eight senior championships hit home the stark reality that there just hasn’t been anyone anywhere near the same levels of the like of Duff and Roy and Robbie Keane come through – never mind a consistent supply line of top players, Champions League finalists like Irwin, Finnan and O’Shea, and some of the most influential players to go across the water and thrive in the highest tier, like Shay Given and Richard Dunne.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, maybe it was just luck but, when Kerr was involved in Irish football development through the eighties and nineties and into the early noughties, these sort of players were produced and they were maintained. Now, anyone who shows any sort of talent is shipped over to England at 16 because it’s a cheap investment that clubs can afford to take a hit on when they decide that they no longer want the same players at 18. They leave school, they live away from home in a new country and join a different, harsher and much vaster system and only a tiny, tiny minority of them come through after all of it.

When I worked in Derry, we lost count of the number of feel-good stories we’d do of these 16-year-olds being signed by United, Ipswich, Leeds, Watford – it felt like every few weeks some youngster with a steel in his eyes was coming into the office to have his picture taken to be placed alongside words to some effect of ‘next big thing’. Whilst you can celebrate the success of the like of Darron Gibson and Shane Duffy and Shane Ferguson who all went over as teenagers and carved a professional career for themselves, we’d never be doing the follow-up story to the rest of them – most of them - who were back home at 17 or 18 having been spat out by the system and fallen completely out of love with football.

Mikhail Kennedy is still a hot prospect for Charlton despite having his career recently stalled with a year-long injury. He had been banging in the goals through the English underage divisions and did so for the club’s senior side too when he got a chance but he’d be the first to warn any Irish youngster of the tough reality of chasing that dream at 16. He’d experienced his own strife with homesickness and watched his younger brother join him in London but not adapt to the environment as well. In fact, when he first went over to Charlton Athletic, there were five Irish players in that set-up, he’s the only one of them still there whilst the other four aren’t even playing football anymore.

For Brian Kerr, who oversaw a more successful period of elevating Irish players to professional football, it’s a structural issue. And it’s a crying shame that we can’t keep top players here as another viable option – even a back-up one.

“That’s the unfortunate part of it all,” Kerr says.

“Every young fella wants to become a star player or a professional footballer and so do the majority of their parents as well. So, if there's a chance of them fulfilling that dream, they do their best to make that happen.

“The problem here in Ireland is the alternative to that hasn't been provided frequently enough in the past and that's where there's a huge deficiency in the model of Irish football.

“The League of Ireland clubs haven't been strong enough, haven't had the resources, haven't had the coaches, the backroom staff, the finances, the training grounds to support a professional structure that allows the best young players to come into it, stay in it for a reasonable amount of time, maybe stay in it until their football careers finish or graduate onto a higher level of football in Britain or throughout Europe.

“That hasn't been available to them. The first stop for the potentially most brilliant players is we go to England at 15, 16, 17 years of age and you go into a whole, totally different environment where it's hard for young Irish kids to adapt to. Only the strongest survive. They also need a bit of luck to make a breakthrough at first team level.

“Unfortunately, many of them come back home with their tail between their legs. No party for them when they come back, falling out of love with football, no academic qualifications, no qualifications to do any little work. They don't find it too easy to go back into an academic background and we haven't provided enough structures or support to those kids over the years.

“Please God, in the future, we will provide a structure, a proper academy and structure that allows the best players to maintain and find their way academically that gives them a base that they can go into another career if football doesn't provide a career.”

Sounds reasonable, sounds necessary and, to be honest, it sounds absolutely urgent. If the reality of professional sport is that only a fraction will make it in the end, how on earth can Ireland as a nation still be satisfied with the dominant model where you throw teenagers on a plane and send them to far-off lands in the hope that it won’t break them? Even though the great chance is that it will absolutely break them because of the sheer numbers, the math involved in football and, worse still, this way, we’ll have no say or influence in the process in Ireland because we’ve packed their suitcases for them and effectively washed our hands at the first sign of a good first touch.

“Let's face it, for the majority of kids, it doesn't provide a professional lifestyle or wage that means that they can prosper and bring up a family and buy a house and so on. Football... it's a miniscule number of players that get that opportunity and that lifestyle.

“So there's got to be a lot more emphasis on academic or, let's say, qualifications. They might be in a trade. Not necessarily everyone has to become a scientist or an accountant but people who have a gifted ability with their hands should be encouraged to perform, to get involved in trades and get qualifications serving an apprenticeship as well as their football.

“Whatever it is to be, their future has to be provided for and we haven't done that in Ireland.

“We've provided the dream. We have emerging talent programmes, we have international teams, we have trials for players going to England, we have players getting signed up for English clubs but we don't provide the alternative to that and that has to be the future of Irish football.

“There has to be investment and it has to be thought through well and it needs to be delivered on.

“Unfortunately we're miles away from that at the moment.”

And for whatever reason, we’re also miles away from Brian Kerr now and have been for 14 years.

One of the most successful coaches in Irish football, one of the brightest brains and one of the most passionate men, not just about this sport but about this country, is lying on the doorstep but simply being stepped over every morning as we all go in search of sustainable solutions in this, a time of crisis.

Brian Kerr might not have all the answers but he has experience and he has ideas and, more than anything, he has a willingness to see football in Ireland thrive. But he hasn’t even been asked. Not since 2005.

“If anyone ever wants any advice from me, they can come to me.

“Lots of people do,” he says.

“But the Association certainly don’t.”