O’Rourke stepped down in late August after two years in the role, after engaging with a two-man review committee since the end of their championship campaign.
The review committee was expected to present its findings to a Meath Management Committee meeting which would then make a recommendation on the following night to a full county board meeting.
But in advance of those meetings O’Rourke withdrew from the process, paving the way for Robbie Brennan’s appointment on a three-year term.
O’Rourke intended to keep his silence on the matter but has been triggered by a suggestion from Meath chairman Jason Plunkett at a board meeting earlier this week, under questioning about the process from the Skryne delegate, that there was no deadline imposed on O’Rourke to have a backroom in place by those two meetings.
O’Rourke’s selectors Barry Callaghan and Stephen Bray had both stepped down in the wake of Meath’s championship exit in June and O’Rourke was seeking replacements.
“I wanted to get over the disappointment of not being reappointed, I want to see the Meath team do well, I want to see the new management doing well, but I don’t want to be treated with such lack of respect as I was shown at the Co Board meeting last week, and that includes Seán Boylan and all the other people that were involved with me,” O’Rourke said in an interview published by the Meath Chronicle this evening.
He has disputed any contention that there wasn’t a deadline imposed to have a new team in place.
“In actual fact there were two deadlines put to me. One for the middle of August and one for a management meeting which I believe was due to take place on Monday 26th August,” he said.
“When the first deadline was set the chairman (Jason Plunkett) and Liam Keane made it clear that we had to have a full management team in place and if that didn’t happen then the review committee would not be recommending me for a third year as manager.
“Not only that, I also have an email from the chairman which read that himself and Liam Keane would not be recommending me for manager.
“I got that email in August without explanation, without reason, just a statement that they would not be recommending me. That email was before I was given a deadline to get a management team in place,” O’Rourke said.
“So Seán Boylan and myself then met (the review committee) and we were told that we had to have our management team in place by the last week of August.
“At that stage I told them who the people we wanted were, but that they wouldn’t be named until after their involvement with their club teams, one in Meath and one in another county, was finished.
“We were told that they didn’t think this would be acceptable to management, so I basically got fed up with them at that stage because I felt that the whole process was not carried out properly.”
O’Rourke said he could not understand the urgency around making his appointments known when inter-county training was not cleared to start until early December.
Separately, O’Rourke told the Irish Independent when contacted this evening that “if there was no deadline imposed I would not have pulled out. Why would I pull out? I still wanted to stay. I had my homework done in the background.”
O’Rourke said members of the Meath Management Committee were not aware of any deadline imposed and added that Paddy Kelly, the current vice-chair, had stated this at the August county board meeting.
“As far as I am concerned I was led up the garden path. That’s worse than being told you are not getting the job. In my opinion the whole review process was a complete shambles.”
O’Rourke said he also met with a players’ representative group where issues relating to coaching and communication were raised.
But he said there was no suggestion at that meeting that the players didn’t want him to continue.
“If there was,” he said. “I’d have gone straight away, I wouldn’t have been gone for a minute. Who wants to be in a situation like that?”
He also took issue with the use of any anonymous player survey during the review, saying it was “a recipe for everybody who hasn’t been on the team who may feel they haven’t got a proper chance (to air a grievance).”
