It is regrettable to be among the last to say this but it is worth saying anyway. The Republic of Ireland should not play soccer in Belgrade next Saturday.

Regardless of what UEFA decide this morning, regardless of what moves Slobodan Milosevic makes this week to spare himself the belated wrath of NATO, it is inappropriate and wrong to be playing football against Yugoslavia.

It is disingenuous to argue the case for playing the game by stating that football should not allow itself to be used by politics. Lives are cheap but sport is vested in sanctity?

No. All international sport is political. To blithely suggest that sport and politics should not mix is to leave sport open to be traduced as it has been by totalitarian regimes since time began. By playing the game next Saturday, football (and the Irish team) will allow itself to be used in most objectionable way possible.

To say that is not to skim over the manifest imperfections of the Croatian regime whose representatives we played football against last month; it is merely to recognise that in the light of the ongoing genocide in Kosovo there is something rancidly obscene about travelling to Belgrade and fretting about hotels, hamstrings and three points.

It has been depressing in the past few days to hear the weasel worries expressed about the possibility of the Irish soccer team being sanctioned or punished by UEFA if it refused to travel.

Soccer and safety are beside the point. It would be far more honourable for the FAI to surrender the points on offer and even forgo the possibility of playing in the next European championships, than to travel to Belgrade on Saturday if UEFA have been satisfied as to the safety of the travelling party.

The issue is not safety and that should be made clear. The FAI should withdraw stating clearly that it feels it would be wrong to play the game in current circumstances. Better still the Government should be uncategorical on the issue.

Over the past week the FAI has behaved like a group of people stuck in an elevator, standing there helpless in the darkness waiting for something to happen, for some engineer to come along and make the lift move up or move down. "WE are monitoring the situation," said Merrion Square - Football speak for waiting for somebody to tell us what to do.

That somebody is unlikely to speak up. The government, better equipped to make judgements, advises citizens not to travel to Belgrade but has no firm foreign policy stance on our prime representative sports team travelling or playing there. The FAI have been sluggish on the matter but they haven't been the worst offenders in football.

It might be reasonable to have expected UEFA to have taken some steps by now. They seem content to pander to scoundrels. The organisation which banned Yugoslavia from the 1992 European Championships has the opportunity to remove them from the current competition before they kick a ball. That would be the decent thing to do, as right and proper as sporting sanctions on South Africa were.

We do not want for fresh atrocities or ample context in this matter. Last Monday, international monitors found the bodies of 14 people at Gornje Obrinje in central Kosovo. They were Albanian civilians. Most of them had been executed with shots to their heads. Six of the them were over the age of 60 and five were under 10. Kids. The monitors also found the bodies of 17 Albanians, 15 of whom were apparently civilians, following fighting in the Vucitern area of Kosovo. The massacre of Kosovo civilians by Serbian security forces has been an ongoing atrocity in the sickening ethnic war whipped up by Milosevic's regime.

The stories from Kosovo should curdle the blood even of those of us reared within a short drive of Omagh or Loughin Island or Grey Steel. Scores of people found dead and mutilated in ditches, throats cuts, limbs severed, women raped. To be bystanders is to share the guilt.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague receives news of new massacres on almost a daily basis. Most reports lay blame at the hands of uniformed Serbian police and soldiers. We are asked to play football under their auspices this week, to oil the machinery of daily life.

Even if nothing happens in the coming days in terms of the deployment of NATO forces , even if Milosevic comes slowly towards the negotiating table, he will have gotten away with it again. It is an old trick, perpetrating an atrocity, pushing his deeds to the limits of western revulsion and then agreeing to talk when the threat of reprisal breaks over his head.

We shouldn't be looking this week for circumstances or statements which might make us feel better about travelling to play his team. We should be walking away paying due respect to the dead of Kosovo, not conferring the trappings of normality on life in Belgrade.

How times have changed, and the ironies are blooming everywhere. On Wednesday, October 19th, 1955, when Ireland played Yugoslavia in that celebrated friendly game, the country dithered about what was the right thing to do.

The Catholic church, generally hostile to eastern Europe's governing political philosophy and specifically hostile to the disappearance of notedly misguided clerics like Archbishop Stepinac, was croziers drawn on the issue.

The De Valera government of the day, serving in the office of diocesan mindslaves, duly withdrew the army number one band, Radio Eireann refused to provide a commentary and withdrew Philip Greene (providing sub editors with various colourful possibilities in terms of Reds, Greene and running yellow), the Legion of Mary picketed the game and President Sean T O'Kelly cancelled his attendance.

This week the salient point about 1955 is not whether or not 22,000 football fans were acting in noble defiance of the tyrant of the Dublin diocese John Charles McQuaid (they were), but the fact that at least the debate was concentrated on the substantive issue, whether it was right or wrong to play Yugoslavia.

Forty-three years later, almost to the week, it is patently wrong and obscenely wrong.

Are we to have our jersey worn in Belgrade, our flag flown and our anthem played? Is our team to stand stock still and respectful for the Yugoslavian anthem? Are they to shake hands with Slobodan Milosevic if he shows up? Are we to rise up on our hind legs in innocent excitement if our team scores a goal, put heavy heads in hands if we concede one? To watch Yugoslavia's resurgently ugly sense of nationhood bloom again if they give us a thrashing.

If UEFA can countenance no consideration other than the safety of players, well then the FAI should withdraw unilaterally and suffer the consequences regardless. The Republic of Ireland versus Yugoslavia isn't just a game. It is a symbol of normality which the host nation has repudiated its right to.