Top quality outrage-bait here, from Kathy Sheridan:
Ireland’s Call is a welcome solution to a sports dilemma but there it ends. We know what a national anthem sounds like, even when it isn’t an official anthem. Who has ever sat across a stadium from a Welsh crowd belting out Land of my Fathers or the Scots with their magnificent Flower of Scotland, and had to suppress a twinge of jealousy?….
…..The Irish anthem’s copyright was never renewed on the advice of the Attorney General and there the matter rested until last year’s IPSOS/MRBI poll for The Irish Times on Irish unity told us three things: just under two-thirds would vote for a united Ireland, four in five would never pay for it, and seven in 10 would have no truck with any new flag or anthem designed to reflect the identity of our newly-welcomed unionist brethren. Repeat: seven in 10 would refuse to yield up Amhrán na bhFiann for the sake of the unity so many of them claim to desire.
Her broader point, to be fair, is that ditching the anthem for a replacement would be a small price to pay for Irish unity, if one desires such a thing.
I must confess, such conversations have always struck me as intellectually interesting, but ultimately very silly. We nationalists could debate from morning to night what a perfect replacement for the national anthem might be (my own shout: Hail Glorious Saint Patrick, as sung by Frank Patterson, or Faith of our Fathers, also as sung by Frank Patterson) but that always seems to me to miss the point entirely: it’s a conversation that nationalists, and only nationalists, are having.
As I’ve written before, a good way of thinking about this is to ask yourself the following question: What could the UK change its national anthem to, away from God Save the King, in order to make you feel comfortable enough to ditch all that silliness about 1916, and reclaim your proper place as a subject of His Majesty the King? If the answer to that is “nothing, I’m Irish”, then congratulations: You now understand Unionism.
The idea that a million Orangemen will trade their identity in return for a new flag and anthem is hopelessly, stupidly, naïve, which is probably why the entire national establishment is dutifully obsessed with it.
Sheridan does, however, make an interesting point: If we’re unwilling to make even the mildest, most milquetoast adaptations to our identity in order to make other Irish people feel comfortable in a “new Ireland”, how much do we really want it, and what do we really want? Ask a Unionist, and they’ll tell you that it feels to them that what we really want is final and total victory over Unionists, on absolute terms. I’m not sure they’re wrong about that.
That brings me to an interesting internal debate we had, yesterday, at Gript: The story about Michael Reade, the combative host of LMFM’s daily talk show, who compared the use of the Irish national flag at the East Wall rallies to the Nazi flag. It was – and this is being fair to Reade – an entirely stupid and offensive remark. And yet it is important to note that he wasn’t saying that the Irish flag is like the Nazi flag, but that in his mind it was becoming associated with certain groups more than it was becoming associated with the country itself. Still a stupid and offensive comparison, to be sure, but there’s the grain of a point in there which is relative to this debate.
That point is this: Is the Irish national flag, and anthem, in the eyes of Unionism, more associated with Ireland the nation, or with Irish nationalism? There’s a reasonable case to be made that it’s the latter. And giving them both up, really, would objectively be a small price to pay – not to make Unionists feel Irish, all of a sudden – but to perhaps make them feel that Unity was not the nationalist triumphalist event they fear it might become.
Really, though, all of this feels vastly premature to this writer: For all the blather about Unity, it still strikes me that it’s as far away as ever. The polling in Northern Ireland has never shown a majority for it, and that’s with only one side really engaged in the debate. Unionists have never really taken the prospect of a referendum seriously, or put forward serious arguments against it, targeted at the middle ground. In a referendum, that would change, and nationalists are already starting in a hole. They might win, but they’d be very foolish to hold a vote without being close to certain of victory.
Look at the mess independence finds itself in in Scotland, for an allegory.
So, whatever Kathy Sheridan thinks, it’ll be the Soldier’s Song for a while yet. And that’s fine. The bigger problem will be that people with a small bit of taste will have to continue muting the telly at the start of Irish Rugby internationals.