THERE’S A STRANGE FEELING going on now, north of the border.
The Olympics are on. If you can put aside the displacement of thousands of homeless people in camps around the fringes of Paris to airbrush the place enough for visiting dignitaries, then you can really enter into the spirit of it all. A blind eye is all it takes. Come on in, the water is warm!
Up in the six counties, it’s a little warmer since Daniel Wiffen wrote himself into the history books. A matter of origins. And we’re not talking about the whole Armagh-Down wars.
No, that was settled by Wiffen himself, when he mentioned what a wonderful time it was, a recently-minted Olympics Gold medalist and the boys from the county Armagh lifting Sam Maguire.
As for his nationality, it was something that we here broached in a pre-Olympics interview. Mentioning his birth in Yorkshire and his English father, we asked if there was any chance he might have declared to swim for Great Britain.
“I swim in Ireland, I did all my schooling in Ireland. I did everything here, so why would it ever come into my mind that I would ever want to represent Great Britain?” he answered.
“My goals when I started swimming, or at least one of them, was to make sure Irish swimming was faster than British swimming and I am happy to say I have accomplished that goal because of our records last year in distance swimming.”
He’s done alright since.
However, once he struck gold, the gun went off. Northern media such as The Belfast Telegraph and The Newsletter laid claim to the medals on behalf of Northern Ireland.
You cannot blame them. To them, it hardly matters that the athletes are in Team Ireland gear and have an Irish tricolour raised behind them on a podium.
To them, the concept of Northern Ireland is an entirely legitimate one, so they hail their local heroes. Some are merely doing their job; others have history and are enjoying giving that pot a little stir.
To them, Daniel Wiffen is as Norn Iron as Lady Mary Peters, or Jimmy Kirkwood, who was on the Great Britain hockey team that won in Seoul 88, but had played for both Great Britain and for Ireland the previous year. Hmmm. Complicated.
But still, they drive on in the pursuit of a little reflected glory. You see it in other headlines when they reference ‘Ardmore’s Daniel Coyle’ and ‘Belfast’s Alice Sharpe.’
For clarity’s sake, we must state that there is no Northern Ireland team at the Olympics, or a United Kingdom team for that matter. There is just Ireland, and Great Britain, and athletes have the right to compete for either.
There’s another layer to this. They can compete for Northern Ireland in the Commonwealth Games. Wiffen, the lad who played Gaelic football for St Michael’s Magheralin and said what he said above about nationality, has competed for Northern Ireland in that competition.
So too has Ciara Mageean, the camog from Portaferry turned runner who has been moved to tears by the emotion of representing Ireland.
As has Rhys McClenaghan, who given his own religion and schooling is more likely to identify with the entity of Northern Ireland.
Listen to us. The sheer arrogance of throwing a label on him like that!
Perhaps it’s just another competition they can compete in. Perhaps some or all of them just see the whole thing as a bit of a pain in the hole and they just want to compete at a high level as much as possible and are grateful of those avenues.
Maybe they just found a coach that they gelled with in the Irish system and felt on the right path, no matter what the rig they wear.
Like say, Carl Frampton who boxed for Ireland at the European Schoolboy Championships and found himself once on a team trip to the Vatican.
“That was the big joke in the team,” Frampton laughed years later.
“There was me and seven others. They were taking the piss and throwing holy water on me. It was just a joke, no one really cared.”
Nationality is a moveable feast. In the middle of this little one-horse south Tyrone town, a banner is erected honouring the local rower, Rebecca Edwards. A nice display of loyalty to a local woman who, along with another NI woman Rebecca Shorten, togs out for Great Britain.
That the banner is tethered between a lamppost and the Orange Hall – where no Catholic is allowed to join, remember – is a metaphor that could take some unravelling.
You could spend any amount of time thinking about these things and turning them over in your mind. Ultimately, what use is any of it?
All the northern media are doing is catering for their constituency. However, it can get up the nose of many who value their Irishness up north.
Where it gets painful is when they feel they are being shunned by the Irish state broadcasters.
On the Friday that Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy took gold for the lightweight double sculls, you could not see it in the north, unless you had illegal means.
The BBC did not show it.
And when you flick on RTÉ, the most soul-crushing message is that ‘this programme is unavailable.’
Undeterred, and half-thinking you’re about to pull a fast one, you hook up the RTÉ Player. And again, computer says no with a derivative of the message that the programme is ‘not available in your location’.
It can sting.
If people in the north can be touchy about their Irishness, it’s not without reason. RTÉ regularly display a map of Ireland without the six counties on it. Ulster GAA teams, even those such as Donegal, have been subject to sectarian abuse down through the years, with quite a lot of it happening in the last 15 years.
Us Irish are hounds for slapping on proprietary rights on anyone with the slightest link to the country as one of our own.
There’s a fair number of Irish who cannot flick through the television channels without half-springing out of the sofa, Leo DiCaprio style in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, to point at the box and say, ‘Irish,’ like they’ve just filled a full house in bingo.
Barack Obama. Irish. Paul McCartney. Irish. Muhammad Ali. Irish. Mel Gibson. Irish. Jimmy Carr. Irish. Morrissey. Irish.
On and on it goes. Ned Kelly. Bing Crosby. John Lennon and George Harrison as well, don’t you know. Rita Hayworth.
Joe Biden. Well. Maybe not so much now.
The ones across the border come with caveats. Unless, like Daniel Wiffen, they have won gold at an Olympics. Then they’re sound. National treasures.
Insecurities around identity are a very fragile thing in the six counties. When new housing developments go up, quite often the lampposts have flags hanging from them before any residents move in.
All of this is the fluffy stuff around identity politics, at the same time as several towns and cities, including Belfast, is at the mercy of far-right riots and looting from the alienated who have been fed a message of racism taken from the fringes and platformed on family television shows.
We’ve reached the scenario whereby businesses are being burned out in Sandy Row, Belfast with locals expressing their satisfaction with this turn of events.
It all feels like The Enlightenment has suddenly lurched into a reverse gear.
Onwards the sporting world goes however, all sides grabbing a piece of Wiffen as he heads for the Seine and Friday morning’s open water marathon swim.
Maybe we should all chill out over this stuff, and heed the words of Frampton in that same 2021 interview.
“You can call me what you like,” he said.
“I’m a UK fighter. I’m an Irish fighter. I’m a Northern Irish fighter. But I am all those things.”
Just sit back and enjoy the show.
