The Joe Horgan Column
Here in Ireland, the 1990 World Cup is seen by many as marking some kind of watershed in Irish consciousness, as the national team made their first appearance at the world's biggest tournament.
It was like some long delayed coming of age and hyperbole and sensationalism aside it was made clear that the essence of sport could go beyond that of the duration of a game. A bit like music or literature, sport could be seen as marking something deeper about us, something at once both totally useless and totally essential.
Twelve years later everything was different but many of the things provoked into consciousness by the events in Saipan in 2002 only proved further that sport does indeed at times carry the essence of a society in it. When Roy Keane walked out it was primarily spoken of as a clash between him and the manager Mick McCarthy — indeed there is now running to great acclaim a comedy musical in Dublin, I Keano, based around those very events. What was of course very quickly latched on to at the time was that Roy Keane is a native of Cork city and Mick McCarthy a native of south Yorkshire. To those who worshipped Keane, McCarthy was immediately suspect because of where he was from, because his Irishness was derived from his father and not from the bed he was born in. Then of course the story got legs and we were all told that Keane had told McCarthy he wasn't even Irish and though it was let known later that there was no truth in this, it kind of opened up a can of worms with regard to who was and wasn’t Irish.
All the usual voices came out saying all the usual things about only those born here being Irish, omitting presumably those who were black, those who were Asian, Chinese, etc, etc, and that only Keane from inner city Cork really knew what it was to be Irish.
From the RTÉ news presenter suggesting that the team was just a bunch of Englishmen in green shirts to Dunphy calling another midfielder “that Englishman”, to those who spoke and wrote columns hoping that one day every player in the team would be Irish-born, a row in a football team had widespread ripples.
I have to admit that for those of us who had found an expression of our Irishness in that very team they were times when the usual dislocations came home to roost from a most unexpected quarter. If they weren’t really Irish players we weren’t really Irish supporters.
Which is why an interview that Roy Keane gave to the same reporter whose initial interview with him had set Saipan in motion carried with it more than the usual media industry hyperbole. Roy Keane actually said some very interesting things to a reporter who actually writes some very interesting things and who has written before about being born in London before the family moved back to Ireland. Roy Keane told Tom Humphries in The Irish Times that: “I’m living in England but I see myself as being Irish. I see my family as Irish, my kids as Irish. Of course they’re in school and they’re talking about the things English kids talk about. They’re Irish, but they were born in England, they live in England.” Kind of rings a bell.
I wonder just how many who rowed out under the guise of supporting Keane’s excellence and under the cover of it let slip their narrow-minded prejudices will now row swiftly backwards. See what was let out of the bag at time was that to many McCarthy was an Englishman too far, in that unlike Jack Charlton he was claiming to be Irish even though he wasn’t born here. Some might say the Irish-born just hate the English but it seems that what many of them just hate is those who are British-born but claim to be Irish. Now that really seems to eat them.
Humphries went on to write of Keane that: “He tries to explain the Irishness of his house in England. The accents of the people who would come in and out. His mam bringing over white pudding and black pudding. The pictures all over, Shandon and other Cork scenes.” So his Irish house and his Irish voices around it and his Irish kids with their Irish names and Irish faces and British accents and English birthplace. And their trips home. And all of a sudden the millionaire sportsman’s home sounds just like the one we all grew up in.
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