I don’t know why this stayed with me. Three years ago and it’s halftime of Newcastle United against Manchester City at St James’s Park. I’m in the East Stand, cigarette smoked, queuing for burgers. A man in his 50s, jersey on, Bruno G(uimarães) on the back, is on the phone. He says, with warmth and wonder, in his lovely Geordie accent, “Maxi is playing out of his skin.” He was right. That first half Maxi, Allan Saint-Maximin, had decided the day was his and had terrified the man opposite him, Kyle Walker, who at this stage still had his pace. Every time he got on the ball everyone in black and white expected.
Newcastle were 2-1 up. That same awe in the Geordie’s voice was in us – my brother, sister, cousin and me – as the second half kicked off. We can’t believe this is happening. Ten minutes in and Newcastle win a free kick around 25 yards out, Kieran Trippier’s range. My brother turns to us and says, “Here can some man get Paddy Power on the line? Tell him we’re putting it all on this.” He's adamant. We laugh. A minute later we watch Trippier put it over the wall, just like the chant, past Ederson’s grasp into the top corner. I’ll be going to football and soccer and rugby matches for some time before I experience the raptures we all went into in that stand.
It was a classic. Newcastle held on for a 3-3 draw. Maxi was man of the match. A year later Newcastle sold him to another Saudi-owned club for a fee that just so happened to allow them to sign Harvey Barnes from Leicester City while also adhering to financial fair play rules. It didn’t so much anger as sadden me. Sometimes I remember that man at halftime and wonder if he felt the same.
I was chatting with an American friend last week and he told me he was hoping to make it to Croke Park to protest the Pittsburgh Steelers-Minnesota Vikings game played last Sunday. I didn’t need to ask why. Pick any of the reasons, the NFL’s status as an effective arm of the US state probably best.
I admitted I’d been to one of the NFL’s European games. Two years ago I put on a number 52 Ray Lewis jersey in a London hotel room and went to see the Baltimore Ravens play the Tennessee Titans in Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium.
Before the match kicked off we had the British and American anthems and a Royal Air Force flyover. The US flag and Union Jack were flown, waved and projected around the stadium. I took a picture of the two and put it up on Instagram, flippantly, with a poll: more blood on whose hands? Britain won.
The NFL wants you to think about these displays and feel something. It wants you to react to the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner, the flying of Old Glory, the war machines flying over your head, even the red, white and blue of its logo. I knew that. I accepted that. I was there to see Lamar Jackson run and gun. I enjoyed it.
‘Apart from, like, banging the pom-poms’
I watched parts of the game in Dublin. There was ceremony similar to that of the London game. Seeing it in Dublin was different.
After Robert Mizzell, stetson in hand, sang the Star-Spangled Banner, Lyra sang Amhrán na bhFiann. There’s a mournfulness to our anthem and a contradiction between its triumphalism and the unfinished revolutions of the Free State. The gunshot of the chorus's final line continues to fire. I like to think I feel this contradiction when I sing it. It’s featured in great days for me like this year's summer weekends in headquarters for Donegal against Meath and Monaghan, as well as Louth’s Leinster final win. (The All-Ireland final was sombre.)
On Sunday Amhrán na bhFiann was triumphant – the American flag stretched the length of the Davin end, filling half the pitch; the tricolour joined at the other end – but the performance softened the anthem’s contradiction. Here was the tricolour, whose travels around the world are defined by a casting out, partnered with the stars and stripes, whose journeys are of conquest. I felt like I did that day when Newcastle sold Maxi, when professional football revealed itself, no matter how you try to ignore that nature.
Save yourself from making your own interpretation. Take it from the US military that participated in the flag ceremony. “Their precision and professionalism highlighted the strength of US–Irish partnership on an international stage,” said the US Army Europe and Africa in an Instagram post.
We paid the NFL €10 million to host the game. RTÉ’s analysis asked if it was “good economics” and said government estimated the “country” would get €64 million return on that €10 million. The chief executive of the Irish Tourism Industry Confederation said it was “a good investment”. Keep the tills ringing, keep the accountants in spreadsheets, keep shaking your arse. But, like rapper Yasiin Bey asked, “What happens when this thing collapses? What happens when the columns start buckling? Are we not in some early stage of that at this present hour? Are we seeing, like, the collapse of empire? Buying and selling: where’s the message that I can use? You know, what’s in it for your audience apart from, like, banging the pom-poms?”
The sums the state claims it calculated didn’t assess much beyond buying and selling. This accountancy betrays not just what the GAA was but what it is.
This is a fucking religion
Years ago my school played a football match against a team from Keady, south Armagh and I remember our manager telling us in the dressing room, here, we need to understand, “This isn’t just a game to these boys. It’s a fucking religion.” Cause or culture or politics might’ve been a better word than religion but he had a point. Even if northern Gaels aren’t political, they’re politicised; though they have the choice of embracing or rejecting the identities constructed around them, these identities will be imposed regardless.
When considering the GAA’s politics and history, its place in Irish culture, you don’t need to look to the men with stands in Croke Park named after them. You don’t even need to take the association’s contemporary word and efforts. Look north.
I’ve togged out a few times for East Belfast GAA. Irish media’s coverage of the club’s foundation, in the unionist heart of the city, situates it after the conflict. "The club has one founding principle – it will be cross-community, open to any and all who feel they’d like to get involved,” wrote Malachy Clerkin in the Irish Times. Our crest features the word Together written in Irish, English and Ulster-Scots.
These ideals are partly realised with the club, no more than any other in the Cumann Lúthchleas Gael. The odd time I lined out with them though it felt more an exiles’ club, men from across the province who found ourselves in Belfast, than an aspirational cross-community GFA CLG. Its five-year history has shown we’re after the agreement but not post the conflict.
This week a man called John Wilson was convicted of an attempted bombing at our playing grounds. He’d messaged a friend before his attempt. “Ok mate, what's happening with this GAA, surely something needs to be done?'' He softened during his trial, telling the court, “Some of my best friends are Catholics.” He cried into a handkerchief on his conviction.
The dignified power
Go back further, but still not 40 years, to that day Aidan McAnespie parked his car on the northern side of a British army checkpoint in Aughnacloy. Soldiers knew him. He lived under “continual threat of harassment and physical violence at best and the real threat of being killed at worst,” said his sister in a submission to a reconciliation forum. She also referred to the time a soldier stopped her father, asking him to confirm Aidan was his son, telling him, "We have a bullet here for him."
That day in February 1988 Aidan was on his way to play a Gaelic football match for Aghaloo O'Neills. Football was important to him. He recognised the importance of the club to his community and what it would mean to future generations. He used to tell his family they had to keep it going, not for him, but for his godson.
He got out of his car. “He had only walked three hundred yards when a single bullet from a heavy calibre machine gun cut him down, in the prime of his life, on a lovely sunny afternoon, while on the way to a Gaelic football match. Aidan's life was taken, his killer watched him walk towards the football pitch, aimed and fired to kill,” said his sister.
David Holden, the soldier who killed him, lied about the shot and claimed it was an accident. The state dropped the charges against him. The McAnespies didn’t get some level of justice till three years ago when Holden was finally convicted of manslaughter. His three-year sentence was suspended.
It’s tradition for Tyrone teams to pay tribute at Aghaloo O'Neills’ monument to Aidan on big days. This summer their minors won their All-Ireland football championship and continued it. Aidan’s nephew Darren played at wing forward. There’s a dignified power to the photographs of Darren and the team standing in front of the monument, a power that doesn't rely on marching bands or flags or partnership with a global hegemon. It’s a power that confronts why Aidan was killed and bears witness to his community’s persistence.
Because the killing of Aidan McAnespie was an attack on an entire people.
On New Year’s Eve, 1992 the UDA said it was going to intensify its campaign "to a ferocity never imagined”. In early January another paramilitary, the UVF, which should be understood as an arm of the British state, assassinated Pat Shields and his son Diarmuid in Dungannon. All but confirmed British agent Billy Wright was involved.
This killing, said Bernadette McAliskey, came “in the wake of the statement that they now intended to broaden the definition of a ‘legitimate target’, that they intended to attack members of the GAA and other people interested in Irish culture”. Another paramilitary had shot McAliskey as another legitimate target in 1981.
“As an individual Pat fell into a number of categories which they announced they were going to shoot and therefore several groupings of people were specifically terrorised by the shooting of this supposedly random, apolitical Catholic. Everybody in the GAA knew Pat was one of them, therefore, if they were going to shoot Pat Shields, they were going to shoot any member of the GAA,” said McAliskey.
The British state and its proxies killed these men, which is to say colonialism and imperialism killed them. Their membership of the GAA was their commitment to republican ideals. It also marked them as targets of the same structural forces our anthem and flag sided with in Croke Park on Sunday.
The flag we republicans claim should be taken back.
They not only deserve but need each other
We’ve imported a debate about the meaning of our national flag from the US and Britain. Right wing activists follow their British leaders and associate it with their own anti-republican nationalism; our ruling class argue it needs to be flown in the service of their anti-republican liberalism. They not only deserve but need each other, thesis and antithesis, resolved in the Free State, all of them either inconsiderate of or embarrassed by the north and republicanism, many seemingly quite taken with Sunday’s game in Croke Park.
This July I took part in a talk with the Independent Workers’ Union and Trinity College’s BDS society. I joined one of the marches for Palestine beforehand, starting at the Garden of Remembrance, headed towards Trinity.
By myself, at a pace quicker than those marching with friends and chatting to each other along the way, I passed different participant groups, unions and parties, each with their flags and banners. As I reached Doyle’s I noticed for the first time protesters flying the tricolour alongside Palestinian flags. I think it was republican socialists who’d brought it, would have to be them. They flew it in one of its rightful places. They were the right people to do so.“It can never belong to Free Staters for they’ve brought on it nothing but shame,” as James Ryan wrote in Take It Down from the Mast.
In late summer of 2014 I was in Croke Park with a friend from Ballyshannon and a college classmate. It was the All-Ireland semi-final and Donegal were playing against the Dublin side the Irish Independent declared “unbeatable”. No one gave Donegal a chance. After goals from Ryan McHugh and Colm Anthony McFadden the Cusack was in a frenzy. We couldn’t believe it was happening. On Sunday, sadly, I could believe all that preceded the Steelers-Vikings game was happening.
