October again, and soon it will be the 11th. George Larmour will wake with his stomach churning, Michael Longley and his daughter will think of ice cream on the Lisburn Road, and the extended family of Jimmy Hasty may weep quiet tears for the violent loss that never leaves. All will know angst, old and fresh.
We live our lives — Irish lives, British lives, Belfast lives — swimming in anniversaries. One hundred years ago today, 50 years ago today, on and on, the past forever filling the present.
Maybe this is why we’re stuck. Maybe this is why we’re still reading the same stories over and over.
Kyle Lafferty is back in Northern Ireland football news, a Fenian-bastards comment allegedly coming from his lips in a bar on a team night out. Said without thinking. Careless, thoughtless, reactive.
Conor McMenamin, a member of that team, is also in the news. This was for a pro-IRA chant as a youth. Again, said without thinking. Careless, thoughtless, reactive.
[ Denis Walsh: Different story now for sectarianism and sport in Northern IrelandOpens in new window ]
Both Lafferty and McMenamin were caught on camera; both were left out of the Northern Ireland team due to face Kosovo last Saturday in Belfast. It’s hard enough being the manager of limited resources, but Ian Baraclough, like Northern Ireland managers before him, found he had other considerations beyond who can play in what system. He has to know if a player’s past or present contains a sectarian remark, off-the-cuff or not. Then Baraclough can think of 4-4-2 or whatever.
It’s probably best Baraclough did not go around the squad one by one to ask if they’ve ever said, or been in the company of people who have used, sectarian words. The only ones left would be those with an English accent and even they will have spent enough time in Belfast to hear a “party tune”.
This is because they are still sung, just as “No Surrender” is still shouted during God Save the Queen — loudly before Tuesday night’s game according to those who were present.
The people who do this haven’t gone away, you know; just as those chanting “Ooh-ah up The ‘Ra” are still about.
Yes, society has changed from the daily bulletins of bloodshed, but our attitudes — some of them — remain hard and old, as does our vocabulary.
So while we can say Lafferty and McMenamin are the problem — Lafferty, in particular, is 35 and should know better — we must also acknowledge both men are symptoms of the sectarianism that still thrives in our walled-off, divided streets and the institutional shame that is segregated education.
How does Kyle Lafferty, who has 85 caps, come back from this? Can he come back from this? He is now suspended and his Scottish club, Kilmarnock, have contacted the admirable anti-sectarian charity Nil By Mouth. Lafferty will meet them soon. Kilmarnock have gone further and invited NBM to engage with the entire club. Steve Clarke, current Scotland manager, spoke out against sectarianism while at Kilmarnock three years ago. The club is making an effort.
Will Lafferty be open to this conversation about the danger our vocabulary? Of equal significance to him, perhaps, is how his words and response are viewed in Kesh, a Co Fermanagh village five minutes from the border.
Kesh is not a place to suffer from a shortage of Union Jacks. And Kesh is where Lafferty was formed.
On the morning of the 11th in 1974 Jimmy Hasty was murdered by the UVF near Belfast’s docks. Hasty was the remarkable one-armed striker who scored the goals that took Dundalk into Europe. It was George Larmour who found him dying on the street because of sectarianism. Jimmy Hasty was a Catholic, George Larmour a Protestant.
He has been part of the Northern Ireland senior set-up since 2006. He has played for 14 different clubs since 2008. He is generally popular — there’s a Paul Gascoigne aspect to his character, if not his footwork. But there is recklessness, too.
Some of it comes together in the chant: “He’s seven foot and he plays the flute, Kyle Lafferty.”
In Orange and Green banter terms it’s quite humorous. But there’s a knowing, wink-wink presence about it as well, which we should not avoid. Similarly, we cannot swerve the fact Lafferty, his background and his opinions are representative of many loyalists/unionists/Protestants. If you’re interested in a shared Ireland, it is a necessary consideration.
Lafferty’s remark came as the new census found Protestants to be in the minority for the first time. The coincidence has been noted; this may be a historic moment, felt on both sides.
But then next year brings the 30th anniversary of the Downing Street Declaration which stated the British government had “no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”, and some of our alleged leaders appear not to have fully countenanced that yet.
Lafferty’s remark also came at the end of a period of mourning for the Queen, during which a group of Shamrock Rovers fans chanted “Lizzie’s in a box”. One reaction to this was graffiti in Tallaght praising her, Linfield, the UVF and Soldier ‘F’, and this came soon after Larne player John Herron was pictured wearing a kit with Tiocfaidh ár lá designed as an armalite rifle across the front. Herron, from Glasgow, swiftly departed and is now bound for Australia. Then came Lafferty, then McMenamin.
On and on and on.
Meanwhile, crowds are up in the Irish League, Linfield are doing community outreach work and signing Catholics from west Belfast. The club which personifies unionism in football to many has Pat Fenlon in a senior post. Grassroots work, the mixing of children who would otherwise not meet, carries on.
But it is undermined by all of the above and a reasonable litmus test of where we are — in a football context — is to ask: Could Derry City rejoin the Irish League tomorrow? Well?
It is 50 years this month since Derry left, forced out, voted out on the 13th. It is October again.
On the morning of the 11th in 1974 Jimmy Hasty was murdered by the UVF near Belfast’s docks. Hasty was the remarkable one-armed striker who scored the goals that took Dundalk into Europe. It was George Larmour who found him dying on the street because of sectarianism. Jimmy Hasty was a Catholic, George Larmour a Protestant.
George could never forget Jimmy. On the same October day fourteen years later George’s brother John was standing in for him in his ice cream shop on the Lisburn Road. Around 10pm two IRA men appeared and shot John Larmour dead. They shot two customers as well. John was a good amateur footballer; he was in the RUC. Michael Longley wrote a poem to his daughter about it.
The father of George and John Larmour never recovered. Twelve months later he died of a broken heart. He was buried on October 11th.
We can’t have this back. We can never forget, but we can’t have this back. We can’t be reading this again in 2032.
