Tommy Martin: Football has a way of getting beyond the lies and prejudice

Time was when you knew where you stood with election leaflets. There would be a plump, contented looking Fine Gaeler, a schnakey-eyed Fianna Fáiler and an old trade union stalwart called Joe for Labour.

Then you’d have someone with their name awkwardly translated into Irish for the Shinners, a hard-grafting local independent fella going on about bus stops and a smiley woman in a cardigan representing the Greens.

Now you can’t move for goggle-eyed loons spouting fascist rhetoric at you as you are eating your cornflakes. Ireland is Full, Ireland for the Irish, Stop the Immigration Takeover and on and on it goes. Seriously, it’s like the Beer Hall Putsch at breakfast time in our house when postie makes his deliveries.

Grim stuff, and you’d fear that the election results will show that these knuckle-dragging Hiberno-Nazis have managed to move the needle in this country. Not that any of them will get elected — we haven’t quite gone the full ‘President Hindenburg handing over the keys of the Reichstag to that fine young Adolf fellow’.

But all that hate and hot-air has to go somewhere and most likely it will shift opportunistic mainstream politicians rightwards, making this country just that bit of a colder house for those that look a bit different.

This is all the internet’s fault, of course. Whenever you get a new and revolutionary way of disseminating information human beings tend to go nuts, adopting extreme positions and tearing lumps out of each other.

For modern social media, read the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. That precipitated the Reformation which in turn led to 500 years of sectarian conflict. So, we have that to look forward to.

The development of radio helped the rise of fascism,
especially when they got in charge and could pump their messages of hate into every home unmolested. We haven’t got to that stage yet, but if you hear Marty Whelan playing just a little bit more Wagner than normal, you’ll know something is up.

Given that you don’t have to be Professor Simon Schama to know that the fascists were the baddies and actually lost and generally ended up dead in a bunker or strung up on a meat hook, it is incredible to see a new generation adopt so many of their ways and tricks: The targeting of minority groups, the use of disinformation propaganda, the appeal to cultural purity, the belief in the purifying power of violence to achieve their ends.

The only thing they haven’t adopted is an identifiable uniform, but then the buttoning up of brownshirts requires opposable thumbs.

If you normally come to these pages for a distraction from all this kind of stuff, then apologies. In this case, however, sport is less distraction than positive alternative.

For example, it is rare that the managerless Irish soccer team is a shining light in anything at the moment, but in offering a glimpse of an Ireland that celebrates ethnic diversity then it’s pretty elite.

Of the squad originally named by John O’Shea for the current international window, Adam Idah, Michael Obafemi, and Andrew Omobamidele represented those of African heritage on the senior scene. When Omobamidele withdrew through injury, he was replaced by Celtic’s Bosun Lawal, born in Dublin of Nigerian parentage.

Not included this time due to various end-of-season injury afflictions were Chiedozie Ogbene, Festy Ebosele, and Gavin Bazunu, while Sinclair Armstrong of QPR and former Bohemians striker Jonathan Afolabi, now at Kortrijk in Belgium, have been sniffing around recent squads.

YOU go down through the Irish underage system and it is enough to make a far-right activist cry into his Mein Kampf.

All the age-grade international teams are dotted with names that speak to the arrivals of people from faraway places looking for a better life and prepared to work hard to make it. Similarly, if Rhasidat Adeleke does the business for Ireland at the Olympics we’ll talk loud and long about the possibilities of multi-culturalism and integration, but we shouldn’t need a gold medal do to that.

You can be cynical about this stuff and wonder how relevant it is to the messy business going on in streets and outside asylum seeker accommodation centres. But the point is that sport — and particularly football, with its reach deep into underrepresented communities — has a way of getting beyond the lies and prejudice. Its meritocracy is brutal and clean and blind to hate. You’d hope no one was handing out Ireland is Full leaflets at the Aviva on Tuesday and that they were given short shrift if they were.

None of this stuff about the diversity of Irish sport is news, but it needs amplifying right now.

Speaking to Second Captains recently, Brian Kerr explained how, when asked by O’Shea to speak to the players during his time with the Ireland squad in March, he focused on the importance of their multi-cultural makeup in giving a true representation of the nation.

“I talked about how impressed I was at the diversity of this modern Irish team, that we had six players of African background…and how important that was to modern Ireland and, in the culture they came from, how important they were and how they were seen as icons and leaders and how impressed with them I was as people.”

Kerr said that several of the black players in the squad approached him afterwards to thank him, appreciating the kind words and the understanding of the barriers they had to overcome to get where they were.

All of which reads much better that what has been coming through my letterbox lately.