McClean not a bad guy

HAVING praised James McClean on these pages last week do we now need to throw him under the bus for his spectacularly ill-judged Instagram post? Does he go from being a good guy last week to a bad guy this week? No and of course not

For those of you who haven’t seen the post – now deleted and which has cost the Stoke player two weeks wages in a fine – the Derry man is pictured wearing a balaclava “teaching history” to his two young children and not for one moment are we going to defend it or him for posting it.

Even as a piece of humour or satire – which is what McClean claims it was – it was crass, crude and cringe-inducing. That doesn’t mean that we can’t find humour in dark themes, even in the Troubles. Of course we can and of course we do and of course we must, there can be great healing in humour ( Derry Girls is a joy), but in this instance the joke didn’t land anywhere except on its face.

For a man who makes such a big deal about refusing to wear the poppy because of what it represents, it’s odd that the Irish international doesn’t seem to understand the power of symbolism. We have every sympathy for him for the sectarian abuse he takes, but Christ does he doesn’t half know how to make a rod for his own back.

We’ve always supported McClean’s refusal to bow the annual orgy of poppy wearing across the Irish Sea. Whatever its original intention, the wearing of the poppy has become a jingoistic exercise. The increasing prominence of which was in hindsight the canary in the coalmine for the process which brought us Brexit. McClean is right not to wear it. Those who attack him in sectarian terms for not doing so are wrong, but so too is popping on a balaclava and taunting people with it on social media. It doesn’t make the Derry man a bad guy, there’s a real decency to him as we saw last week, but he could do with copping himself on just a little bit.