Euro 2016: Even football cannot heal the Irish divide

These are special but complex times for Ireland’s teams

Friday, 1.30pm, BBC Northern Ireland’s lunchtime bulletin. Item one is joyful reflection on the events of the previous evening at Windsor Park. Fans, players and manager Michael O’Neill feature.

Item two is similar, a joyful reflection of the previous evening, this time at Lansdowne Road, with footage of Shane Long’s goal, celebrating fans and Martin O’Neill’s post-match press conference. This is a good news day.

Item three, though, is: “There is a security alert at a hotel in Derry.”

A few hours later a “controlled explosion” ended that alert, but there was another one in Belfast and, poignantly, another in Omagh. Its main street was still sealed off Saturday morning.

And so life goes on. The Irish peace process continues but it is a restless peace. This allegedly low-level strife carries on, but it has disappeared from the UK news agenda. In case you missed it, the UDA – loyalist paramilitaries – announced this week that they are “still in existence”, a response to an alleged IRA murder in August.

Ireland, Northern Ireland, remains divided. Today there will be two Irish football teams playing European Championship qualifiers, while there is one Ireland rugby team in the World Cup – because football remains an expression of that divide.

Rugby, a middle-class sport in Ireland, as in England and Scotland, was initially divided as well.

There were two Irish rugby associations once. But, having come together a century ago, they have remained united. Until the 1950s, some Ireland rugby internationals were played at Ravenhill in Belfast.

However, football – or soccer as it is called in the Irish Republic – has been a venue for the Troubles. Rewind from the death threats against Neil Lennon in 2002 to September 1912 when the Sunday Chronicle reported “several revolver shots” were fired at a match at Windsor Park between Linfield and Belfast Celtic.

Linfield’s support was Protestant; Belfast Celtic’s support was largely Catholic. In 1949 Belfast Celtic felt compelled to disband after a sectarian riot – again at Windsor Park.

These events may seem like ancient history but they are not irrelevant. Northern Ireland is part of the UK and its football team’s anthem, “God Save the Queen”, acknowledges that.

Some of the players sing it with gusto, a demonstration of British identity, and certainly the majority of Northern Ireland fans do. Not many of those fans would be miffed if the Republic of Ireland did not join them in France. And vice versa.

Yet some of Northern Ireland’s greatest players have been Catholics – Peter Doherty, Martin O’Neill and Gerry Armstrong among them – and the same applies to Michael O’Neill, a 46-year-old who grew up in Ballymena at the height of the modern Troubles. O’Neill’s religious and cultural background make him acutely aware that there were moments in the 1990s and early 2000s when it felt like Northern Ireland were being cornered into representing ‘a Protestant team for a Protestant people’.

At O’Neill’s unveiling as manager in January 2012, he said: “I’m going to focus on making the national team fully inclusive.

“The IFA has done a great deal of work in making the games at Windsor Park inclusive. We want a team on the pitch which is inclusive of everyone.” O’Neill knew that the IFA – the Belfast-based Irish Football Association – was losing players to the FAI – the Dublin-based Football Association of Ireland.

Marc Wilson, Darron Gibson, Eunan O’Kane and James McClean are among them, with McClean the most high-profile as a result of his vocal stance on the subject.

When Northern Ireland were 3-0 up against Greece on Thursday night, Windsor Park reverberated to a chorus of “Are You Watching, James McClean?”

But McClean chose to play for the Republic of Ireland because of who he is culturally, not because he thought the Republic were a better team. He played for Northern Ireland at youth level but his anthem is “Amhrán na bhFiann” – “The Soldier’s Song” – not “God Save the Queen”.

When the Ireland rugby team lines up today in Cardiff against France, they will sing “Ireland’s Call”, in part because as an all-island team, “The Soldier’s Song” has been deemed insensitive to those players who come from Ulster - or the six counties of Northern Ireland. (Ulster has nine counties; three are in the Republic).

So in Wales, Finland and Poland today three Irelands will take to the field of play. In Helsinki, Northern Ireland will attempt to win Group F and the IFA will then have to hope it can tie down the increasingly in-demand Michael O’Neill. In Warsaw, Martin O’Neill will try to guide the Republic of Ireland to an automatic qualification that looked implausible a few days ago. And then there will be the rugby team in Cardiff, straddling the border.

Watching will be another symbolic Irish sportsman. Rory McIlroy was at Windsor Park on Thursday to support Northern Ireland, well aware of the furore caused by his decision to play for Ireland, not Great Britain, at the Olympics. His family understand the significance, Rory’s great-uncle was murdered in the Troubles long before he was born.

Northern Irish Catholic, Irish and British, McIlroy has been described as a “poster-boy for the post-Troubles generation”.

But he knows about division. Steeped in Irish nuance, he tweeted on Thursday: “Great night for the island of Ireland, north and south.”