Storm in a tea cup

 

Storm in Tea Cup

Have you ever had a discussion with someone and find that it’s only after they go away that you come up with the perfect response to their argument? There are many instances in life of the things we should have said at the time but didn’t. I felt that this week watching a smug Sky Sports Newsman grilling a young woman from the Irish FA over some of the players singing ‘Celtic Symphony’ after their victory over Scotland at Hampden. The song, a favourite among Celtic fans, references the IRA with the words, ‘ooh ahh up the Ra’ and this caused a bit of a media storm.

The Sky presenter asked, ‘we’ve seen a statement from the FAI which apologises for players singing a song which references the IRA. Would you like to apologise?’ The young woman did and ate some humble pie live on TV. What she should have said is something like this…

‘Yes, if it caused any offence then I am sorry, it was never our intention, the team was celebrating reaching the world cup and perhaps got carried away. While we’re here, would you like to apologise for occupying our country for centuries, the confiscation of our land, the outlawing of the faith most here held, the penal laws, the deliberate starvation of hundreds of thousands of people, the slaughter in Drogheda the forced migration of millions, the evictions, the absentee landlords, the exploitation, the plantation of Ulster, the famine graves, the coffin ships, oppression, partition, humiliation, collusion, Bloody Sunday, Ballymurphy and the poverty you inflicted upon us?’

What grated was the presenter suggesting the team needed ‘educating’ about the past when the average English person has no idea of the crimes perpetrated on Ireland by the UK. Nor indeed the crimes committed all over the world in the name of empire. Of course, Ireland is moving towards a new reality with the northern statelet no longer certain it has a Unionist majority. It is time to build a new society where the old war songs are allowed to lose their potency. The Irish women’s team may have hit a nerve with their choice of song at Hampden but the national anthem they sang before the game is hardly a song of peace and harmony. ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’ (The Soldiers song) was sung by the men in the Post Office in 1916 and was a favourite of the Irish volunteers who fought a brutal war of independence with the British. It contains the lyric…

‘Impatient for the coming fight,
And as we wait the morning's light,
Here in the silence of the night,
We'll chant a soldier's song.
Soldiers are we
whose lives are pledged to Ireland;
Some have come
from a land beyond the wave.
Sworn to be free,
No more our ancient sire land
Shall shelter the despot or the slave.
Tonight we man the gap of danger
In Erin's cause, come woe or weal
'Mid cannons' roar and rifles peal,
We'll chant a soldier's song.’

Is the lyric above any more or less warlike than ‘up the Ra?’  Perhaps it is less potent to the non-Gaelic speaker due to them simply not understanding what it is saying.  Is it in any case a fact that songs from the war of independence are more acceptable than songs about the more recent conflict in Northern Ireland?

Let me be clear to any Irish folk reading this. No Irish person should ever need to apologise for singing songs of resistance to the occupation of their country. It’s part of your history as much as ‘Flower of Scotland’ or ‘Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled’ is part of Scotland’s. My old grandfather, a native of county Clare, would sing ‘The Croppy boy’ on occasion and why shouldn’t he? Countless people gave their lives in the struggle for self-determination, are they to be forgotten because of modern political correctness?

Those of us who follow Celtic have always had to deal with this hostility towards our identity, perceived or otherwise. It’s one of life’s ironies that the more something is mocked and disparaged, the more people hold onto it. The attempt to make Celtic remove the Irish flag from their stadium following crowd trouble at a New Year’s fixture with Rangers at Ibrox was a prime example. The demand put to Celtic was that they 'refrain from displaying in its park any flag or emblem that has no association with the country or sport.'

George Graham, Secretary of the SFA and a man described even by his friends as a bigot was the leading light in the attempt to force Celtic to shed part of their identity. In the end Bob Kelly, Celtic’s chairman, faced the clique at the SFA down and the threat of being thrown out of the league was defeated, ironically enough with the help of Rangers.

The Anglo-centric view put forward by the Sky reporter this week is typical as is the 24-hour news hungry media which picks up on the smallest thing and magnifies it out of all proportion. This storm in a tea cup will pass when they move on to the next item. No one who remembers the bad old days forgets the horrors of the troubles. There were many dreadful things done by all sides and the implication in so much of the reporting this week; that the British government holds the moral high ground, falls apart under closer scrutiny.

The Irish women were a bunch of young folk exhilarated after reaching the word cup. They’ll doubtless be more careful about how they celebrate in future but come on, was it really that much of a big deal?