The Irish National Football Teams and Northern Players Who Declare for the Republic of Ireland Breen, P
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WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch The Footballing Elephant in the Room? The Irish National Football Teams and Northern Players who declare for the Republic of Ireland Breen, P. This is an electronic version of a paper presented at the 2017 Annual Conference of The Football Collective, University of Limerick, 23 to 24 Nov 2017. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] Sean Huddleston – School of Education, University of the West of Scotland Dr. Paul Breen – University of Westminster Abstract for Consideration for Publication and Presentation at Conference Title – The Footballing Elephant in the Room? The Irish National Football Teams and Northern Players who declare for the Republic of Ireland Topic – Northern Ireland has struggled to achieve momentum for “toleration, respect and recognition” that would help the society move towards meaningful embedding of the “appropriate normative expectations associated with equal citizenship” (McBride, 2015, p. 249). The society remains divided even two decades after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, as exemplified by the culture and practices that surround support for and endorsement of Ireland’s two ‘national’ football teams. Before the 1980s there appeared to be a greater separation of politics and Association Football in Northern Ireland, with the cross community support for the 1982 World Cup team serving as an example of that. In the late 1980s and early 90s football became increasingly politicised, with loyalist identity becoming synonymous with support Northern Ireland, and an increasingly confident Catholic population finding greater affiliation with the Republic of Ireland (Hassan, 2002). The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, though aspiring to harmonise identities (O’Neill, 2003), has potentially served to reinforce the concept of two distinct communities defined by their political and religious affiliations. On the surface level this appears to have created greater cultural and sporting divisions if analysing the situation through the pronouncements of public representatives on the Unionist side, and in so many young players of a Catholic background declaring adult allegiance to the Republic. However, at a deeper level, there appears to be a greater tolerance on the part of supporters with differing identities to recognise the achievements of the other side. Ultimately though, real harmony may only be attained when the symbols around football become less political and more neutral, in such areas as flags and anthems for example. There seems very little appetite for this though on any side, with each preferring to keep its own distinct identity rather than 1 diluting them down to something more acceptable to those at the other end of the political spectrum. Introduction National pride is closely allied to political symbols, and Northern Irish society serves as an exemplar of how sport and politics are inextricably linked in the popular imagination. Armstrong & Mitchell (2001:140) point to the role that those social activities such as sporting events play in reinforcing a sense of national pride. However, in a divided society even the most basic symbols can become contentious, and used as a vehicle for asserting ownership over the cultural terrain of a state. Northern Ireland is politically and demographically divided between the Christian denominations of Catholic and Protestant within a context where “religious ascription has typically been seen as coterminous with national identity” and Catholics see themselves as Irish rather than British (Nagle, 2012:3). This means that the majority of Northern Irish Catholics support the Republic of Ireland’s football team as a consequence of identifying with the notion of Ireland as a singular entity, which is more reflective of their long-held political aspiration of a united Irish state. As such, loyalty to the Northern Irish football team is seen as lukewarm at best. However, this has not always been the case despite decades of conflict that arguably have their roots in the Anglo-Irish conflict of the early 1900s and the subsequent partition of Ireland into two states. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that the “social significance of sport in Northern Ireland” (Hassan, 2002:66) extended into the realm of political and cultural identification. Increasingly, ‘ownership’ of the national football team has become a crucial aspect of maintaining Protestant hegemony over a state that has seen considerable demographic change in the past half century. Yet, despite the increase in the Catholic population (Nolan, 2012; Hughes, 2013) Hassan (2002:69) has observed that “the popularity of soccer amongst Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland, far from questioning their sense of national identity, appears to provide many with an opportunity to express their support for the idea of Irish unification and engage in counter-hegemonic activity against the Northern Ireland State.” That though hardly seems like a recipe for the agreed society envisioned in the 1998 Belfast Agreement’s, signed into British, Irish and European law on Good Friday, tenth April 1998, after two years of formal negotiations between representatives of unionism and nationalism. This agreement established “provisions for a new political and constitutional configuration in Northern Ireland, on the island of Ireland and between Ireland and Britain”, and cemented “a strong equalisation policy” that had been in place since the late nineteen eighties. Nagle (2012, p.12) further describes the deal as recognizing both nationalists and unionists’ respective “self- determination claims, the need to share political power, as well as ‘parity of esteem’ for their cultural identities.” Parity of esteem though is a difficult construct to measure (O”Neill, 2003) and the Agreement itself has been deemed a failure in taking on board “overlapping, confused, or even contradictory identities” which “slice through the alleged fault lines of conflict” (Vaughan-Williams, 2006, p. 518). Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the binary landscape of supporting ‘the national football team’, which in itself is a loaded assertion since many Catholics also 2 see Gaelic football as their national game, rather than soccer. The situation is thus a complicated one, and raises the question of whether or not it is possible to accommodate diversity within the support base, and to have this reflected in the broader symbols associated with the Northern Irish football team. To date, that appears not to have been achieved to any substantive extent and a scenario exists where, twenty years after The 1998 Belfast Agreement, sporting allegiances may be just as polarised as in those now-passed decades of conflict. It remains to be seen though if that could change, and whether or not there is scope for arrangements in which supporters, if not players, can strongly identify with teams from both parts of Ireland. For this to happen, a number of measures might have to be put in place regarding such issues as anthems and symbols, but even then as Roberts (2017) has pointed out, most Catholics would still probably identify more strongly with the Republic of Ireland regardless of any cosmetic changes. However, an interesting challenge to this position comes in the existence of Catholic players such as Paddy McCourt and Niall McGinn. They have chosen to wear the colours of Northern Ireland, even in an era when they could self-select for the Republic as others such as the infamous James McClean have done. This suggests that there may be hope for making the background environment of Northern Irish football more reflective of a broader society that has long since ceased to be “a cold house for Catholics” (Trimble, 1998). For that to succeed though, Roberts (2017:461) argues that it “take more than words” and cites the aforementioned Niall McGinn as saying that in some scenarios such as the playing of the ‘national’ anthem, for Catholic boys it’s a case of “just put your head down and try to get through it” (ibid: 452); which seems a contradiction to the foundations of the 1998 Agreement. Historical Context Much of Irish football’s present day divisions have resulted from the “divorce” (Breen, 2014) of the island’s two football associations in 1921, following the partition of Ireland into two states. Historically in Ireland, Association Football, had been the preserve of the Protestant north east, even if two of the most recognisable clubs, Belfast Celtic and Cliftonville, Ireland’s oldest club, generally attracted a largely Catholic following (Roberts, 2017). Even in the aftermath of the split into two associations and right up to this day, the northern version retained a sense of righteousness in being true heirs to the title of the Irish Football Association, with the Football Association of Ireland being the ones who broke away. The Republic of Ireland football team’s identity thus came to be based on a statist version of nationalism according to Cronin (1999:124) in that it was formed around the boundaries