OPINION:The IFA is trying to enforce a kind of pure form of sporting national identity, writes FIONNUALA O CONNOR
WHEN Sepp Blatter, the president of world soccer’s governing body Fifa, said at a weekend conference in Newcastle, Co Down that Northern footballers with Irish passports were eligible to play for both the Republic and Northern Ireland, it dragged non-sporting minds towards a dispute that has engaged many for years.
The Fifa man had dealt with proposals about the number of foreign players English teams should field. Then he answered a local questioner inspired by a recently-revived argument: could players born in Northern Ireland play for the Republic? It was the opinion of his organisation’s legal committee, he said, that since Northerners had the birthright to a Republic passport they could play North or South. Ireland was an exceptional case because of the political situation.
The statement was guaranteed to reverberate. Politics should never be brought into sport said Jim Rodgers, a director of east Belfast’s Glentoran football club and former unionist lord mayor of Belfast. But the North’s football association, the Irish Football Association (IFA), has effectively been saying for the past few years you may think you are Irish but we are going to make you play for a British team. Their spokesman promised they would be seeking clarification from Fifa, who are meant to deliver a final ruling on the issue in a fortnight. It is unlikely, to put it mildly, to end the argument.
The IFA has a tough job and this makes it worse. The Northern soccer body has struggled with management problems while trying to cheer on unsuccessful Northern Ireland teams and working hard to change their reputation for sectarian fans. It naturally wishes to hold on to good young players, in whom it invests time and money. But telling them they cannot play for the Republic because they live in the UK does not work. Worse, it confirms a suspicion that in spite of recent efforts, the IFA is still unthinkingly unionist.
The 21-year-old midfielder Darron Gibson, reared in Derry, is best known as one of Manchester United’s starlets and featured in the club’s Carling Cup final win at Wembley last Sunday. But he has exercised the IFA since first he showed an interest in playing for the Republic – after playing for Northern Ireland’s youth team. When he was picked for the Republic team last year the IFA claimed he was ineligible by their reading of Fifa rulings at that point: he might have an Irish passport but he had not lived in the Republic for two or more years.
He considered himself a Republic player, Gibson told the Derry Journal. Unionists supported the IFA, nationalists defended Gibson. Dermot Ahern, as then minister for foreign affairs, told the IFA to leave him alone while Derry SDLP representative Pat Ramsey said the IFA were trying to drive a coach and horses through the Good Friday agreement. Then chief executive of the IFA Howard Wells said talk of passports and the agreement were totally irrelevant.
This is a particularly odd moment for the IFA to insist on tidiness, when sport seems ever more fluid. There was the English rugby team at Croke Park on Saturday fielding one player born in Trinidad and a New Zealand Maori who has played for New Zealand at under-21 international level. Nothing is new, say scholars, citing for a start the Real Madrid legends of the past, di Stefano and Puskas – the former played for Argentina, Colombia and Spain, the latter for Hungary then Spain.
The IFA might claim that Gibson coming from Northern Ireland and playing for the Republic is an anomaly but anomalies are virtually the norm in Irish sport: the rugby team with Northern players and supporters in Croke Park shaking hands with the Republic’s President – a Belfast woman. The new British Commonwealth heavyweight boxing champion is a Falls Road taxi driver.
The IFA accepts with some relief that Derry City soccer club plays in the Southern league: this weekend they play Drogheda United. So a young Derry soccer supporter like Gibson grows up watching Drogheda, Bohemians and Shamrock Rovers at Brandywell, looking to the Republic soccer team on the international stage with heroes such as Roy Keane or Robbie Keane. The reality is that virtually all Northern soccer supporters from a Catholic background identify with the Republic team rather than Northern Ireland. Sympathy, like identity, cannot be compelled.
Trying to enforce a kind of pure sporting national identity when the Northern national team is itself an anomaly is a curious, cloth-eared effort. Isn’t Northern Ireland anomalous, its current political structures negotiated under joint British-Irish supervision and signed up to as an international agreement? Peter Robinson would prefer not to share equal power with Martin McGuinness and vice versa – but needs must. There is no point in the IFA complaining about anomalies – this is not the first and will not be the last. In making Northern Ireland function half smoothly, nothing will ever be tidy.