Everybody Hates Us And We Don't Care

On Saturday night Northern Ireland got a draw against Romania who are the twelfth best football team in the world. This amazing result keeps Northern Ireland 2nd in group F and still on course for qualifying in the European Championship in 2016. The Republic of Ireland were also playing on Saturday and they managed to eek out a draw against Scotland who are similarly ranked to them on the FIFA table. The Republic will almost certainly not be qualifying for the European Championship but Northern Ireland have a very good chance of making it to Euro 2016. You can look at the tables here and you'll see what I mean. You'd think then that Northern Ireland's result on Saturday night would have dominated the British and Irish football media reports on Sunday morning. A plucky underdog taking on the European football powerhouse Romania and managing to hold out for a draw and getting a step closer to the championship? You'd have thought wrong then. The Guardian, the newspaper I read, did a live feed that was updated every 5 minutes before the Republic game and it had live updates during the game. The dismal result of that match was a front page story. No one did a live feed of the Northern Ireland game and the NI result was buried deep deep in the football section. Why is this? 
...

the current Republic of Ireland manager, Martin ONeill, was of course, a famous player
for Northern Ireland and one of the heroes of the 82 World Cup campaign

The answer is because everybody hates Northern Ireland. The meta-narrative of the Northern Ireland football team is seemingly not a good one because it is connected to Northern Ireland the state. This meta-narrative runs like this: when Ireland became gloriously independent in 1922 a tiny rump of six counties decided to stay with Britain. These largely Protestant fanatics ran Northern Ireland as a kind of Boer South Africa until 1968 when the whole statelet erupted into civil war. A civil war that did not abate until the 1990's with thousands dead. The name Northern Ireland then is stained with the legacy of sectarianism, racism, colonialism & war. The Republic of Ireland football team by contrast is Ireland's real football team that every Irishman and woman and every Irish exile should support. This is the meta-narrative and its why Northern Ireland seldom gets coverage in the press anywhere in the world outside Northern Ireland. N. Ireland is an embarrassment. Of course a lot of this is true and it doesn't help that Northern Ireland's home games are played at Windsor Park the home of Linfield which has been described as the Glasgow Rangers of Ulster. Not exactly a welcoming place for Catholic supporters. And in the 1980s it was a pretty terrifying environment especially in the old kop stand where you could get roughed up by skin-heads (this happened to me) and where racist invective was all too prevalent. To shoot itself further in the foot these "fans" would sometimes barrack Catholic players and so some Catholic players decided reasonably enough that they wouldn't play for Northern Ireland at all and preferred to play for the Republic. So this is a pretty easy meta-narrative to embrace if you live outside of NI (or if you're a nationalist living inside Northern Ireland) - if you want to cheer for an Irish football team cheer for the Republic. 
...
Unfortunately for a world that wd prefer the N Ireland football team to just go way, the team is actually pretty damn good. In fact in terms of per capita population its one of the best teams in the world. Northern Ireland has qualified for three world cups. 133 countries have never qualified for a world cup and Northern Ireland has qualified three times. What's also very weird is that when they get to the world cup Northern Ireland always does very well. In fact some people have argued that in terms of per capita Northern Ireland is the most successful country ever in the world cup finals. You heard me right. Poor, benighted, ignored, loathed Northern Ireland always seems to shine on the big stage. And now we're doing it again. We're in Group F in the European Championships against 4 teams that when the qualifying process began had higher FIFA world rankings than us. We were expected to end up second from the bottom in this group. Thats what all the pundits said. But it didnt happen. While all the media types were talking about England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland very quietly, off screen as usual, just kept winning and drawing against superior opposition gradually moving up the table. 
...

the current logo. I believe the words "Northern Ireland"
were not inserted until as late as the 1980s. If you know
the exact date please let me know in a comment

There's another problem with the meta narrative of a wicked Northern Ireland team and a cheerful plucky Republic of Ireland team that represents true Irishmen and women everywhere and its this: Northern Ireland is, in fact, the true Irish football team and it always has been and it's the Republic of Ireland & FIFA who divided soccer on the island of Ireland. In rugby, boxing, hockey, pretty much every sport you can think of there is only 1 Irish team but not soccer. Why? The answer is this: The IFA, the Irish Football Association was founded in Belfast in 1880. This was the period of the Gaelic Revival in Ireland and soccer was considered to be a foreign game by the intellectuals down in Dublin so they didn't care about it. It was only after the partition of Ireland in 1923 that the Free State authorities rebelled against the idea of having such a popular game as football controlled from a "foreign land", so they set up a rival organisation called the FAI and applied to FIFA for membership. It was the Irish Republic, the FAI, who divided football in Ireland. Sensibly the IFA in Belfast ignored this usurper organisation and continued to select players from all over Ireland for its team. It wasn't until the 1950s when that pernicious and corrupt organisation FIFA noticed that some players were playing for both the FAI team and the IFA team that they decided they had to put a stop to it. They insisted the IFA call its team Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland call its team the Republic of Ireland. The IFA didn't want to do this but FIFA makes the rules. So since the 1950s the IFA has only been allowed by FIFA to select players from the six counties of Northern Ireland. The FAI selects from the 26 counties down South (and anyone who has an Irish grandparent anywhere else in the world). The IFA reluctantly accepted this six county rule but didn't actually change the badge that Northern Ireland players played under until the 1980's when the worlds "Northern Ireland" where added to the IFA logo, again after FIFA pressure. But historically the IFA which is still headquartered in Belfast is the true Irish football team and until FIFA's meddling was the Irish football team from 1880 - 1954. But for FIFA's corrupt shenanigans the IFA wd still represent all of Ireland. De jure if not de facto we still do. We have been robbed of our birthright. We are princes in exile. We are kings over the water. Look at this picture of George Best in the early 1970's. It's hard to see but the only thing it says on his shirt are the words: Irish Football Association.
...
This is the underdog story that no one else will ever tell you about. Northern Ireland always ranks number 1 or 2 in the FIFA top 50 rankings per head of population. We always do well in the world cups. We always beat teams that are consistently ranked above us. Why will you never hear this story? Because the prevailing meta narrative is too strong. N Ireland wont ever get the respect or attention of the British, Irish or world media. Our burdens are many: FIFA despises us, the Republic of Ireland is indifferent or hostile to us, Windsor Park is not a nice place to play football, Belfast is not a beautiful city, much of the Catholic population of Northern Ireland prefers to root for the Republic team.
...
Manicheans  (those who simplify the world into good and evil) hate nuance and to support Northern Ireland you need to be able to embrace nuance. The Northern Ireland football team is too much associated with the toxic legacy of sectarianism and the Troubles for most people. It's so easy (too easy in fact) to be an England supporter or a Scotland supporter or a Brazil supporter or a supporter of team USA where nationalism for these nations is easily consumed, packaged, boring and simple. But to be a Northern Ireland supporter you need to have a heterogeneous mind able to do Scott Fitzgerald's trick: the bifurcation of your consciousness into opposing ideas. You need to be able to appreciate Ireland's complex past, you need to be able to ignore the rump idiocy of sectarian supporters on the terraces and cheer for a plucky bunch of 2nd rate players who somehow manage to raise their game on the international stage again and again and again.
...
All of this is ok. I remember going to a Millwall v Chelsea game in the 1980s and I'll never forget the famous Millwall chant "No One Likes Us and We Don't Care". I found that chant pretty inspiring actually. The whole world can go fuck itself. We're Millwall, we know who we are and we don't give a shit. Intelligent Northern Ireland supporters say the same thing. We're not Brazil, we're Northern Ireland, we are the original Irish football team, we are underdogs in every game we play and everybody hates us and we don't care. 

The End Of Theocracy In Ireland

"yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

--Molly Bloom

The triumph of the "yes" vote in Friday's gay marriage referendum in Ireland is another nail in the coffin of the power of the church in Ireland. The Catholic Church vehemently urged its parishioners to vote "no" to gay marriage but the parishioners didn't listen and the yes vote won by a comfortable margin. Ireland is the only country in the world where gay marriage has become law by a popular vote in a plebiscite rather than by a vote from parliamentarians or a diktat imposed by a Supreme Court. 

The Catholic church's power has been waning in the Republic of Ireland for decades. The 1937 Constitution of Eire brought in by Eamon De Valera in consultation with the fundamentalist Archbishop John Charles McQuaid is a remarkably sectarian document that begins thusly:                                                                                                

In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred We, the people of Éire, Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial.

No "We hold these truths to be self evident" or "We the people"; nope in Ireland the laws come direct from heaven and heaven's administrators are the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was given control of the schools and many aspects of life in the Republic. Drunk with power the church spent the next five decades abusing altar boys, raping kids, beating boys and girls, sending unmarried mothers to work as slaves in laundries etc. etc. etc. In the 1990s two things began to happen. First, the Celtic Tiger economy allowed many young Irish people to stay at home and work rather than emigrate. Second, an emboldened Irish media began to report on negative stories about the church. With the dissenters staying home rather than leaving and with scandal after scandal finally making the papers a tide of revulsion against the theocrats began. Once the floodgates opened and the Catholic Church began obfuscating and lying about the decades of abuse heaped upon children in its care the sensible people of the Irish Republic turned their back on what Christopher Hitchens called a "creepy cult of professional virgins." The gay marriage referendum is a sign of how far the Church's status has fallen. The church desperately wanted a no vote - the people voted yes. The next thing the Irish will have to do by plebiscite is change their - still - extremely restrictive law on abortion that regularly kills women (!) but, you know, one step at a time...Also it cannot be forgotten that the Catholic church controls education in the Irish Republic and in half the schools in Northern Ireland, but again one step at a time... 

...

In Northern Ireland things, however, are still pretty damn terrible if, like me, you believe in the sensible libertarianism of John Stuart Mill. Abortion is illegal in Ulster (the only place in the UK where this is the case), racism is still endemic in parts of Belfast and gay marriage is a long way off. Indeed Northern Ireland is now the only part of the UK or Ireland where gay marriage is not permitted. Northern Ireland is roughly 50:50 Protestant/Catholic; northern Catholics appear to be only slightly more conservative than their fellows down south but it's the unionists particularly the DUP who have blocked gay marriage in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Prominent members of the DUP would like to see creationism taught in schools as part of the science curriculum and many of their elected representatives believe that the Bible is literally true and that the scientific consensus on man made global warming is some kind of global conspiracy. Sheesh. The north still has some catching up to do if it wants to enter the twenty first century. Yes, you can attempt to impose a liberal morality on a reluctant population (Brown v Board of Education is an example where this has worked) and in Ulster the recent gay cake saga has attempted to do a similar thing, but its much better if the morality comes from the bottom up. (I agree with Simon Jenkins on this one) 
...
I wonder what would happen if a referendum on gay marriage were held in Northern Ireland? I think the politicians on all sides might be surprised by the results. There is some evidence that in the quiet privacy of the ballot booth the people might vote yes despite the Biblical rantings and ravings of their elected representatives. The population of Ireland is getting younger and young people have no truck with this kind of nonsense. The theocrats and Biblical literalists are on their way out. Plug Alert. You only have to read my, ahem, award winning novel, The Cold Cold Ground, set in the nightmare year of 1981 when homosexuality was punishable by 3 years imprisonment to see how far we have come since then. 
...
Ireland is marching into the future and there's not much the people in silly hats (mitre, bowler or beret) can do to stop it. 

What Anthem Do They Play For Northern Ireland At The Commonwealth Games?

The surprising answer is the lovely "Londonderry Air," which is seen as a neutral anthem by both traditions in Northern Ireland. Of course its usually a moot question because N.I. doesnt often get gold medals but at the last games they in fact won three golds (one of their highest totals ever) all in the boxing. I wish they would play The Derry Air (nice pun for our Francophone readers) at N.I. football matches too, instead of the doleful God Save The Queen, but football is more politically charged than the Commonwealth Games so I wont hold my breath.
...
For those of us engaged in the war against stereotype and cliche it is somewhat disheartening to learn that half of Northern Ireland's entire medal total came last time in either boxing or shooting.
...
The Londonderry Air has got an interesting history - this is what Wikipedia says about it:

The air was collected by Jane Ross of Limavady. Ross submitted the tune to music collector George Petrie, and it was then published by the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland in the 1855 book The Ancient Music of Ireland, which Petrie edited.[1] The tune was listed as an anonymous air, with a note attributing its collection to Jane Ross of Limavady. This led to the descriptive title "Londonderry Air" being used for the piece; the title "Air from County Derry" or "Derry Air" is sometimes used instead, due to the Derry-Londonderry name dispute. The origin of the tune was for a long time somewhat mysterious, as no other collector of folk tunes encountered it, and all known examples are descended from Ross's submission to Petrie's collection. In a 1934 article, Anne Geddes Gilchrist suggested that the performer Ross heard played the song with extreme rubato, causing Ross to mistake the time signature of the piece for common time (4/4) rather than 3/4. Gilchrist asserted that adjusting the rhythm of the piece as she proposed produced a tune more typical of Irish folk music.[3]
In 1974, Hugh Shields found a long-forgotten traditional song which was very similar to Gilchrist's modified version of the melody.[4] The song, Aislean an Oigfear (recte Aisling an Óigfhir, "The young man's dream"), had been transcribed by Edward Bunting in 1792 based on a performance by harper Donnchadh Ó Hámsaigh (Denis Hempson) at the Belfast Harp Festival. Bunting published it in 1796.[5] Ó Hámsaigh lived in Magilligan, not far from Ross's home in Limavady. Hempson died in 1807.[1] In 2000, Brian Audley published his authoritative research on the tune's origins. He showed how the distinctive high section of the tune had derived from a refrain in "The Young Man's Dream" which, over time, crept into the body of the music. He also discovered the original words to the tune as we now know it which were written by Edward Fitzsimmons and published in 1814; his song is "The Confession of Devorgilla", otherwise known by its first line "Oh Shrive Me Father".
...
For those of you who have read Julian May's fantasy novel The Golden Torc, The Derry Air has an entirely different and fascinating imagined provenance which involves time travel and aliens...

The Irish Connection To Game Of Thrones

I was pretty excited to learn that the brand new HBO series Game of Thrones was largely filmed in Northern Ireland. Until the last decade or so no films were made in Ulster because production companies couldn't get the insurance to do so. All those cheesy movies about the Troubles were usually filmed in Manchester, but all that has changed since the Good Friday Agreement and the influx of Hollywood money has been part of the peace dividend.

...
The interiors for Game of Thrones were shot at Paint Hall studios in the Belfast docklands but I was even more interested to learn that many of the exterior shots were filmed in rural Northern Ireland. Filming locations included Carncastle, Shane's Castle, Magheramorne and Tollymore Forest. Carncastle is a wild mountainscape overlooking the Atlantic, it's an area I know extremely well having camped and hiked there. Shane's Castle is a working castle still inhabited by a minor member of the royal family - I've visited Shane's Castle on several occasions. Tollymore Forest I've been to hundreds of times. I even made a Super 8 swordfighting movie there with my little brother. (Hopefully the production values for Game of Thrones are slightly better.) Magheramorne is maybe the most surprising filming location for me. My dad was from Magheramorne and its basically just a village with barely more than a dozen houses in it. I assume they filmed not in Magheramorne village itself but in the abandoned quarry nearby which juts into Larne Lough in pretty spectacular fashion. 

...

If Game of Thrones is a hit maybe HBO will do more of George RR Martin's books and perhaps they'll use Carrickfergus Castle next time (above). I literally was born and grew up a stone's throw from Carrick Castle which is the best preserved Norman structure in Ireland. The keep is over 800 years old and the outer walls date from the thirteenth century. It's an amazing place. When I was a kid I was in the local archery club and once a week we would set up the targets in the middle ward and shoot our composite bows in there - yes it was as cool as it sounds. 

...

I haven't seen Game of Thrones yet (I have read the books) so if anyone has seen a preview copy or the actual show I'd love to read your review in the comments below.

Nothing Yet From Nick Clegg

Being a bit of a geek, last week I was reading the Liberal Democrat manifesto and I noticed that it did not have a Northern Ireland section. The next British PM will govern 1.7 million people in N.I. but unlike Labour and the Conservatives we have no clue what the Liberal Democrats are going to do to us because Nick Clegg wants to keep it a secret. Ironically although I'm a mystery novelist I'm not keen on suspense so I emailed Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems to ask what nefarious scheme they are cooking up for Ulster. I have not yet received a response and meanwhile doubt has grown in me like a phytophthora infestans fungus on a potato; I've begun to think that maybe I'm missing something. You dear reader are more observant than I, see if you can spot the Northern Ireland section in the index to the Lib Dem manifesto below:
N
National Audit Office ...............................17
National Border Force .............................75
National Bursary Scheme ........................39
National Crime Reduction Agency ...........72
National Curriculum ................................36
National Grid ............................... 23, 58-59
National Health Service ......... 33, 40-44, 99
National Insurance ..........................97, 100
National Lottery ......................................46
National museums & galleries .................45
National Parks ........................................82
National Policing Improvement Agency ...72
Neighbourhood Justice Panels................17
Network Rail ...............................54, 78, 88
Night Buses ............................................73
Non-Doms ........................................14, 89
Northern Rock ........................................28
Nuclear Power ........................................59

BTW their plan for night buses is this: (and I'm not kidding, you can look it up) drivers of night buses should be required by law to drop every person on the bus at their door instead of at the stop; so if you're taking the night bus from say Belfast to Carrick, you're going to have wait while every single drunken hood in Rathcoole Estate gets dropped at his house - if he can remember where it is - before you go on to Greenisland Estate and finally Carrick itself: what a bloody nightmare, it wouldn't do to be desperate for the bog or anything, although you could always take those other night buses that drop you at your door, you know, the ones called taxis.