Why Politics And Sport Don’t Mix
Politics can be dictated by bitter and deep beliefs that ignore the joy of sport and this was often experienced in Northern Ireland during times of real violence
Growing up I loved sport but my country was in political turmoil.
And it affected the sportspeople in the northern part of my island of Ireland. For all they wanted to do was to play their sport without distraction and live a life in peace, but politics often reared its head to disrupt them.
None more so than in the border town of Crossmaglen between the north and south of Ireland.
They were a Gaelic football town through and through yet they were the epicenter of the Northern Irish troubles that reared their ugly head in the 1970s through to the late 1990s.
Although all the footballers wanted to only play their football and forget about the quarrels that were occurring between the rival political unionists, loyalists, and republican parties who had differing religious beliefs of either protestant or catholic and represented views from Britain and Ireland, it wasn’t that straight forward for them. As their home field was located approximately one mile inside the Northern Irish border the British helicopters decided to use it as their landing strip at times.
The players from the Crossmaglen Rangers club were used to growing up with soldiers and guns around them and they never got a respite from it.
Because even an innocent game of football had ‘the troubles’ close to mind.
Yet the club was extremely committed to playing sport and their dedication was rewarded as they won 6 All-Ireland titles over the decades to show they were truly the best team around.
All through that period, the North of Ireland had six counties whereas the Republic of Ireland, which is the southern part, had twenty-six counties. The Republic of Irish Gaelic footballers didn’t have that problem that the Crossmaglen players experienced but they knew of the regular political turmoil in the north of the country. As a result many of the players never visited that part of the country except to play the odd game of football if the national football league demanded that they had to.
But the players of Crossmaglen were not the only ones that had their sport interrupted by the Northern Irish troubles.
Players further north in the country Antrim had many challenges too.
Terence ‘Sambo’ McNaughton was an Irish hurler from Cushendall, in county Antrim. Antrim was the county that contained Belfast the capital of the north. There on the Falls and the Shankhill roads, many hours of violence occurred.
Sambo though funneled his aggressive energy into the game of hurling instead of choosing a path filled with political motivation.
He was a strong swashbuckling hurler who had the required skill levels to play at the highest level. Yet his bigger attributes were his ability to play in a range of positions across the field as well as to lead consistently even when his team was suffering defeats.
And his Antrim team was often beaten badly. And although they were by far the best team in the north of Ireland when they came up against many of the teams from the south they weren’t within their competitive field. This was mainly down to the structure of the competition around them because the teams in their province of Ulster were not able to compete against them so they largely entered into the All Ireland semi-finals every year without one competitive game whereas their opponents had played several games in either the Leinster or Munster championship in the south of Ireland.
Still, Sambo struggled on every year and got as much from the game of hurling as politics would let him.
Tough and all as hard beatings were when Antrim reached the semi-finals and the national competition in Dublin’s Corke Park, Sambo had the day-to-day issues that he never brought on himself. As his game demanded that he had several wooden sticks similar to the size of a shotgun so that he could hurl the ball during a match it attracted negative attention to him. The British soldiers were not aware of what the hurleys were used for and he’d have to stop his car for them to search the trunk when he went to and from his practice sessions.
Although Sambo never won an All Ireland medal he always looked back at the late 1980s and early 1990s on how much more his team could have achieved as they had real hurling talent.
Even though they reached only one final in 1989, I always wonder if they hadn’t been in the heart of the Northern Irish troubles what heights they could have reached. Because there were some great players on that team as well as Sambo McNaughton. And a few were awarded when getting on the national All-Star team too.
Although we can’t go back in time to change the trouble in it we can learn from it and conclude that politics should always be kept out of sport.
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