SHANE MCGRATH
FAI SHOULD KNOW THAT ITS LATEST PR DISASTER WON’T GO AWAY
THEY haven’t gone away, you know. The difficulties created for John Delaney and the FAI by the brief clip of him singing an IRA song are substantial, and they are made more problematic by the visit of England to Dublin next summer.
Delaney has spoken of his nationalist background this week and a statement from the FAI president referred to a nationalist song, but in England the most senior official in Irish soccer made the headlines for singing a sectarian ballad. What seems like a harmless, tuneless singsong in one country is an offensive paean to terrorism in another.
The FAI board apparently cannot recognise this, while Delaney apologises if offence was caused. A man so richly rewarded for his expertise should know the risks of singing a political song in public with such a sensitive match as the one against the English to come. By the time Roy Hodgson brings his team to the Aviva Stadium next June, 20 years will have passed since English thugs rioted in Lansdowne Road.
When announcing the friendly, Delaney told a Dublin radio station: ‘If you think of the events of 1995, that fateful game in Lansdowne Road, both associations have moved on an enormous amount since then.’
The English FA is entitled to wonder about that.
Hodgson apologised on behalf of the FA for England fans singing ‘No surrender to the IRA’ last week, and that throws Delaney’s conduct in a more abject light. Hodgson and the English FA were sensitive to the potential difficulties in their fans’ chanting, but Delaney merely apologises for singing about an IRA man if people were offended.
Of the contentious subject matter of the song itself, he reasons ‘we all sing songs where we don’t believe in all the lyrics’.
When an Irish supporter sings a rebel song in a pub after a match, some might join in and most try to speak over the racket. But when Delaney does it, it becomes a major news story in Britain, one that is certain to be resurrected before Hodgson brings his team over here.
It will not help a match that, while exciting, will also be exhaustively policed and which has the risk of attracting a noxious element, too. In an interview earlier this year, Jim Boyce recalled the day he was
injured in a terrorist attack. He broke his leg in three places when a bomb exploded at the Belfast office where he worked.
‘What I will say is that it never changed me as a person. I never became bitter in any way,’ the FIFA vice-president reflected. ‘In fact, it strengthened my belief that people should come together to sort things out. Looking back now, what did all that violence achieve?’
The criticism Boyce made of Delaney’s behaviour this week did not billow from inside some stuffy blazer; it came from a man who has a painful understanding of the hateful mess that was the Troubles. For a band like the Wolfe Tones in a song like Joe McDonnell, history is reducible to black and white, good and bad, hero and villain.
Boyce could tell the Wolfe Tones and other budding balladeers that history cannot be so easily categorised. He knows the pained and poisoned history of the north of Ireland. The culture that left him needing months of rehabilitation is not worth celebrating in a ballad.
THERE is a long, teary and often tiresome tradition of rebel songs in this country. Not only do many of us know them, some of us were taught them in school. Societies grow, though, and attitudes to Irish history have evolved. over the past two decades.
Mournful tunes about IRA men sound out of key on an island that wants peace and in a country more interested in good relations with its neigh- bours than ancient territorial claims.
As part of his busy clean-up operation on Tuesday, Delaney said: ‘An Irish song in an Irish pub is not something that’s unfamiliar to most people, but you sing it in private. On many occasions I’ve heard that song sang, I’ve chipped in and I’ve sang it and if I’d known on any occasion that somebody would, in a sly way, tape me and try to use it in a way that represents you incorrectly I never would have sang it.’ The song was not regretted in this explanation, but getting caught was. The song is central to the problem, however. A
fellow in a pub closing his eyes and belting out a dirge usually attracts little more than rolled eyes and turned backs, but Delaney is the most influential figure in one of the country’s largest sporting organisations.
The person who filmed him may have thought they were being little more than mischievous. Instead, they revealed a major difficulty for the FAI that extends beyond Delaney’s questionable behaviour.
Such as in the area of player recruitment. Martin O’Neill has vowed to pursue players eligible for Ireland through parents or grandparents, if he believes they will improve the team.
Not all of the players in this bracket may necessarily have grown up in a house fully aware of and devoted to its Irishness. Some might include family members who have served in the British army. If Martin O’Neill is trying to lure these targets, they could respond with a question about the chief executive of the FAI, the guy who sang a song including the lyrics: ‘And you dare to call me a terrorist / While you look down your gun / When I think of all the deeds that you have done / You have plundered many nations / Divided many lands / You have terrorised their people / You ruled with an iron hand / And you brought the reign of terror to my land.’
John Delaney is no Provo or man of violence, but he has made a foolish mistake that resulted in problems out of tune in modern Ireland. And they haven’t gone away.