September 28, 2023 - 7:00am
Irish rugby union teams are habitually overhyped but underperforming at World Cups. So the partying crowds in Paris will have felt relief as much as joy after Ireland, the world number one, edged defending world champions, South Africa, in a tight group stage battle on Saturday.
After the final whistle, with the encouragement of the Stade de France’s sound system, tens of thousands of Irish fans belted out The Cranberries’ 1994 hit ‘Zombie’, a banging victory anthem.
Many of those singing along will not even have known that The Cranberries’ lead singer, Dolores O’Riordan from Limerick, wrote Zombie in protest after the IRA’s 1993 bombing of Warrington, when two children were murdered and 56 people injured after devices were left in litter bins in one of the Cheshire town’s main shopping streets.
Some Sinn Féin supporters, however, seem to have known the song’s provenance only too well and reacted with fury to its adoption as a national rugby anthem. Tadhg Hickey, a Cork-based comedian whose snarky Republican videos are regularly shared on Gerry Adams’ social media accounts, blasted the song as “the perfect partitionist anthem” exemplifying southern ignorance of “the lived experience of Northern nationalists”.
Social media on both sides of the Irish border has been less interested in celebrating the win than dissecting the post-match chanting. Dublin-based Republican historian Kerron Ó Luain bewailed the song as representing the Dublin 4 press, the Irish Rugby Football Union, and the Irish Times who had “foisted rugby on the whole country as the national sport”. All of those institutions are associated with the upper-bourgeoisie in general and the small southern Protestant minority in particular.
The spat reveals much about Irish class and party cleavages. Outside a few pockets of blue-collar strength like Limerick, rugby in Ireland has historically been an upper-middle-class sport with huge overrepresentation of Protestants. Football is favoured by the urban working-classes, and Gaelic sports in the countryside.
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SubscribeThe song has been used by Munster Rugby because the Cranberries were local. Someone in French Rugby has obviously been to a game at Thomond and thought it was great and so they’ve played it.
I think what really sticks in the Sinn Fein craw is that the fans loved it and sang along heartily.
I’m of Northern Protestant stock and like many of my ilk I’m a very big supporter of the Irish rugby team. This confuses my other half no end because my other loves are the Northern Ireland football team and the England cricket team.
The key thing is that if Sinn Fein ever want to have a single political entity on the island of Ireland, they will have to grapple with these sorts of identities.
They dream of Ireland as they want it and not as it is. They cannot let go of the Catholic Gaelic Irish state that the IRB and IRA and de Valera and so on wanted. They defined Ireland and Irishness by dint of being in opposition to Britain and Britishness. Anything that doesn’t fit that mould is anathema.
The real reason that some SF folk have been so exercised by Zombie is that the people have let them down by demonstrating that they really don’t care about the SF dream. It really isn’t them, nor their family, as Dolores O’Riordan sang. Ireland isn’t Catholic anymore. It’s barely Gaelic either. There are far more immigrants than ‘planters’.
There is a golden opportunity ahead of SF and other republicans to genuinely create ‘a new Ireland’ that encompasses all these identities, that welcomes and reassures Northern unionists that they have no need to fear ‘Rome Rule’, that the British part of their identity could be respected within a United Ireland. But SF won’t take that opportunity because there are just too many bigots who can’t look past their hatred of Britain to see their love of Ireland.
Very well expressed… and as a third generation Irishman born into a Jewish family, non sectarian or partisan I concur especially SF been given an opportunity to step up . But they have too many rank and file who are monocular about history and real life. We all need new fresh change attached to hope and commonality
Of course the Planters were mightily magnanimous when they sequestered their 6 counties at the point of a gun. They – too – had a vision of Ourselves Alone. So you have more in common with SF (literally, Ourselves Alone) than you think.
Great. You’re clearly a part of the future!
This was 500 years ago…! It wasn’t actually the Planters who conquered the territories but the English state who allocated the land. So blame “us” if you like, but what the hell does that divisiveness achieve now?
I think a United Ireland will be achieved, but it has to be one that recognises all the traditions and identities that inhabit the island, not just (an increasingly archaic version of) the Gaelic rural one. Otherwise there is a risk of recreating the “Troubles” in reverse.
So Sinn Fein is unhappy because supporters sing a song condemning terrorism and the murder of children. Mhmm. Loons everywhere.
Thankful my own beloved Wales went for the uncontroverisal Stereophonics after our win…
Is your capacity for analysis really that limited? Or are you deliberately opting for a simplistic take so as to enable you to mount your factional high horse?
I would say exactly the same about a song based on Bloody Sunday purporting to represent all sides on the island.
Do you not get that point?
Warrington was a shameful action, and I condemn it utterly, without reservation. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t.
There were atrocities on all sides, all heinous, obviously. I’m a corporate lawyer who’s never had as much as a parking ticket in my life, yet I spent my formative years being roughed up by the British army.
A balanced approach would be to have a de facto anthem abhorring all, or moving on entirely.
A song that was penned to condemn one side only is of course valid per se – but its adoption as an all-island anthem whereunder people of all stripes can unite is doomed to failure, as it is inherently biased, in that it (probably unwittingly) perpetuates the establishment propaganda line that “it was the evil Irish Republicans who are wholly to blame for the Troubles”.
Up North, we don’t have much time for lightly-informed Free Staters, who grew up under the most draconian press censorship regime in Europe, pontificating on subjects they know SFA about.
We’d do rather better to move on entirely.
Ireland’s Call, for all that it is beige as tofu, is nonetheless inclusive and forward looking.
Apart from which, on a purely musical level, the Cranberries were one of the most dreary and boring bands I ever had the misfortune to listen to, nearly as awful as REM, albeit not quite as messianically unbearable as U2.
Your usual stupid ad hominem nonsense. For what it is worth I actually think some of the most heinous deeds were committed by Loyalists. Don’t bother replying as I will just ignore you. You are incapabe of debate.
So I was not mounting a “factional high horse”. You assumed far too much
It is time some let the past go.
Typo there in “incapable”, Andy; it’s spelt with an “l”. You really ought not to type under the influence of strong emotions, as it plays havoc with both spelling and logic.
But, my dear old chap, we are in agreement!
Had your horse been less high, when reading my post, you might have noticed that I said:
“We’d do rather better to move on entirely.”
Out of interest, what part of “We’d do rather better to move on entirely” do you consider to be inconsistent with “letting the past go”?
You’re perfectly at liberty to ignore me, sadly. With time, and counselling, I imagine I’ll get over it lol.
You make some generic insults about me, and then purport to play the ad hominem card as an excuse to duck out of the debate. Do you see any irony in that?
Notably, you have utterly failed substantively to rebut a single point I made.
Yet you do agree with me that we should let the past go. Could you then explain to me how singing a song about an incident in the past is “letting the past go” lol. Do you see any contradiction in that approach? Self-evidently, your idea of letting the past go is that the wrongs your side did should be forgotten about, but that the wrongs my side did should be commemorated in a new de facto rugby anthem. Do you see any inconsistency in that?
I would abhor any song about e.g. a Loyalist atrocity being adopted as a rugby anthem, yet you’re quite happy to support the converse. I’m quite happy to debate you. Debates derive from respect. Sadly, your preference to “ignore” an opposing viewpoint reveals how little confidence you have in your own position. You’d rather hurl some generic insults, seek to cancel me, and then run away from the debate.
As someone who lived through it, the Troubles bore the pants off me by this stage. I’m one of the few in NI who agrees with the intent of the British govt’s amnesty legislation. Past a certain point, and apologies for the mixed metaphors, raking over old coals morphs into flogging a dead horse.
My general point is that no song about the Troubles – whether for or against any side – should be being dragged up to mire us all yet again in the politics of the last century.
As for moving on, here’s my take on a solution, and you’ll see that its gives two fingers to both a united Ireland and remaining in the Union: https://ayenaw.com/2021/02/06/venn-land/
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Get a grip Frank.
You refer to lightly-informed Free Staters, “who grew up under the most draconian press censorship regime in Europe.”
What about the Soviet bloc, eh?
And what about Ireland? Since 1945, there has been no press censorship regime in the Republic. Sinn Fein has not been prevented from publishing its newspaper, an Phoblacht. During the Troubles there was a censoring on broadcast media of members of illegal organisations and of Sinn Fein. That was during what is now proclaimed to have been “a war”. And the views of Sinn Fein could and were reported, just not the voices of the party.
Ah, so you crow about being better than the USSR? I’d re-think that line of defence, Cormac lol. In any event, half of it is in Asia.
And I repeat – S Ireland had the most draconian political censorship in Western Europe (excluding the totalitarian regime in the USSR, who I readily concede were much worse – feeling better now?)
There was no need for press censorship in the S of Ireland, given how right-wing and instinctively deferential to govt opinions were the main newspapers in Irland. You’re really scraping the barrel if you need to posit sales of SF’s barely-read underground newspaper as evidence of a “tolerant” approach. You know as well as I do that An Phoblacht had a very small circulation. It was read by no-one outside Republican circles, and not even by most of those. Very few ‘RA read the thing, it was mainly read by a few lefty students. As an opinion former in wider society, it was utterly irrelevant. The Irish govt could afford to ignore it. Of course, that did not prevent the Irish police’s Special Branch form arresting 3 editors of An Phoblacht. One editor was jailed for 15 months on a trumped-up charge of IRA membership. Upon his release, he was promptly re-arrested and sentenced to another 15 months, for the crack. Ditto for another editor, Coleman Moynihan.
Arresting and jailing editors on trumped-up charges? Clearly, nowhere near as bad as the Soviets (who’d jiust have shot them), but not exactly on a different planet from the Soviets either.
TV and radio was a different matter though, and it was thre that the Conor Booze inspired S Irish govt really showed its anti-Republican teeth. The wiki on this is handy:
“During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, from 1968 to 1994, censorship was used principally to prevent Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) interviews with spokespersons for Sinn Féin and for the IRA. Under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Authority Act (1960),[21] the Minister for Posts & Telegraphs could issue a Ministerial Order to the government-appointed RTÉ Authority not to broadcast material specified in the written order. In 1971 the first ever Order under the section was issued by Fianna Fáil Minister for Posts and Telegraphs Gerry Collins. It instructed RTÉ not to broadcast any matter that could be calculated to promote the aims or activities of any organisation which engages in, promotes, encourages or advocates the attaining of any particular objectives by violent means.
Collins refused clarification when RTÉ asked for advice on what this legal instruction meant in practice. RTÉ interpreted the Order politically to mean that spokespersons for the Provisional and Official IRA could no longer appear on air. In 1972 the government sacked the RTÉ Authority for not sufficiently disciplining broadcasters the government accused of breaching the Order. RTÉ’s Kevin O’Kelly had reported on an interview that he conducted with the (Provisional) IRA Chief of Staff, Sean MacStiofáin, on the Radio Éireann This Week programme. The recorded interview was not itself broadcast. MacStiofáin’s voice was not heard. However, he was arrested after the O’Kelly interview and charged with membership of the IRA, an illegal organisation. Soon afterwards, at the non-jury Special Criminal Court O’Kelly was jailed briefly for contempt.
In 1976, Labour Minister for Posts and Telegraphs Conor Cruise O’Brien amended Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. He also issued a new Section 31 Order. O’Brien censored spokespersons for specific organisations, including the Sinn Féin political party, rather than specified content. That prevented RTÉ from interviewing Sinn Féin spokespersons under any circumstances, ***even if the subject was unrelated to the IRA campaign in the Northern Ireland conflict***. On one occasion, farcically, that led to the interruption of a call-in show about gardening on radio because a caller was a member of Sinn Féin. The changes eroded liberal interpretations by RTÉ of its censorship responsibilities, afforded by the original 1971 Order, and encouraged a process of illiberal interpretation.”
There you have it Cormac. In your ”free” Free State, a Shinner even talking about gardening was deemed to be a threat to the State.
Anyone growing up down South during the Troubles who read mainstream papers and listened to RTÉ were kept in the dark and fed b/s, Cormac. They still don’t even know what they don’t know; but, being Irish, they assume that they know more than the English or the Americans, lol.
My favourite example of an application of Section 31 related to Raidio na Gaeltachta’s broadcast of Mass in Irish every Sunday from a different church. One Sunday, it came from West Belfast and Councillor Máirtín Ó Muilleoir did the second reading (an excerpt from one or other of St Paul’s epistles). As Ó Muilleoir was a member of Sinn Féin, the broadcast was in breach of Section 31. That was in the early 1990s.
I support your comments on ‘Ireland’s Call’ … your other comments can only stem from limited taste and narrow mindedness… low experience, minimal achievers suffer such negative traits….
What a bizarre, bourgeois, non-sequitur response. I must have gotten under your skin, if you need to bolster yourself with such sniffy lower-middle-class insults. FYI, I’m a City-trained lawyer who has lived in half a dozen countries and I retired at 55 and now work for fun. Let me know if you need a loan, lol. Meantime, could you engage in a logical manner with my points, instead of retreating into arriviste ad hominem piffle? I’d love to engage with you in a debate, instead of trading avoidant insults. Come on, explain to me why you feel it’s important that Irish rugby should have an avowedly-partisan song as its anthem! And explain to me why we should not just move on and stop wallowing in the past with any such song! Who gives a damn about the Troubles in 2023? Certainly not me. I’d be fascinated to hear your reasoning; assuming you have anything in your locker beyond personal insults.
“Up North, we don’t have much time for lightly-informed Free Staters, who grew up under the most draconian press censorship regime in Europe, pontificating on subjects they know SFA about.”
Yes! One thousand times yes.
You ignore the fact that Republican atrocities hugely out number those of Unionists and that Republicans have spent the last 100 years murdering Brits. The Army’s great restraint in these circumstances was laudable.
The army’s “great restraint”, as you put it, was merely a pragmatic evolution of tactics. The Aden style heavy stuff was backfiring. However, Kitson was a quick learner, and using Loyalist goons as mudflaps (such as in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings), running informers on both sides, and skilful disinformation, was simply much more *effective*, and less bothersome from a global PR perspective. The British army could of course have systematically exterminated the half a million or so largely-unarmed Irish people living in NI in a few months had it wished, obviously. However, to have done so would have rather given the lie to the official British position that it ruled by consent lol. Claiming that NI’s Irish population was British while simultaneously waging outright war against them would have been a trifle embarrassing internationally. The other point, often missed by outsiders, is that the British Army’s top brass was keen to see the Troubles persist in a low-intensity manner. It was an excellent training ground for the army, at a relatively low cost in terms of turnover. The British establishment cared little about the occasional deaths of working-class lads from the Tyne, or Essex, etc. A price well worth paying. Much better than messing about with mannequins in the Brecon beacons lol.
It doesn’t condemn one side only.
”With their tanks and their bombs
And their bombs and their guns”
From what I remember the IRA weren’t big users of tanks.
Indeed – and it does tend to reinforce my point of just how lightly-informed the S Irish Cranberries were!
Erm, the Southerners are going to outnumber Northerners, both Catholic and Protestant, so I’m not sure why your singular vision has to take precedence over theirs. (“Free Staters”!! You sound like a one man anachronism!).
The song is being used as a sporting anthem for goodness sake, (“Sing Low. Sweet Chariot”?) and most fans don’t take it as some justification of Partition or the Protestant Ascendancy. I think their position is rather more sensible than yours. Unfortunately there is a thread within Republicanism which doesn’t seem all that exercised about democratic legitimacy (and yes, I get that the same thing can be said of some Unionists/ Loyalists).
I do not wish to see a united Ireland. Don’t presume, mate. My view is that that would be unfair on Unionists. It was unfair that Britishness was forced on my lot, and I do not see how on earth it would be fair thereafter to force Irishness on our other lot. Two wrongs do not make a right etc. And, with my record of contrariness (never happier than when being massively down-voted lol), do you really think I’d be happy to be governed by a state as irritatingly woke as modern S Ireland is? I have been cancelled out of a couple of major S Irish chat boards for speaking my mind about trans, lol. Truth be told, I struggle to muster much enthusiasm about being governed by either Dublin or London. My preferred position is this: https://ayenaw.com/2021/02/06/venn-land/
Social class has nothing to do with it. This is a generational thing. Younger Irish people have been given a totally distorted history of the Troubles, and are shockingly and nakedly nationalistic. It may be similar in China, certainly it is hard to think of any Western comparators. One is told that they support Sinn Fein because of the housing crisis. But only a fool could believe Sinn Féin’s open borders, high welfare, high tax and anti business policies (at least in the domestic economy: they are sucking up to the Multinational Corporations, whose tax receipts they believe will pay for it all) will bring any improvement, so that is difficult to accept. It has been many decades since Protestants, and particularly southern Protestants, were hugely over presented on the Irish rugby team. These days New Zealanders qualifying under the bizarre residency rule are more likely to be selected. If the English football team benefited from the same regime, they could pick from the cream of the Premier League, and win the World Cup every time!
Agreed. The fact that so many people, both north and south of the border, are voting Sinn Fein, a party inextricably linked to IRA violence, is telling.
I am of a generation that remembers the mainland IRA campaign and it’s impossible to shake this off, particularly as SF have never renounced what the IRA did and indeed, have at times doubled down (see Michelle O’Neill’s no alternative comment).
The new generation of voters inevitably have no concept of this and it is somewhat understandable they think like they do. History whitewashing is commonplace unfortunately.
Of course Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael have violent revolutionary histories too. The Irish thus have a tradition of moving on with perhaps a different perspective than us Brits that they can embrace?
The Brits don’t have the burden of having to move on because they seem to have very little knowledge of any history, especially their own.
Tosh! The Irish largely believe in a ‘history’ skewed by their violent prejudices.
Perhaps not nothing to do with it, but that the key category is tribalism; the original identity politics. The millenial working class has formed a different tribe from boomer/gen X working class.
I think it was John McGuirk made the point that young people in Ireland have very few outlets with which to shock their elders. They can’t use music because that’s stage is literally crowded out by ageing rock stars. They can’t use gender woo because the Taoiseach and the Tanáiste are fully on board with it. As for social liberalism and upending tradition, the contraception train literally left the station 51 years ago. So the only thing left is the Wolfe Tones. And yes, the sight of a few 20-somethings at closing time singing Celtic Symphony will raise hackles with those of us old enough to remember what Zombie is all about.
Nonsense. Young Irish people have barely any idea of the Troubles. They couldn’t care less. Nothing to do with them. Just a bunch of elderly Nordies and elderly Brits banging on about some stuff that seems mainly to be shot in black and white, from the last century.
3 truisms about the Troubles:
First, the Troubles no longer matter. History ultimately will record that, in the last quarter of the 20th century, two white communities in N Ireland, with nominally-divergent cultural identities, engaged in a low-intensity, violent political conflict (with varying degrees of tacit state support) for a number of years, before ceasefires were declared. For future generations of global historians, the Troubles will be a mere footnote in history.
Second, the Troubles were the ramifications of (at least) 800 years of wider, antecedent Irish and British history. Any attempt to explain the Troubles by focussing primarily on the Troubles, or by focussing on one side only, is a fool’s errand; though that never stopped judgemental, simple-minded, middle-class pundits in Dublin and England.
Third, the Troubles primarily was a working-class conflict. By definition, very few Unherd commentators will have anything other than a filtered, hearsay understanding. Republicans and loyalists have sharply divergent narratives thereof. The middle-class improving mindset holds that both narratives are flawed, and should be supplanted by a unified, ex post facto, external middle-class narrative. This is an error of snobbery. Nobody in Ireland or Britain is yet objective about the Troubles, least of all those who profess to be. Any attempt to understand the Troubles tends to validate Camus’ dictum that “nothing is true that forces one to exclude”. To understand the Troubles, listen to both the republican and loyalist narratives as they are, with respect, and without the tidying effect of a class / Cranberries / rugby crowd filter.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, away from the tabloid concerns of the last century, young Irish people are mainly exercised by housing, an area wherein the long-standing main Irish centre-right parties have dropped the ball. SF is making predictable hay with this, and that’s the primary reason for their popularity in the South.
I don’t often read all of the comments on a piece but I have done so for this one. As a Nordie Prod, I can only say that anyone who doesn’t know much aboit Ireland should read them all. Reading the essay and the comments, you will have a much better understanding of Ireland today, north and south, in all of its complexity. Many thanks to all.
Ourselves Alone no more, just us among all the others like everywhere else. Having withstood and fought off 800 years of British domination multi-culturalism will demolise Irishness in a generation.
“Republican historian Kerron Ó Luain bewailed the song as representing the Dublin 4 press, the Irish Rugby Football Union, and the Irish Times who had “foisted rugby on the whole country as the national sport”. All of those institutions are associated with the upper-bourgeoisie in general and the small southern Protestant minority in particular.”
Because we did not manage to ethnically cleanse all of them
Surprised he didn’t include the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin. But that’s a problem for Sinn Féin Nua (new Sinn Féin) – Mary Lou McDonald is a graduate of that institution.
First of all I missed the furore about thus which just shows what an irrelevance social media can be.
Secondly, and more seriously, the writer invents a disingenuous, and false, Protestant/Catholic divide with regards to rugby. As another commentator has pointed out, it is much more complex than that. Many of the leading Catholic private schools are rugby schools and I don’t detect any confessional bias. The difference in the North is also associated with class I believe – not too many Shankill loyalists play rugby. I expected more from a former Alliance leader.
Best comment about this non issue
I looked, and not a word throughout about “Fields of Athenry”- sung regularly, and far less acceptable than “Zombie”. Oh, and the milquetoast “Ireland’s Call” is a dirge of a thing.
I’m half-Irish, by the way. Southern Catholic, non-Republican.
Just very glad the Swiss don’t play rugby, the Six Nations is tough enough as it is when you’re English/Irish/French/Swiss.
I remember, as an Englishman, staying with in-laws in a genteel Kildare village to Dublin for a rugby friendly against Argentina. What an experience to witness: from the sharp differences in accent between posh Kildare and working class Dublin, the Ulstermen at the bar singing their own sectarian songs and intimidating everyone else around them, to the generally super-polite Lansdowne Road (yes it is) atmosphere.
A lovely country Ireland, but one that always unsettles me a little.
We’ve got Mary Harrington’s article today which asks this question of the UK :
“When a nation is so talented at white-labelling its own culture for overseas propagation, can it be said still to have a culture at all?”
Whatever your answer to that question, any rebellious offshoot of that sort of polity, is going to struggle to be a nation in the traditional sense.
Presumably rugby is historically a Protestant sport, an Anglo-Irish import, while that awful whining song has been revived as a modern karaoke classic such is the dearth of good pop songs nowadays.
It might be a slightly more Protestant game in northern Ireland, not in the south, but there is a class difference in some areas, see Ross o’ Carroll Kelly for example
Back in the day Association Football was regarded in a similar way by the Gaelic purists. Irish sports only. Perhaps otherwise Dublin would have had top class teams as Glasgow does…
Brendan Behan said the soccer was for townies because you kept the ball on the ground and didn’t break any windows. The Gaelic football was for country folk because you could kick the ball high in the air in a field in the middle of nowhere without bothering anyone. He didn’t know much about Rugby until he went to Borstal. He tried it out there and was quite good at it. Like most of Behan’s observations, there is probably a lot of truth in this.
Well, Éamon de Valera was a rugby player and a very passionate fan all his life – he even suggested if the GAA wasn’t in the way, Ireland could beat all comers, so I wonder is anyone talking about that right now. Similarly, one of his lieutenants, Oscar Traynor, was president of the Football Association of Ireland, a role another firebrand republican minister from Fianna Fáil, Neil Blaney, succeeded him in. The mixture of Irish sport with politics (and religion for that matter) is very complex.
Top class teams, maybe in 1967 when Crltic won equivalent of Champions league.
Money talks, so teams from smaller leagues like Dutch or Belgium etc are unlikely to win major European trophies.
It should be noted that the Lansdowne Road site, now Aviva Stadium, has always been the venue for International Rugby Union and International Association Football. It is on the South Side whereas Croke Park is on the North Side.