Rugby in Ireland - Anderson dos Anjos

Rugby in Ireland

Out yonder waits the Saxon foe

WHEN the Irish rugby team takes the field against England on March 17th in London, there will be all the prospective buzz of a classic St Patrick’s Day clash against their old enemy. The Irish have been soaring lately, reaching the quarter-final of the sport’s 2011 World Cup, and they are now recognised as a ferocious force in world rugby.

Apart from their attacking flair though, the Irish team that runs out in its famous green jerseys will be showing off one of the great quirks of world rugby, and indeed of world sport. In international rugby, the constituent parts of the British Isles play as separate teams: England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. When playing in Europe’s Six Nations tournament, of which the March 17th game is a part, the four teams play against each other, as well as France and Italy, between January and March every year. However, several of the Irish players are not in fact citizens of the Republic of Ireland, but rather of the United Kingdom. For the Irish rugby team—as well as the country’s less successful field hockey and cricket teams—is made up not just of players from the Republic, but from Northern Ireland as well.

In many other sports, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland field separate teams, or Northern Irish sportsmen and women play for the British team. In football, for instance, north and south have only ever united once, in 1973, calling themselves the Shamrock Rovers All-Ireland XI, to play a friendly against Brazil in Dublin. Otherwise, there is one team for Northern Ireland and another for the Republic. The Irish rugby team, on the other hand, has always represented the whole of Ireland, in defiance of the sometimes bloody political history between them. Proud Ulstermen, loyal to the British crown, have for decades been happy to pull on the green jersey of Ireland and shed sweat, and sometimes blood, for the Irish (sporting) cause.

No one seems quite able to explain why. Some say it is a question of social class, that the “Troubles”, as the sectarian fighting of the late 20th century was euphemistically known, were always more of a working-class concern. Rugby, with its middle-class roots, rose above it.

The sport is not immune to historical sensitivities. At the team’s home games in Dublin, the Irish national anthem, “The Soldiers’ Song”, is sung by the home team in Gaelic. Its third verse contains the phrase “out yonder waits the Saxon foe”. But when the team faces said Saxon foe in London—and whenever Ireland play away from home, for that matter—the anthem is not sung. In its place is a specially composed song, “Ireland’s Call”, that is considered a compromise, allowing the Northern Irish players on the team to sing an anthem not so laden with the baggage of history. Some team members choose not to sing one, some don’t sing the other. Trevor Ringland, a Northern Irishman whose father was a policeman in the old Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary, says that even though his “Britishness…can accommodate Irishness”, he never sang the Soldier’s Song in Dublin when he represented Ireland in the 1980s. “It’s the anthem of the Republic of Ireland, not the island of Ireland,” he says.

Choosing what flag to play under also required special accommodations. The team has taken the unusual step of flying two separate flags: the Republic’s tricolour and the traditional flagof the four ancient provinces of Ireland, in a nod to the Northern Irish players’ sensitivities.

In other sports, the absence of a united Irish team and the right of all Northern Irish to claim an Irish passport has forced athletes from Ulster to make difficult decisions. In the 2008 Olympics, where all the constituent parts of the United Kingdom play as a single team, Wendy Houvenaghel, a cyclist, won a medal for Britain, while Paddy Barnes, a boxer, secured one for Ireland. Rory McIlroy, who as the world’s top-ranked golfer is Northern Ireland’s most successful sportsman today, seems to be having trouble making up his mind. He represented Ireland in the 2009 World Cup of Golf, but says he will probably switch to the British team in the 2016 Olympics.

Irish identity today is much more fluid than in the past, and the sectarian and religious conflicts of old are fading. Mr Ringland says he does not want a united Ireland. But he does wants to keep building bridges across the divide, and says the Irish rugby team exemplifies that process. “While the rest of Ireland was tearing itself apart, rugby was doing it right,” he says. “It’s a different way to do politics, in which nobody dies.”