Mixing sport and geography

Omagh schoolchildren greet the Olympic flame on its passage through Ireland.

It was probably no more than a slip of the tongue but it spoiled my breakfast… and it has been niggling since. The fact that it was a ‘good news story’ on RTÉ Radio One’s Morning Ireland hardly alleviated the inexplicable feeling of being slighted once more.

Brother boxers keep her lit on the Border.

I didn’t even catch the name of the reporter who informed listeners that the Olympic flame was ‘now in Ireland, if only for a few hours’ after the symbolic handover between fellow Irish Olympians Wayne McCollough and Michael Carruth at the Border on the Newry to Dundalk road.

It jarred because, by no coincidence, I was actually in Ireland yesterday morning to witness the same Olympic flame making its passage through Omagh, having come from Derry City via Strabane before heading off out the Dromore Road towards Enniskillen and a string of other Irish towns and villages.

The feeling of euphoria I had felt since about the passage of the Olympic flame on a symbolic course that included both parts of Ireland was dissipated by the carelessness of yet another ‘professional’ news reporter who can’t even be bothered to look at a map and know the difference between a country and a state.

Jack Kennedy, 15, carries the flame through Omagh.

‘A few hours’ indeed, I thought, my mind tracing the earlier path of the flame from Belfast through Antrim, along the north coast and through each of these six Irish counties in Northern Ireland before its brief interlude in the Republic of Ireland.

Yet such geographical dismissal should be like water off a duck’s back by now, one would think.

For all of my life, I have listened to unionist politicians talk of ‘Ulster’ and the ‘Ulster people’ in a way that pointedly excluded me and all those in Northern Ireland who espoused Irish reunification, not to mention one-third of the actual province of Ulster. Such geographical and social selectivity was always deliberate, however, a contrived formula to bestow historical pedigree and political legitimacy on the partition of Ireland.

It was anathema to news reporting in most of Ireland, of course. Reporters were reminded forcibly by editors, who were sticklers for ‘House Style’ back then, that there were very precise rules on these matters.

Standards appear have slipped since the Good Friday Agreement (or ‘Belfast Agreement’ in Irish Times house style). And I blame soccer for that.

For just as we prepare to root for the Irish Olympians at the London games, the hype is reaching a crescendo for the European Football Championships. Notwithstanding that the Irish team taking part includes (controversially for some) players from throughout the island, it travels to Poland under the auspices of the breakaway Football Association of Ireland, one of the two bodies that persisted in fielding teams under the name ‘Ireland’ until the 1950s.

Representing Ireland against Brazil at Landesdowne Road in July 1973 were the Shamrock Rovers XI (from back left) Miah Dennehy, Tommy Criag, Paddy Mulligan, Martin O'Neill, Derek Dougan, Alan Hunter, Liam O'Kane and (front from left) Bryan Hamilton, Pat Jennings, Tommy Carroll, Johnny Giles, Don Givens, Terry Conroy and Mick Martin.

Fab Four – Don Givens. Johnny Giles,
Martin O'Neill and Pat Jennings .

It hardly mattered so much at a time when there was little prospect of playing on the world stage, but then the 1970s came along with the Troubles and possibly the best crop of home-grown soccer talent we ever produced. From this, a team was put together in 1973 by the two serving captains of Northern Ireland and the Republic – Derek Dougan and Johnny Giles. With no official backing from the ‘representative’ bodies, they engineered a match with the mighty Brazil in Dublin and, with no official sanction, they had to field as the Shamrock Rovers XI. That didn’t stop them racking up three goals against the world champions’ four.

Despite the continuous efforts of the great Dougan to unite the Irish soccer teams, the divide continues, bolstered by marginal success for Northern Ireland in 1982 and for the Republic on occasions since then. It has become firmly institutionalised with many professional reporters persisting in the belief that rugby’s adherence to an all-Ireland selection is the exception, rather than the rule. Indeed, soccer is the exception.

So as the FAI side heads off for the European finals with a team of varied pedigree, the Irish Football Association and its supporters resort to irony and self-derision. Their favourite chant in recent years is the refrain, ‘We’re not Brazil, we’re Norn Iron’.

As if we need to be reminded.

So as credit union accounts are raided for the road to Poznan, I’ll be looking forward to the Olympics and lamenting that the last outing for the Ireland soccer team was in July 1973 – a glorious sporting occasion ‘if only for a few hours’.

Lost for names in time and place

‘I never saw a richer country, or, to speak my mind, a finer people; the worst of them is the bitter and envenomed dislike which they have to each other. Their factions have been so long envenomed, and they have such narrow ground to do their battle in, that they are like people fighting with daggers in a hogshead.’ – Sir Walter Scott, 1825

Tourist board gets it ass-about-face on the locaton of the Clogher Valley Show

 Ireland, it has been noted, has far too much history and simply not enough geography. Yet what ‘narrow ground’ we inhabit, we envelop in multiple names that confound and confuse visitors, while we inhabitants misname, rename, relocate and forget. 

So long before this age of dwindling assets, we had trouble keeping track of our real estate. And much of it stems from simple carelessness.

Take, for example, the case this week involving the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB), which hardly has a limitless domain to promote by any stretch of the imagination. It placed an ad in the Belfast newspaper, The Irish News, proclaiming, among other events, the attractions of the Clogher Valley Show scheduled for August in the village of Augher. 
In the process, it moved the venue from County Tyrone to County Fermanagh, a not infrequent mistake for Belfast-based bodies when it comes to that proud locality. Fivemiletown on the western fringe of the Valley, and also officially in Tyrone, is invariably assigned to Fermanagh, although the Tyrone-Fermanagh county line does actually run through the button roundabout at the junction of Main Street and Clabby Road.

Wendy Austin

Wendy Austin, host of Talkback on BBC Radio Ulster, took up the NITB’s Clogher Valley faux pas. While wagging the finger at the NITB, she then admonished a couple of Fermanagh people for not knowing where the village of Plumbridge was. Sure didn’t they go through it on their way to Belfast? Wendy was obviously unaware that going through Plumbridge – in the very heart of the Sperrin Mountains of north Tyrone – would entail a detour of more than 100-km from the Fermanagh to Belfast A4 route. That of course would take them perilously near the city of Derry/Londonderry and even closer to the village of Dunamanagh/Donemana.

Let's shake on Derry/Londonderry

 Yet place-names remain at the very core of our identity on an island where the smallest unit of officially named geography is the townland, a space ranging from a couple of hectares to broad expanses of moorland.

We have long sparred across and inside our two jurisdictions of multiple names. Dublin governments and their subjects have been affronted down the years by the use of ‘Éire’ to designate their state in English, even if it is the proper title in the first official language. 
In a similar vein, those who have even shrugged off the Republic of Ireland designation and now style their 26 counties as ‘Ireland’ in all official communications, as well as in the name of their soccer team, regard the use of the ‘Free State’ by northern nationalists as a knuckle-dragging insult.

Rockall – another disputed territory.

In their enthusiasm for a truncated Ireland, it often seems as if they have managed to create an extra 420 kilometres of coastline and floated the six other counties of Ireland off to somewhere near Rockall, another piece of real estate that has caused bother in the past.

Yet it is hardly better on the northern side of the boundary line, where great passion can be invoked by what people call the place. Unionists once proclaimed their jurisdiction as Ulster, persisting in the delusion that they had honoured the Solemn League and Covenant of 1912 by simply obliterating the counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan. More recently, they have reverted to the official designation of Northern Ireland. The use of the alternative ‘North of Ireland’ is now pounced upon as a pejorative insult used disparagingly by nationalists and republicans who were previously denounced for using 'the Six Counties' in all references. Yet for many decades, the ‘North of Ireland’ was used as frequently as ‘Northern Ireland’ by unionist spokesmen, although both names fell far behind ‘Ulster’.

Supporting 'Our Wee Country' aka 'Norn Iron'

(Indeed, common international usage in place-names would suggest that the occasionally heard Americanism ‘North Ireland’ is more appropriate for a defined separate jurisdiction, as opposed to an internal region with less defined boundaries, as in North Korea, South Africa, North Dakota and southern California etc.)

So while Republic of Ireland soccer fans proclaim their allegiance to ‘Ireland’, their fellow football enthusiasts supporting the team of the original Irish Football Association get over this legalism by embracing the diminutive virtues of ‘Our Wee Country’ and chant the reminder that they are ‘not Brazil’ but 'Norn Iron'. Thankfully, fans of all other sports in international competition do not experience this problem.

But our confusion over what to call places is not confined to our own ‘wee island’. While many Irish people bristle and fume at the use of the accepted geographic descriptor ‘British Isles’, they have taken to increasing use of ‘the UK’ to describe the biggest neighbouring island in our ‘north-west Atlantic archipelago’ – the island that we once called ‘Britain’ or even named by its constituent parts of England, Scotland and Wales, before Maggie Thatcher undertook to put the 'Great' back into it.

The UK acronym stands of course for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, yet that meaning is only conveyed publicly in statements – mostly from unionists – wishing parity of esteem with ‘the rest of the UK’. On this island, southern business commentators and others will often refer to situations applying in ‘the UK and Northern Ireland’ as if they are separate places.

The UK designation grows more precarious in the 21^st century, of course, given the Scottish propensity for scrapping the original union forged in 1707 and into which our island was drawn almost a century later, with revision after another century to accommodate the creeping formalities of Irish partition.

Yet our name-calling persists in defying politics, geography, law and even history. The Frontier Post has dealt in a previous blog with those who extend the longevity of partition back into the 19^th century. One prime example of this nonsense was from the historian Ruth Dudley-Edwards.

Barbary pirates raided Baltimore

She is not alone we found this week. On Sunday, the usually excellent evening slot on RTÉ Radio 1, The History Show, featured a fascinating segment on the ‘Sack of Baltimore’ on the Cork coast in 1631 by pirates from the Barbary Coast of Africa. The History Show host Myles Dungan observed that such raids for slaves were not confined to Ireland. They also occurred at that time (1600s), he told us, on the southern coast of ‘the UK’!