Keith Duggan talks to the one-time rock promoter who put his money on Eamon Gibney while rival Paul McGuinness went with U2. But Ollie Byrne had somewhat better luck with his main act, Shelbourne FC.

His an old-time Dublin love story but there is no girl next door, no memories of huddling from rainstorms or driving to Howth on August evenings or dancing five and six nights a week. There are dance halls here alright, hundreds of them in fact, but this is one of those romances typically concerned with phone bills and football and prison and The New York Dolls. And tradition. Most of all, it is a story about tradition.

"I've not got a musical note in me head," Ollie Byrne cheerfully concedes but he is a dead ringer for Joseph Locke, loud and large and warm and gregarious and weirdly life affirming. By his own rating system, Byrne is involved in a perennial struggle with Pat Dolan of St Patrick's Athletic for the title of the most controversial figure in the tight, obfuscate world of Irish league soccer.

Ollie, in case you don't know, is Shelbourne. Not of Shelbourne, mind; he is the club - its benefactor, its archivist, its owner and self-ordained keeper of the flame. His supporters - and Ollie's generosity and his humour and his often childlike honesty mean there are people in this city who would happily die defending him - would say that equally, Shelbourne is Ollie, that the club has become his eco-system and that sometimes they worry about that.

But his detractors - for Ollie has a short fuse and lets rip when the occasion does or doesn't demand - would tell you he is nothing but a bollix. Catch Ollie on a certain day and he would tell you so himself. Or at least he would say, "I am not a saint and I never claimed to be. But I hope I have never set out to deliberately do harm to anyone."

At heart, he is a football man and he lives for the 90 minutes. When Shelbourne play Bohemians in tomorrow's game of the season at Tolka Park, Byrne will be untouchable in the sense that if you dare disturb him when the ball is in play, he is liable to explode.

"That's when I let off me steam, get all the adrenaline out," he laughs. "People know well to give me space during the game. And if we lose to leave me alone for a few hours afterwards."

But while the match is the essence, it is all the incidentals that so hold Ollie Byrne in thrall. It's the smell of the place on a big match day - that fried food and damp smell, it's the noise and feel of human energy that on big days permeates through the stands to the dressing-rooms below. It's the way the team's shirts, laundered and pressed, look when the players prepare to leave. It's the drama he loves. It's the show.

Ollie's vision is coloured with the flair of a Vaudeville impresario. Listening to him talk about Shelbourne leaves you under no illusion the club is to him anything other than "a passion, a labour of love, an obsession or whatever ya like to call it".

Maybe if he had been born elsewhere, it would be something else but Shels are in his blood. In 1949, when he was five, his brother Joe took him to see them play at Milltown and he was enchanted. There must have been about 20,00 people there, he reckons, and he couldn't get over the power and attraction of this spectacle. Somehow he got lost in the throng as they exited the ground and either he found a phone booth or a stranger found one for him and he called home. The Byrne name was synonymous with Shelbourne even then, as his father was chairman and controlling shareholder.

That day was the start of it. Ollie was never a superstar on the pitch; asthma saw to that but God, he was hungry and honest. His attitude to playing soccer mirrored his approach to life; he hurled himself at it, maybe clumsily at times but with vigour and humour and good intentions.

When the Byrne family moved to Leeson Park, he helped found Rathdown Rovers with his brother and went on to play for UCD, all the time becoming steeped in Shels until he was inducted to the board in 1976.

There he has been ever since, except for a low spell in the 1980s, sometimes working at his desk for 20 hours a day. Occasionally, he will talk to someone like Howard Wilkinson or Alex Ferguson with eyes wide and clear and say, "how do you run a football club"? He is always learning, applying what he has learned in life and, to borrow one of his favourite phrases, "It would be fair to say", Ollie Byrne has lived a little.

In the late 1960s, a pulse, vibrant and tingling and exciting, reverberated through Dublin. Ollie Byrne wasn't musical but he felt it and felt what it was doing to everyone else. He sniffed showtime. He was never a front man, never had the confidence or desire to try his luck in leather trousers or lead guitar. But the music thing, it was exploding. Bands galore, all looking for venues. And if there was one thing Ollie could do it was persuade and facilitate. He started running gigs at tennis hops and then managing The Good Times. The Gentry, The View and a host of others.

Brush Shiels asked him to get more gigs for Skid Row. As it transpired, Ollie was lousy at doing his books but great at bookings. He made bands busy. He loved it. And he loved the brightness, hanging around places like the Go-Go Club and the Flamingo and Moulin Rouge and marvelling at the way the girls would flock around Philo, beautiful and ebony and so at ease with it all.

"I suppose when I was young, I would have led a sheltered life. It would be fair to say that my mother and father were quite strict and we were very disciplined - although we could be a bit wild on the football field. With the music, I suppose I was making up for being in when other kids were out late on school nights, things like that. I was rebelling against meself, But also, to be honest, the ego got the better of me. The thing of having people lookin' up to you went to me head. I loved the craic of it more than anything, you know. I never learned to see it as a business."

Ollie speaks in the soft, flat Dublinese - peppered with "dis" and "dat" - that is the dialect of choice of all self-respecting league of Ireland folk based in the city and so it is disconcerting to hear him speak of the cutting edge of the Irish rock scene, circa 1970.

He is a great raconteur and banged into many major and minor players on the local and international scene at that time. Although he had Phil Lynott's fledgling band The Orphanage on his books, the guys he was convinced were bound for mega stardom were Eamon Gibney and Gerry O'Donovan. So he did what Ollie does, took the plunge and headed to New York. Booked on different flights, a gang of them were to meet at Grand Central Station at a certain time, the way you'd meet at Heuston before an away game.

Naturally, the planes got delayed and "there we are in New York, fuckin' lost when we bump into them wandering up and down Broadway about two days later."

Arrangements were, at best, vague. The band had no bookings. The band had no money. The band had no instruments. Like vagabonds, they would head out to Jersey to a couple of ex-pat Irish families, the Smiths and the Clearys, who would feed them, let them use the outdoor pool and make a fuss of them.

"So one evening we are heading out and this lad with us, Jimmy Slevin, a young, attractive guy is sitting there when this girl on the train takes a shine to him. So they get talking and it turns out her husband is a music producer and he gets us an introduction to this company Wartoch, who handle publicity for Stevie Wonder."

And the next thing, they are playing nightly and boozing with Dave Johannsonof the New York Dolls and going backstage to meet Stevie at the Apollo, Harlem, and meeting Rory Gallagher when he was touring and hanging out in The Dug Out in Greenwich Village, which was Manhattan's equivalent to the Cafolla on O'Connell Street.

"One night we were there and Deep Purple came in and we were having a few jars," Ollie Byrne recalls 30 years later. "And they were on about this club down the quays, The River Club. Now, we had been in there one night when Eamon Gibney, I think it was, got into a bit of a row. And one must protect one's protégès so, you know, we jumped in. And Ian Gillen begins telling us about the same night - 'you Irish, you're fackin' mad, we were havin' a few drinks and all fackin' hell breaks loose', and so on. So then we say, look pal, 'you're not going to believe it but we were those fuckin' soldiers'. And of course, they loved us after that."

Stories like this flood out of Byrne. They never hit the big time in the US but he returned to Dublin and turned a good living over the next 10 years out of his club, Countdown, on Mary Street. He crossed paths with Louis Walsh and Paul McGuinness over the years but even when he was a relative king of the promotions game, he recognised in them a cold exactitude and precision he knew he lacked.

"They got a blast out of the music, yes. But to them, it was a business first and foremost. It was their living. For me, I suppose it was more the ego thing. You understand what I'm saying?"

His exit from music promotions was as disastrous as it was glorious. Offered a chance to book Joe Cocker - who with Aretha Franklin made the only type of music Byrne really cared for - he jumped at it. This was 1980, a low ebb for Cocker. Byrne got him bookings in Ireland and England and on the continent but neglected to hammer out sufficient sums to cover himself. Cocker sang up a storm and Byrne was torn between pride for the show and dismay at losing about £50,000 because of it. In 1980! Rueful, he passed on the option for another Cocker tour and could but smile when his hero scored a global hit with Jennifer Warnes a year later for Love Lift Us Up. If that wasn't a sign to quit while he was behind, nothing was. Anyhow, there was always Shelbourne.

Until there wasn't.

HE SPEAKS of his time in prison in monastic terms.

"It was a period of reflection for me, a low period in my life."

In truth, it was probably the first time he had paused for breath in about 15 years. Stolen fags hung him. The cigarettes were nicked and Byrne purchased them for one of his businesses. It was a minor enough transgression but there were a fair few puffs and the judge decided to make an example of him. So in the mid-80s, he did a stretch, did some thinking, clearing the clutter of the previous decade.

He was in prison when he heard Phil Lynott died. He first saw Philo when he was playing with The Black Eagles, managed by Joe Smith from Crumlin.

"That was a terrible moment for me, not being able to go to Philo's funeral. I kind of felt I was a father figure to him in the early days before he took off with Thin Lizzy. It was a lonely time, my lowest ebb."

As if in sympathy, Shels had also sunk, mired because of money troubles and internecine warfare over ownership and disappearing crowds (in the '50s, they could command maybe 30 buses of supporters for away games) and apathy.

"At that time, I recognised the club was in danger and if we didn't come up with a framework, the repercussions could be disastrous."

And Ollie is talking about Shelbourne here but also he is talking about himself. He needed a blueprint, the club needed a blueprint and when he walked free, chastened and burnt but still not bitter, he set about implementing it. He describes the day he met Tony Donnelly as "the greatest of my life". Donnelly provided Shels with financial backing, know-how and respectability and to Ollie, he is a saviour.

"Like the phoenix rising from the ashes," is how he describes Shelbourne's revival.

Since then, the club has not marched but dragged itself upwards and onwards. Byrne never had any time for what he refers to, in a wonderfully sniffy way, as "the English game" until he realised that was what the people wanted. Now he counts Howard Wilkinson as a friend and Shels are affiliated with Manchester United. For the club centenary, Liverpool, Manchester United and Leeds all played Shels on consecutive days, a feat that Byrne rightly points out even Real Madrid would struggle to emulate.

"I suppose guys like Howard Wilkinson are astonished and laugh at me when they see you collecting tickets or cleaning the jacks. Doing whatever. But I think they recognise what we do here and also I hope we treat them very well."

He is brilliantly vague about the glamour of the Premiership, squinting to recall the "blond lad" who played his first game for Spurs against Shels. (He meant Jurgen Klinsman). In Ollie's vision, Shels can offer it all and he sounds like a proud and fussy mother when he maintains the club is, once again, Ireland's greatest.

"I concede that Shamrock Rovers have the greatest international appeal but I think that our record in recent times stand alone."

Sometimes, he looks at Pat Dolan, St Patrick's oiled young buck and sees the ghost of his music-promoting self.

"I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say I like him but I will recognise the benefit of Pat Dolan for Pat's and Irish football. I have the greatest respect for what he does. But I still think Pat is at the stage of being caught up a little bit in his own ego. But I suppose it's all right me saying that, I'm nearly 60. Pat's still a young fella."

Ollie Byrne never married, which in one way isn't surprising because it's hard to imagine him ever sitting still long enough to converse with a girl, let alone to last a marriage ceremony. That's longer than a football game. In a way, though, it is very surprising because he is such a warm person. As he talks - and he talks - various people interrupt his flow and generally he has them exiting his office flushed in laughter.

"My friends say that no woman could ever have competed with Shelbourne and maybe that's true," he says quietly.

These are the same friends that want him to ease up a little, to stop pouring his soul into Shelbourne, that tell him they don't understand him. Equally, he is at odds with their insistence on ringing him at 3 p.m. on a Sunday. After 40 years, don't they know where he is? He believes if Shels win this year, it could be the best season ever.

But you sense that will only be true until the next one begins because although he is at the stage in life where most people begin to put the feet up, his designs for Shelbourne are still in their infancy.

"It has all flown by," he says. "And there have been bad times. I've been depressed, of course I have, that's human nature. But there have been some great times here. Sure the last few weeks have been unbelievable and tomorrow might be fantastic," he says.

But that's the draw for him. That's the high. It's always new. Ollie Byrne lost himself to Shelbourne when he was five. And he's finding his way back just fine.