Issues such as the Thomond Park naming rights, CVC’s potential investment in the PRO14 and the signings of South African World Cup winners were deftly kicked to touch in this exclusive first interview with the new man, responses diverted swiftly to Flanagan’s mission to secure long-term and sustainable success for his home province.

Johann van Graan’s team go into their final Heineken Champions Cup pool game at home to Ospreys tomorrow with qualification for the knockout rounds out of their control after a recent run of poor form. It is a temporary dip, the ambitious Corkman is certain of that, and furthermore, he believes the right people are in place to take Munster and its supporters on what he will describe as an exciting and incredible journey in the coming years.

You can see why both the IRFU and Munster top brass are convinced that Flanagan, 46, is the person to take the reins from Garrett Fitzgerald, who led the province for 20 years before retiring during the summer following a bout of ill health. Raised in Ballyphehane on the same street as the Dolphin end of Musgrave Park, his was not a traditional Cork rugby background, having attended Coláiste Chríost Rí in Turner's Cross, but the sport was never far from home.

“My mother was born on Pearse Road and has lived on Pearse Road her whole life. She remembers Musgrave Park being built on day one. My family house is probably half a mile from here or less so I cycled past this place every day.

“I remember chasing Tony Ward for his autograph on the pitch here, I must have been seven or eight at the time and my son is seven now so that was a lifetime ago. Dolphin was my club and the Dolphin clubhouse was a big part of my social circuit when I was a teenager. So this is coming home in a real sense.”

Flanagan returns to Cork after a career working in the sports industry, most notably in football, looking after the likes of Bobby Robson, Ronaldinho and Roberto Carlos for a London management agency, consulting Real Madrid and Barcelona on how to develop their brands in Asia, and as Leicester City’s commercial director, being part of their remarkable rise from Championship also-rans to Premier League champions. He brings with him a wealth of experience in assisting sporting organisations transition into something bigger and better, exactly what Munster is looking for.

“We know we’re close. We need to take that final step. The ambition is not just trophies. Trophies are part of it but the ambition is to be consistently competitive at the highest level on an ongoing and sustainable basis. We also need to do the right things. We need to ensure that the academy system, the domestic game is resilient, is robust, is thriving because that means more players into Munster, into our academy, it brings more supporters into Munster as a club and my other main role then is to ensure the club develops off the pitch as well.

"By that I mean we need to broaden our revenue base. We need to generate more revenue across the board so that we can invest it into the long-term future of Munster, both in terms of facilities, stadia and then obviously in terms of strengthening the squad.”

Part of that effort, Flanagan believes, will involve telling the Munster story to the wider world.

“We have been quite reticent historically, and that’s a term I would use advisedly, that in Ireland in general but particularly in Munster we don’t talk enough about what we’re good at. We don’t talk enough about how unique this club is.

“I’ve worked in all sorts of sports and with all kinds of teams and so many of them would give their right arm for what we have and I think we need to speak in a more coherent way with commercial partners outside Ireland who maybe are unfamiliar with the story because we don’t shout enough.

“That can be a very good thing but I think there’s a balance to be struck in terms of communicating to the commercial world just how special we are.

“We’ve begun that process. I’ve been here less than three months but that’s a significant part of my background, the commercial piece around sports. We’ve just hired a new head of commercial and marketing who has just arrived last week — Dave Kavanagh has been at the Six Nations for 15 years, so again, we’re taking those concrete steps to address the priorities and go after them.

“You’re not going to see the results overnight, obviously. This is part of a long-term business strategy for the club but I think if you’re a Munster supporter you should be very excited by the next five years, 10 years because we’re doing the right things. We’re doing the right things to make Munster successful on an ongoing basis in the future.

“Every sport needs more money and we’re going to do it in the right way.”

Not seeing results instantly is also part of the current on-pitch narrative as van Graan’s new coaches try to bed in amid high expectations against the backdrop of a mounting injury list and IRFU player welfare protocols which are making selection consistency a pipe dream. Flanagan remains bullish.

There is huge expectation and believe me, no-one is more ambitious than I am for Munster. No-one is more ambitious than Johann is for Munster. In terms of on-pitch performance, the signing of Steve Larkham, the signing of Graham Rowntree to complete the coaching ticket around Johann and JP Ferreira is a significant statement of intent.

“I think a lot of people raised their eyebrows when Steve and Graham were announced because it shows how serious we are about winning. We’re investing significantly in the club as a whole to make the club successful.

“Because World Cup years in rugby are difficult, particularly if you’re the Irish provinces. We had 12 players away in Japan so we lost them for a significant chunk around the beginning of the season and then after the World Cup when we’re dealing with the IRFU’s player welfare programme and players have to be rested at specific parts of the season. So I think it’s significant that a lot of the games recently have been within that period.

"I don’t want to talk too much about that but if you go through the teamsheets for the season you will see we haven’t played the same XV two weeks running and go back to Edinburgh on November 29 here in Cork, we had 14 changes and we lost that game by two points. Those changes weren’t changes that Johan chose to experiment with the team, this was just all part of the post-World Cup player welfare programme.

“That’s not an excuse but my main point about that is Steve and Graham in relative terms are also getting their feet under the table and they’ve actually had very little time in real terms with the team as a whole player group on the training field. I expect, and I’m aware we’ve the Six Nations coming up as well, that you will see, particularly with Steve’s work on patterns of attack and so on, you need hours on the training ground to develop that cohesiveness, the understanding of players playing together and we simply haven’t had that because of the nature of the season that’s in it.

“So I would expect in the second half of this season you will see more and more as the weeks go on, the influence and the positive impact that very significant knowledge base at the training ground.

“We have a world-class coaching ticket, I’m absolutely convinced of that. We have a coaching ticket designed to win and we’re just looking forward to next season when they’ve had a full season, when they have the player group and we’re very excited by the future. We really are and I want the supporters to be excited by the future.

“And I don’t want to talk about the future like it’s five years away, 10 years away because everyone knows the expectation around Munster. All I can say is we’re doing the right things, we’re extremely ambitious, everyone at the training ground is extremely ambitious and we think we will have an incredible journey in the next few years.”

After a summer of change on the business and rugby sides, Flanagan recognises the need for stability. He talks of arrivals rather than changes in personnel “because we’re coming to solidify and strengthen the organisation; they have all been made with the long-term success and long-term solidity in mind.

“We’ve all come for a particular project and a particular vision, which is to be the best on an ongoing basis in the future. It’s a collective job and that’s why I’ve uprooted my family, why Johann’s come, Steve, you know, people aren’t coming for a pay cheque. People are coming because they think there’s something special here.

We absolutely need a period of stability now and we are absolutely convinced we have the right people in the right places now and our job is to get down to work now and focus on delivering concrete next steps and concrete building blocks, the centre of excellence in Cork being a key part of that also, but to get on with our job of making Munster as big and as successful as we can be.

Flanagan knows there are no guarantees but he revealed a personal incentive to help deliver more silverware.

“It’s been too long since Munster won, I know that, and it would be very special. We’re doing everything we can to be successful and we want to be successful.

“My parents, Pat and Kathleen, have a mini Premier League trophy on their mantelpiece at home, they’ve got the miniature trophy that the directors get and I want to make sure that they’ve got a Champions Cup and PRO14 replica there as well. That would be special for me.”

And not too far to carry it.

Lessons for Munster in Foxes' underdog story

Leicester City’s rise to Premier League champions in 2016 is one of sport’s great underdog stories.

When Ian Flanagan joined the club as Commercial Director, the Foxes had just finished 12th in the Championship. That was just four years prior to their crowning achievement and the Munster chief executive sees parallels between his previous and current employers.

“I think one of the key things I would have at the front of my mind from that time is the vision of the owners, the Srivaddhanaprabha family, that they wanted Leicester to be the best that Leicester could be,” Flanagan said.

“Before I arrived, Leicester had had I think nine CEOs and 10 commercial directors in a decade so there had been significant changes constantly and it was important to convey that there was going to be stability, that the owners were there for the long-term.

“They had a vision and the key part then was to ensure that everyone working for the club understood and believed in it, that it wasn’t just empty rhetoric, that we were serious about trying to achieve this and about the steps we were going to take.

“Obviously, getting promotion to the Premier League was a key objective because a lot of the other bits were going to be difficult to realise until we were in the Premier League. But also getting the player recruitment right, focusing on the supporters and how we filled the stadium on a regular basis, how we made the matchday experience good, how we engaged more with our community and our people and didn’t take them for granted.

“I guess that’s a key point. We have to act like our supporters have a choice, that they can go somewhere else or they can stay at home and watch Netflix instead of coming to support us because it’s only by feeling that pressure that we will deliver a great experience across the board. We really want to cherish our supporters and show them that we value them.

“We also invested in the facilities but we didn’t spend relative to our competition. We didn’t outspend them, we didn’t throw money at it, we invested sensibly for long-term success. We planned for success.

“Now, the level of success you could debate and say we obviously never planned to succeed at that level in terms of winning the Premier League but we planned on success at a certain level and we looked at things like the stadium redevelopment and expansion, we started looking at a new training ground, we invested money into our academy, so you’ll begin to see there are similarities.

You can’t just throw money at something because it’s always a short-term fix and it doesn’t always work and there will always be someone out there who will be able to spend more than you. You have to invest in the right things to give yourself the best opportunity to ensure sustained success and viability.

“We built the club off the pitch, invested money bringing the right people into key areas to increase revenues to spend on the club and a lot of what we spent we generated ourselves through increased revenues, so again, you can begin to see there are similarities.

"And I suppose relative to where we (Munster) are today, we were taking on clubs with more resources, potentially more natural advantages than we had and we made a very big deal about making a positive of that.

“We were a bit of an underdog, taking on people with bigger budgets than us and on the back of that, we fostered an enormous team harmony, team spirit and forged a great bond between team and supporters.

"We put a lot of time into the grassroots, the community, so the fans felt we were going out there representing them and it was important at Leicester, we had people like Andy King, who had come through the academy, won a League One medal with Leicester, a Championship medal and then he won the Premier League, the only guy in history to do that.

“So, not to the same degree as Munster but the supporters felt that there was a connection and we did everything we could to foster that. We spent a lot of time and effort being creative on matchdays with the tifos and the clappers to generate the atmosphere, because when we went to the Premier League and we were struggling to win games we needed to help the atmosphere so we worked very closely with the supporter groups on that. We did t-shirt giveaways, scarf giveaways, particularly for away games so the players could see the colour block wherever they went.

"And with Munster, you see that. Last weekend in Paris, it’s such a huge boost for the players when they go out and see red everywhere. We’re so lucky to have it and we welcome it. It’s our job to try to cherish that and to show that we value it because it gives us a huge amount on a matchday.”