'Speaking up': How a dream football course became a nightmare

By Marie Crowe and Mark Tighe

Back in 1989, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) launched the first of several full-time soccer skills courses.

Teaming up with FÁS, the state's training and employment agency at the time, the FAI reached out to talented, unemployed soccer players aged between 16 and 25.

Publicly funded, the nine-month course promised to develop their football skills or possibly lead to a career in coaching.

Over the following years, the men’s courses would produce several successful graduates, most famously Roy Keane.

In 1996, the first all-female course was launched. 20 young trainees aged 16 and above would travel to Leixlip in county Kildare to train daily.

All had hopes of developing a career in football.

Nearly three decades later, as part of a joint investigation between RTÉ and the Sunday Independent, several are speaking about what they experienced on the course for the first time.

Lynn Winters remembers when she decided Eamonn Collins would never touch her again. It was 27 May 1997.

She was at a function after a testimonial match for a female Irish international when Collins beckoned her over to his table.

Collins, she says, "put his hands up between my legs and practically pinched my crotch."

"That's what it felt like," she says. "I remember just freezing... I stood through the conversation and I remember thinking, that’s the last time you’ll ever f**king touch me. And it was."

Collins – then 31 - was the head coach on the course, having returned to Ireland after a ten year professional football career playing in England.

Winters, 18, was a trainee who had been made captain by Collins of the team of young women participating. The group regularly played challenge matches against outside