Fifty years ago the Irish football team played Chile in a friendly in Santiago, only months after General Augusto Pinochet had seized power in a bloody coup. Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president, was regarded by the US as a “dangerous communist” and Pinochet’s move against him was supported by the CIA.
Richard Nixon’s administration quickly endorsed the new military junta, glossing it with some western superpower approval, and bringing an end to nearly 50 years of democracy in Chile.
Ireland’s game in May 1974 was part of a three-match South American tour, that also included Brazil and Uruguay. Ireland were the first team to visit Chile under the new regime and loud objections were raised at home. The Irish government, though, chose not to condemn the match and the FAI had no mind to change course. State papers, released 30 years later, revealed that Garret FitzGerald, the Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time, had been advised by his officials not to enter the fray.
The match was played in the National Stadium which had been turned into a detention centre during the coup. Thousands were rounded up, many of whom were tortured and killed. Eamon Dunphy had travelled to Chile as part of the squad, and a few weeks later he was interviewed by Sam Smyth in the Sunday World.
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“When we went out to inspect the pitch armed guards ordered us back to the dressingroom,” said Dunphy. “It was a sobering experience. I think most of the lads in the team realised we were being used then. The stadium had been freshly painted for our visit so all traces of blood and torture had been destroyed.”
In the same summer the British and Irish Lions toured South Africa. Because of apartheid South Africa had been excluded from the Olympic Games since 1964, and in November 1973 the United Nations had declared apartheid “a crime against humanity”.
Captained by Willie John McBride the Lions tour brazenly went ahead, and like so much else with the Lions, that tour has been eulogised and mythologised ever since.
Interestingly, though, Minister FitzGerald chose to condemn the Lions tour. In a letter to the Irish Committee for Chile, he tried to explain the distinction in his thinking. “The evil of apartheid,” wrote FitzGerald, “is much more fundamental than discrimination or segregation of political groups because apartheid is founded on a fact that is immutable; a man may change his politics, but he cannot change the colour of his skin.”
Has anything changed over the last 50 years? Are these knots any easier to untangle? Has anybody devised a code of best practice? Would everybody abide by such a code, if it existed? Instead, sport continues to trip through the wires of world events, stepping on landmines.
Dr Fitzgerald had one of the most rigorous and agile minds in Irish public life. If he were with us now, you wonder what he would think about the Irish women’s basketball team and their tortuous dilemma?
On Thursday they will play Israel in a qualifier for the Women’s Euro Basket Championship. The game was originally fixed for Dublin, and was scheduled to take place in November, but the Irish Government couldn’t guarantee the safety of the Israeli team and an agreement was reached to flip the home and away sequence of the fixtures. Tel Aviv is not a viable option for Thursday’s game, so it was switched to Latvia.
As reported by Conor Gallagher on these pages and Kieran Shannon in the Irish Examiner, as many as five first-choice players have refused to play. FIBA Europe, the governing body, has insisted, however, that the game must go ahead on pain of punitive sanctions.
If Ireland failed to fulfil the fixture this week they would be fined €80,000. If they refused to play the second scheduled game against Israel later in the year they would be fined a further €100,000 and risk suspension from the next qualifying tournament. For an organisation that lives by modest means, the figures involved in those sanctions could fund Irish women’s basketball for “the rest of the decade”, according to Shannon.
What should they do? What can they do? What’s right? In a case like this, does wisdom exist?
What queers the pitch is that not all world events are treated the same. When Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, sport in the western world closed ranks. Russian and Belarusian athletes were ostracised from a long list of international events. Sports ministers from 36 countries, including Ireland, signed a collective statement to that effect.
And yet, this apparent clarity wasn’t an end to confusion. Ireland sent amateur boxing teams to two international boxing championships late last year on the understanding that if they were drawn against a Russian or a Belarusian opponent they must concede the fight.
Ireland held that line at the European U-22 championships when three Irish fighters gave walkovers to Russian or Belarusian fighters; in the case of Evelyn Igharo she conceded her semi-final, costing her a shot at a gold medal.
At the World Junior Championships, however, the issue came to a head after an Irish fighter was forced to concede a first-round bout. All these athletes were 16 years or younger. When the matter was raised in the Dáil with the Minister for Sport Thomas Byrne, it emerged that no sanction from the department or Sport Ireland would be levelled against an athlete, their club, or the federation if they stepped into the ring with a Russian or a Belarusian opponent.
For the rest of the tournament, Irish boxers took the draw as it came. Political leadership on the matter had broken down.
Sport has not come up with a diplomatic response to the slaughter in Israel on October 7th last year, or the slaughter in Gaza ever since, except to carry on as if sport was a parallel universe. For the international sports bodies it is not a matter of conscience, one way or another: it is the path of least resistance. Do nothing and pretend that sport is somehow detached from selected world events. Who decides which ones? You don’t know either?
In these matters, the only guide is personal conscience. There is no other viable standard. Gerald Davies, John Taylor and others refused to tour with the Lions in 1974. Whatever choice the Irish basketball players make this week, their conscience must be respected.
