We’ve not yet got our heads around the ‘national issue’
IT WAS my first visit to Glasgow to attend a Celtic match and there was no way I’d be allowed home, according to my more experienced fellow travellers, without first paying a visit to the famous Bairds pub in Gallowgate. As it turned out, they were right. This was some experience. The visceral, Catholic/Protestant, sectarian, tribal atmosphere was tangible. And utterly shocking for somebody reared along the softer, less febrile, Atlantic-polished West coast where the nearest we came to communal strife was Newmarket and Sixmilebridge in the championship.
In Bairds that evening a group of prominent businessmen from Dublin, pints in hand, was settling in for a bit of a session and a singsong, giving it welly.
Minutes later I could hardly believe what I was hearing when they started chanting, ‘ooh, ah, up the RA’ – again and again. The late Seánie FitzPatrick in the middle of them.
Five or six years after the Good Friday Agreement and serious hitters from Dublin were releasing their inner Provo in patriot games they wouldn’t dare do, or even countenance, back home.
THAT pathetic scene of big business types masquerading as chocolate soldiers returned in full tricolour mode with the publication of a video on social media showing members of the Irish women’s soccer team singing the same miserable ‘ooh, ah, up the RA’ pro-IRA taunt after their wonderful defeat of Scotland on Tuesday night, a victory that guaranteed their World Cup qualification.
It was so dispiriting that after all these years, after all we know about the murderous conspiracy that was the IRA, after all the cruel deaths and injuries and all the countless injustices the Provos perpetrated, that young women at the height of their achievements would find this as their best way to celebrate.
In fairness, their ‘crime’ should not be exaggerated, given that it’s unlikely that any one of them, like that group of businessmen in Bairds all those years ago, would have any truck with political violence and the IRA campaign which was nothing more than the denial of human rights on a grand scale.
Unlike Sinn Féin TD David Cullinane signing off his 2022 election victory speech in Waterford with ‘Up the RA’, the soccer players have some excuse, caught in a mixed moment of ignorance and high spirits.
But, their mistake, for which the FAI and the management has apologised, tells us a great deal about how we still haven’t managed, sufficiently or at all, to get our heads around the ‘national issue’ more than 24 years after the Good Friday Agreement. It tells us how unthinking, how reflex and how shallow our concept of a shared island of Ireland really is.
Their mistake provides ammunition for those in loyalism and uncompromising unionism, allowing them to say, ‘well, that’s what nationalists really feel’.
It makes othering a lot easier, like when a few stupid loyalists reaffirm the prejudices of ultra-green nationalists and republicans by singing a song that mocked the murder of Michaela McAreavey.
This is not the first time that Irish soccer has managed to embarrass itself in this way. Eight years ago video emerged of then-FAI boss John Delaney singing a song that honoured an IRA man.
Afterwards he presented himself as the unthinking, unreflective nationalist by saying he did not agree with every word of the song he was singing. So, why sing it then?
IRISH manager Vera Pauw was right to say the pro-IRA song cast a shadow over the team’s achievement. But it has also cast a shadow over the dramatic advances made by women athletes across the board in recent times. Irish women soccer players had a showcase opportunity to mark their success – and instead they scored an own goal. A howler.
The most spectral shadow that events like these cast is over community relations in the North.
At grassroots level such behaviour speaks very loudly indeed.
And the damage there is impossible to measure.