How Irish rugby survived the Troubles
Saracens may have squeezed the life out of Leinster to win the European Champions Cup last week; it was a hard-earned well-deserved victory, after which players were quick to praise their coach Mark McCall – who happens to be an Ulsterman. This weekend three of the four clubs in the semi-finals of the Guinness Pro14 are Irish: Leinster (of course), Munster (of course) and Ulster. If Leinster have sufficiently recovered from their bruising encounter last week to beat Munster, then they will be favourites to retain this title, whether against Ulster or Glasgow. Though Ireland may have failed to retain the Six Nations title this year, nobody can doubt that Irish rugby is in good condition – remarkably good indeed, when you consider its history.
This was brought home to me this week by a fascinating TV documentary “Shoulder to Shoulder” presented by Brian O’Driscoll, already as at home before the cameras as he was when wearing the number 13 jersey for Ireland or Leinster. It covered rugby’s experience of the Troubles and featured interviews with players from the Sixties onwards, most, but not all, Ulstermen.
The Irish Rugby Football Union was formed in 1874 and Ireland played its first international against England at Kennington Oval the following year. So there had been almost half a century of Irish international rugby before the 1922 Partition of Ireland, which created the Irish Free State, leaving the North of Ireland (six of the nine counties of Ulster) as part of the United Kingdom.
But, though Ireland was now divided, with Parliaments in Dublin and Belfast, and the Free State an independent country which would become a Republic after the 1939-45 war (in which the Free State had been neutral), the Irish Rugby Football Union remained, like the Irish Cricket Union, undivided and the Ireland team continued to be drawn from both the Free State and the North. In retrospect this seems remarkable. Unfortunately, I missed the beginning of O’Driscoll’s documentary, and don’t know whether he dealt with this question.
Irish Nationalists had little time for rugby then. Like cricket – and indeed Association Football – it was regarded as “an Ascendancy sport”, English or British, not truly Irish. It was also, I think, tainted with Protestantism in the days when The Irish Times was regarded by many as a West British newspaper and Catholics required a dispensation from their Bishop to attend that bastion of the old Ascendancy, Trinity College, Dublin. Rugby, in both North and South, was a middle-class game, drawing players mostly from fee-paying schools. It would be a long time before this base was broadened.
Nevertheless, simply because Rugby was an international sport – as Gaelic Football wasn’t – it gradually became a focus for the expression of national – though perhaps not nationalist – feeling. International matches were played at Ravenhill in Belfast, as well as, more commonly, Lansdowne Road in Dublin. In time the Irish National Anthem Amhran na bhFiann (“The Soldier’s Song”) was played at matches in Dublin, but not in Belfast or in away matches in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Paris; it would be understood that players from the North weren’t required, or even expected, to sing it. There was a good deal of tact and delicacy required.
The anthems have remained confusing – at least to those of us who aren’t Irish. At the first (still amateur) World Cup in New Zealand in 1987 the Irish team discovered that everyone but them had an anthem played wherever they were. That fine lock-forward, Donal Lenihan, recalled that someone had a cassette recording of “The Rose of Tralee”, neither inspiring nor suitable. Now there is “Ireland’s Call” played for away matches while both it and “The Soldier’s Song” are played in Dublin. Preliminaries before the kick-off take a long time there.
Rugby reflects the duality of Ireland, a duality, as O’Driscoll found (or affected, like a good interviewer, to find), that perplexes foreigners and a fair number of Irishmen too. It’s a duality that permits Ulstermen to be simultaneously Irish and British patriots. Many of the greatest Irish players have come from the North, most, though not all of them Protestants: Jack Kyle, Mike Gibson, Willie-John McBride would be candidates for any All-Time Ireland team.
The Troubles were of course at the heart of O’Driscoll’s documentary. Being already, as I say, an accomplished interviewer, he affected to be more surprised by what he was told than I suppose he was. But of course, he wasn’t born or was only a small boy when they were at their worst. Still, it must have come as shock to most viewers, if it wasn’t to O’Driscoll, to learn that as Ireland’s captain, Willie-John McBride, a Protestant bank manager, was told that a guard would be posted outside his hotel room before internationals at both Twickenham and Lansdowne Road – in case the Provos had a go at him.
Some of the most effective – frightening indeed, scenes, had O’Driscoll being shown round streets in Belfast by McBride and others, accompanied by old footage from the darkest days. There was also a moving interview with Nigel Carr, brilliant flanker, whose career was ended by an IRA bomb a month before that 1987 World Cup. This was all the more affecting because part of the interview was filmed with O’Driscoll driving Carr along the road near the Border where the roadside bomb (aimed at a High Court judge, who was indeed killed) exploded. The countryside through which the road ran was so beautiful and tranquil that the contrast between then and now was all the more stark.
It has often been said that you can’t have normal sport in an abnormal society. To their shame the Scottish and Welsh rugby unions took that view and refused to travel to Dublin for the 1972 Five Nations matches. England had more courage the following year, and when their team ran out at Lansdowne Road, they were greeted with the loudest and most prolonged cheering that any other England rugby team has received anywhere – even at Twickenham.
As far as allegiances are concerned Ireland has been abnormal since the 1922 Partition, while the North was not only abnormal but brutal; dangerous and often terrifying for some three decades at the end of the last century.
Yet Irish rugby held together when so much of what happened might have destroyed its unity, pulled North and South apart. O’Driscoll’s fascinating documentary leaves me wondering to what extent Irish rugby’s glorious flowering in the last twenty years is the result of the stresses it experienced and survived. One of his last interviewees was his old team-mate, that lovely winger Tommy Bowe. It was good to have him at the tail-end of the programme: an Ulsterman from the border with the Republic in Monaghan, who in his schooldays played Rugby in the winter and Gaelic Football in the summer, before going on to star for Ulster, Ireland and the British and Irish Lions.