Mitchel issue blindsides clubs

YOU’D have to have a certain amount of sympathy for any GAA club named after John Mitchel at the moment. This is just about the last thing any of them would have expected to be dealing with. Their club’s name was just that: a name. Not remotely a thing members would have thought about in any great depth – if at all.

The decision to name their club in honour of Mitchel would have been taken generations before any present members or players were born and that decision, unquestionably, would have been taken on the basis of Mitchel’s writings and actions and beliefs when it came to Ireland and to the Irish nationalist cause. Naming clubs after such nationalist figures was very much the done thing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It wasn’t until the global movement, inspired by the death of George Floyd, swept across the United States and then into Europe that the dubious legacy of Mitchel became a talking point. The last couple of weeks would have been the first time a lot of people learned that he was an enthusiastic backer of the Confederacy; that two of his sons died in its cause; that he supported not only slavery but also the re-introduction of the slave trade; and that he considered black people “inherently inferior” to white people.

In that context you can understand why people in Mitchel’s home town of Newry feel uneasy about there being a statute in his memory in their town and, in that context, you can understand calls for GAA clubs named after him to consider changing their name and, really, we should put it no stronger than that. It’s entirely up to these clubs and communities to decide for themselves.

If they feel a little bit besieged at the moment that’s understandable too. While John Mitchel was a racist, they are not. Quite the opposite in fact. As County Board Chairman Tim Murphy pointed out this week, the John Mitchels club in Tralee is very progressive when it comes to inclusivity and diversity.

There are, of course, issues of identity bound up in the names of these clubs. The very phrase Mitchels for those people is a place, a community and reflects its story and theirs. It’s not about some relic of the nineteenth century whose odious views are out of step with the modern world.

The thing is though, now that we know more about who Mitchel was and what he stood for we can’t simply ignore it. Now that we know what he believed, it’s hard to think of anything else when you hear his name. Words matter, names matter. Naming something after someone honours them, even when (as is obviously the case here) the intention was not to honour the worst part of their legacy.

While we might have a view (and you might be able to guess what that is), it’s not for us to tell the people of these clubs and these communities what to do. They need to decide for themselves. Are they happy to honour this man? Warts and all? Knowing that, for a lot of people, the warts are all they’re ever going to see?