LOOKBACK: This article was originally published on 21 July 2021
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On Sunday night I heard a commotion out on the road. Rambunctious voices were passing and one was singing “football’s coming home.” At first I thought England had won the European cup, then I looked up the result and the reason for the celebratory atmosphere became clear.
How things have changed. When Ireland made the euphoric breakthrough to the Euros in 1988, the accents didn’t bother us much. Maybe the players in Jackie’s Army only heard about Ireland two years before and had never spent a summer back in the old sward, but they were our boys. It would have been unenlightened to complain that they were Brits playing the garrison game. But that was before Brexit, before political sectarianism became the right lens with which to view our relationship with our colonising neighbours.
It’s funny that the English team that Ireland beat in 1988 had decidedly British (well not Irish anyway) names on the sheet, but last Sunday the starting 11 included a McGuire, a Shaw, a Rice, and a Kane. Sure they’re practically four of our own.
Now, in some quarters, it seems a duty of the right thinking sort to boo the despicable Brits and relish in their just demise (sic). Pre 2016 and all things Brexit, RTÉ would have been the first out of the blocks to highlight the cognitive dissonance of hating the foreign foe while wearing a Man U shirt. In fairness, that’s a good argument.
In Ireland, we digest vast quantities of English culture. We spend enormous amounts on supporting English corporate entertainment, including the modern day peaceful tribalism of professional football. When England played some sort of Rugby game in Croke Park, the press roundly mocked a guy protesting “Foreign Games” who was wearing a Celtic jersey. Oh we had fun that day!
But we have grown. We no longer long to be loved by our former British masters, we have become more sophisticated. Be not alarmed, all of our changes are growth-centric not regressive. We have not done something as coarse as become nationalist like the Brits seem to have done with their deplorable rejection of the community of global internationalism. We don’t have a sudden love for our dying language, our ancient traditional music, or our dying rural communities. We are modern and international. While the Brits went backwards, we surely went forward!
We are scouring the world for new ideas to help us become better, but this is not post-colonial. We used to be West Little Britainers but that is all passed. Now we take our values from the lecterns of globalist Hollywood and from astroturfed neo-Marxist Jacobins. We import the crazed neo-racist ideas of the Frankfurt school and call it social justice, and the nihilistic prattle of cultural relativists like the paedophile Michele Faucault.
Whatever is shrill in America such as transgenderism, abortion and Marxist race hustling, must have relevance in Ireland. Our leaders are yes men middle managers, who spend more time posing for instagram moments than addressing the real issues of inflation, housing, and runaway budgets.
But our corporate arts tell us all is well. We can learn from our past, rejecting the worst and keeping the good. We used to hate the Brits for the wrong reason, apparantly, and the uncultured amongst us would say that this Island was just one nation. Our best thinkers (you know they are our best because they got well paid by a government company) in RTÉ and other corporate media outlets told us that that was terrorist talk.
Now we apparently hate the Brits for the right reasons. In Dublin castle 2019 it was confirmed that this little Island could not possibly have two separate national entities on it. Stephen Rea – who in fairness to him was being consistent with what he always has said on this subject – told us from an RTÉ stage broadcast during Culture Night that this was so.
‘How could anyone say this random line of a border divides this soil?’ Now that RTÉ and the global interests agree, it’s obviously true and right.
Don’t think this switch by RTÉ is old nationalism. Its global love. We have now moved on to better symbols and better loyalties. The king is dead, long live the king (insert empire for king if you like).