Many people claim politics and sport should never mix, while sportspeople regularly tie themselves in knots saying they have nothing to do with politics.
What arrant nonsense. Sport and politics are wholly intertwined. As Basketball Ireland found out earlier this year when the Irish women’s team played Israel, despite efforts to claim politics had nothing to do with the sport, it found itself at the centre of an international controversy.
In Northern Ireland alone in the last 10 days, unionist politicians of all hues fell over each other condemning the participation of PSNI officers in celebrations of Armagh’s All-Ireland football victory, while the names of the places or the teams attached to the Olympic triumphs of Daniel Wiffen, Rhys McClenaghan, Jack McMillan and Hannah Scott, all from the north, were laden with political connotations.
The choosing of a name, a flag or an anthem is a political decision that carries weight and symbolism far beyond the sport it represents.
Studies within Ireland and internationally show the importance of symbols in constructing and projecting identities within and beyond communities. The complex sporting structures that exist on the island of Ireland have added far more weight to the symbolism attached to these choices than elsewhere.
Ireland’s experience of partition was quite distinctive in that the political and legal partition of the country was not accompanied by a social and cultural one.
Historian John Whyte described the pattern in Ireland to ignore the international political frontier as very unusual, particularly in Europe. Normally, once a country has been partitioned, as with Yugoslavia, for example, the organisations attached to that country have also been partitioned. Conversely, once countries unite, as with Germany in 1990, organisations within that country tend to unite too.
Ireland’s unique take is very much reflected in sports, where most remain governed on an all-Ireland basis after the 1921 partition of Ireland.
Gaelic games, boxing, rugby, cricket, bowls, hockey and golf either remained or became all-Ireland bodies, with soccer and athletics being the main exceptions that became divided.
It is why, at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, boxer Wayne McCullough, from a loyalist part of Belfast, was able to carry the Irish tricolour at the opening ceremony. Amateur boxers from Northern Ireland box under the governance of the all-Ireland body, the Irish Athletic Boxing Association, and box for the whole island in international competitions, except for the Commonwealth Games.
In research I am conducting for the Atlas of Irish Sport, which I am editing with John Crowley, Mike Cronin and Charlie Roche, of the 66 sports with governing bodies I have identified in Ireland, 45 are governed on an all-Ireland basis with the other 21 organised along partitionist lines.
Most of the sports on show at the Olympics now are all-Ireland sports. While there can be different reasons for Olympians from the north choosing to represent either Team Ireland or Team GB & NI, the fact that 34 of the 41 northern athletes are representing Team Ireland is probably a reflection that the sports most are competing in are governed on an all-Ireland basis, more than anything else.
A key reason for those sports remaining all-Ireland bodies was the incorporation of inoffensive and neutral flags, anthems and emblems, tailored to accommodate diverse political and cultural interests.
The Irish Hockey Union decided soon after partition to adopt the four provinces flag instead of the tricolour and the playing of the ‘Londonderry Air’ (‘Danny Boy’) as the team’s anthem.
The use of ‘neutral’ symbols was not without its critics. Some in the Irish Free State, including Senator Oliver St John Gogarty, complained of the Irish tricolour not being used for Davis Cup ties in tennis matches involving the Irish team. The Irish Lawn Tennis Association responded that “if the tricolour were flown some difficulty might be presented if there were players from the Six Counties”.
A minor incident was caused in the ranks of the Irish Ladies’ Golfing Union in 1958 when Drogheda-born Philomena Garvey withdrew from the British and Irish Curtis Cup team to play the United States as she refused to wear a Union flag on her blazer. She claimed she “would be prepared to wear a combination of the Union Jack and Éire tricolour, or a lion rampant, but I feel I would be disloyal to my country if I wore a Union Jack only”.
A compromise was reached the following year when a new badge was designed containing the shields of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales, and in the centre a small Union flag, a compromise acceptable to Garvey.
As is apparent at the current Olympic Games, the name of the country attached to sports and athletes can be a very sensitive issue.
Just two years after its establishment, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) changed its name to the Football Association of the Irish Free State in 1923 to gain entry to FIFA. It only reverted to its original name after the introduction of the Irish constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, in 1937.
The choosing of a name, a flag or an anthem is a political decision that carries weight and symbolism far beyond the sport it represents
The FAI campaigned for decades against the monopolisation of the name “Ireland” by the Irish Football Association (IFA), which maintained long after the split in Irish football that it remained the premier football governing body on the island. IFA match programmes still listed “Ireland” as the home team in Windsor Park, and not “Northern Ireland”, as recently as the 1960s.
At the opening ceremony of the 1948 London Olympics, the small Irish team was required by the International Olympic Committee to march as Éire between Egypt and Finland, and not as Ireland, even though Éire is the official Irish language name for the 26 counties, Ireland being the official English language name.
Sport and politics have always been firm bedfellows across the world, as is reflected in the choice and use of names, flags, anthems and other emblems in sport.
The mixing of sport and politics is particularly prevalent in divided societies and given the complex and unique structures in how sport is governed in Ireland, the prospect of sport and politics not coinciding does not exist. Sport will always remain a cause of or conduit for political controversy.
