Northern Ireland football and politics in uneasy embrace

Sammy Nelson took the free-kick. Terry Cochrane rescued it when everyone else assumed the ball was running out of play.

Cochrane crossed, the Windsor Park Kop held its breath, then Gerry Armstrong jumped to head the ball in. Cochrane and Armstrong embraced. Windsor roared.

It was the only goal: Northern Ireland 1, Portugal 0, April 29th, 1981. A week later, Bobby Sands was dead.

Those two events may not seem connected, but they occurred in the same city and they will be linked forever in the minds of us football-obsessed 15-year-olds criss-crossing Belfast on buses to get to school on those checkpoint mornings.

For the lucky ones, these were days of football and politics, then more football. We had all the Gerrys – Adams, Armstrong, Fitt, Mandering.

Bloodshed, condemnation, Scene Around Six and "we interrupt this programme to ask keyholders in Royal Avenue to return to their premises". We had music, more football, more buses.

The Portugal game was on a Wednesday afternoon and we were sent home early from school that Friday, as I recollect, as the city prepared itself for something like a street hurricane. Early again on the Monday.

Another week on and the Northern Ireland-England fixture in the “Home Championships” was cancelled with England refusing to travel to Belfast.

Who could blame them? Wales did the same. It was a decision made reluctantly – both countries had gone to Belfast in the mid-1970s in fairly bad times, which is more than Scotland did.

Belfast, early May 1981, this was a particular time in a particular place. Some have been taken back there this week by the FAI.

Hunger strike

Bobby Sands died on May 5th. On Friday 8th, his friend Joe McDonnell – he and Sands were arrested together in 1976 – began his hunger strike.

Saturday 9th brought the 100th FA Cup final: Tottenham 1 Manchester City 1. It was Joe McDonnell’s 30th birthday. He lived a further 60 days.

There was a Cup final replay - May 14th; Ricky Villa’s dribble.

Joe McDonnell came from Slate Street on the Lower Falls, which as the crow flies, is not too far from the Windsor Park Kop. The proximity – and the city divisions – meant that, occasionally, petrol bombs and other items were thrown up over the walls onto the Kop. Talking to Tommy Cassidy a couple of years ago, he said: “Windsor Park was about 99 per cent Protestant for Northern Ireland games and you could feel it. I was 100 per cent Protestant, that’s how it was.”

Cassidy was making the religious point because he was Martin O’Neill’s room-mate on many Irish trips. At a time when the city was being torn apart, the football team crossed boundaries. We all knew that, and we felt that too, but not with the urgency of what was going on around us.

It was all too serious.

And it's still all too serious. Perhaps as someone brought up in Protestant Belfast and a long time in England, this opinion is out of kilter with Irish thought, but there is something uncomfortable about the sentimentalising of a period as harrowing as the hunger strikes; there is something uncomfortable about the singing of Joe McDonnell by well-fed men in blazers who hide behind lawyers.

Joe McDonnell is not a song; Joe McDonnell was a man who starved himself to death for a cause he believed in. His nationalism was honest.

Many people across Ireland shared McDonnell’s belief, but only a few did the fighting. It was the same on the other side. Some “big men” hid behind some young activists.

One benefit of the latest John Delaney episode has been to return to Ten Men Dead, the brilliant inside story of the hunger strikes by David Beresford. Joe McDonnell is flesh and blood here, not a lyric. He comes across as most certainly someone who would not hide behind lawyers. When there was trouble on a wing of an H-Block, McDonnell was called for. He was not old, but Beresford writes: "By this time Joe was a veteran and a tough character."

Dismissals

From those doing the fighting at street level, there are illuminating dismissals of the likes of Charlie Haughey. Beresford quotes a line from McDonnell in his cell: “None of that Paddy Irishman caper here.”

At McDonnell’s funeral, his son, “Little Joe”, bored and annoyed by the length of the procession through the family house, took his ball outside and kicked it against the wall.

There would soon be other funerals because as another great work of Irish journalism, Lost Lives, records, in the hours after McDonnell's death, 16- year- old John Dempsey was shot dead at the Falls Road bus depot and Nora McCabe, a 33- year-old mother of three was hit by an RUC plastic bullet and died on Linden Street.

In the three days after McDonnell’s death, six people were murdered in north and west Belfast, on both sides.

It wasn’t a sing-song summer, 1981.

Shortly after Michael Devine became the 10th and last hunger striker to die, on August 20th, the new season began. Liverpool lost at Wolves.

Then a night in November brought Israel to Windsor Park.

Gerry Armstrong scored again. 1-0 and Northern Ireland were going to the World Cup finals in Spain in 1982.

Martin O’Neill was the Irish captain. He, they, were brilliant. They burned memories into the fabric of our lives. Some said it showed what could be done with men from each side of the northern divide coming together. There was a tendency for optimistic extrapolation.

And yet, three decades on, earlier this month at the FAI Cup final at what is now called the Aviva Stadium, Martin O’Neill, manager of the Republic of Ireland, sat beside Michael O’Neill, manager of Northern Ireland.

Aviva was formerly Norwich Union, an English insurance company based on what some might call the Queen’s shilling.

But, yeah, we’re round the corner now: Brits Out.

Two teams

A fortnight after the northern O’Neills sat together, this island of six million people sent out, as it does, two national teams. Both have pretty decent first XIs just now, and both might make the finals in France in 2016.

And no one says a word.

Whatever you say, say nothing. Anyone proposing the most basic measure – an all-Ireland league – is either howled down or scoffed at.

Anyone suggesting the next step, an all-island Ireland team as there was in the past, and as there is in rugby, cricket and elsewhere, faces a bit more than verbal abuse.

Because Irish football still symbolises an Irish divide. It’s there in James McClean and it’s there in Northern Ireland fans, though at least both parties are honest about it. So, no, it’s not 1981 – thankfully – but it’s still there.