The Stakis Dunblane Hotel in Scotland has been fairly busy over the past couple of weeks. The Irish under-16 football team have been coming and going, their manager arranging team talks and overseeing training sessions.

Every few days they have played a soccer match. On Tuesday night they beat Portugal 2-0 to qualify for the under-16s UEFA Youths Championship final against Italy. They celebrated with a sing-song.

"Yeah, the atmosphere over the past couple of weeks was fairly quiet, nobody bothering us. Except for the last couple of days when all hell broke loose," says Ireland youth team manager Brian Kerr.

Kerr is making his excuses. "I told the FAI I didn't want to do any more interviews. I've just had journalists here for two hours. Can we leave it until later? Thanks."

The scenario is reminiscent of the World Under-18 Championships in Malaysia last summer. Kerr and his team beat sides the bookies didn't think they would, got to the semi-finals and came third in the world. The calls from Morning Ireland and Pat Kenny and the requests for interviews came tumbling in.

He was left alone but afforded the star treatment again when his under-18 team won the friendly Oporto tournament in Portugal. Last year they also came fourth in the European championship.

But you get the feeling as he sighs down the phone that Brian Kerr is just doing what he does best. The attention, when it inconsistently comes, is a distraction.

The consistency of his own performance to date is probably unparalleled in Irish football management.

His friend Eamonn Coghlan remembers when he managed a local team in Drimnagh at 14 years of age. "He was only an average player himself but he had management qualities from an early age," he says.

Brian Kerr was 20 and managing the under-12s for Crumlin when he was asked to manage the under-18s for Shamrock Rovers. Between 1981 and 1985 he worked with Liam Touhy, then youth manager of the Irish team. The spoils were good; during this period the team reached three European finals and one World Cup final. Next in his sights was St Patrick's Athletic, a club he had long supported and always dreamed of managing. Under difficult conditions - a minuscule budget for transfer fees, a dearth of players, liquidation - he brought glory to the side. They hadn't won the league for 30 years. They won it twice under Kerr's 10-year stewardship.

And when he left to manage the Republic of Ireland youth side it was a "huge blow", says the club's chief executive, Pat Dolan. "I knew it was a chance for him but he put the club on the map," he explains.

Dolan travelled to Scotland to watch Kerr's Ireland team beat Italy last night. Before the game, he said Kerr has the Midas touch. His achievements with the youth side were a miracle. The question of whether he could manage the senior side is for Dolan not in doubt.

"It takes very special skills to do what he has done. Whether it's a group of 16-year-olds or the Brazilian national team he could be successful," he says.

Coghlan agrees. "I have been saying it privately for 1 1/2 years and I'm saying it publicly now. Brian Kerr could manage the senior team."

It's hard to know whether Kerr is more annoyed or amused when this is put to him later. "I'm happy where I am, he says. I'm not hankering after anyone else's job."

He has one eye on his hotel room television and his ear to the phone. The FA Youth Cup final is on and he is keeping a watch-out for young Irish players.

He talks about the Dunblane school tragedy and his true-blue Dublin accent softens. "It's like you read in the papers. A sleepy Scottish village and you would wonder how anything so terrible, so deranged could happen in such a peaceful place. It's difficult to escape from what happened when you're here."

But somehow he and the team have to. The media swarm around. "I tell the lads to stay in their room, to keep focused."

So just how important is the final against Italy?

"People measure a country by their football. Maybe not everyone, but people I know, when you say to them `Italy' they don't say `pasta', they say `football'.

"I'm not taking away from Ken Doherty, he was a great world champion but how many countries in the world do they play competitive snooker in? Who cares except in Ireland and Britain that John Higgins won the world snooker last week?

"We don't have a great status as a football country . . . and part of that is youth football, and up until the last couple of years we didn't do too well. Now all over the world football people are saying `that's a funny thing that happened - the way the Irish are doing so well'. "

And those football people are the ones Brian Kerr cares about. Not, he says, the ones who only get excited when the youth side are on the front page of the paper. Or the Ole, Ole brigade. He doesn't care about escorts from the airport or double-decker buses.

Win or lose, "we will have a few songs".