Month: August 2018

Declan Rice has decided to have a wee think about who to play for. Let’s make it simple for him – Declan, your Irish international career is over. I don’t care that he’s a young man and I don’t care that national identity in this world is fluid and not perhaps as binary a thing as it once was, particularly in this complicated corner of the globe. I don’t want his likes to represent us. I want the likes of Kevin Kilbane – a man, who even as a boy, never doubted his allegiance. Rice may be getting bad advice from some dirty little agent thinking he’ll be better off financially with 20 England caps than 80 Ireland caps or whatever. I’d have some sympathy for him in this situation, but not enough. He has played 3 times for Ireland – he should never waver after such a commitment.

He obviously has been slightly caught up in the fervour around Gareth Southgate and his team’s progress to the semi-finals this summer; blinded by the “It’s Coming Home” brigade, surrounded by his friends and family members who are English. Perhaps that’s enough to sway a young man on many issues, but you cannot doubt such an important calling, even at 19. He has obviously been approached by the FA as well, as is their wont. This is not something that FIFA should allow players to piss about with. Once you have a senior cap, that’s it. I would go even further and state that every professional player should be required to declare an international allegiance at 18 and stick to it. You might say that it’s too young for such a massive career decision, and I would disagree fundamentally with you. At 18 you are old enough to vote; more than old enough to be a parent; old enough to drive; drink; and get your own passport. If you can do all of that without trouble, then you can choose a damn country.

As for the mixed nationality issue, while there is a lot to this, in particular the shambles that is the Irish / English / British / Northern Irish blancmange of options, I find it hard to believe that anyone can feel as passionately for one flag as another. Many sportsmen and women from Unionist backgrounds in Northern Ireland are ok with being cheered on by a crowd draped in tricolours, but major changes have been brought to the symbolism around these all-Ireland sports to accommodate their backgrounds. Such accommodations can never be made to the half-Irish half-English footballers who are confused as to their allegiances. I still don’t know how deeply the likes of Aldridge, Houghton, Townsend et al felt their Irishness. They never seemed anything other than committed, but was that tribal Gaelic passion or immense professionalism and a love of the squad and the experience? And did they ever waver?

People will somehow blame John Delaney, the FAI or Martin O’Neill for this. But that would miss the point completely. Every journalist who asks a question about this in the future – during the next series of games, for example – will be partly guilty for any emerging shambles and for making this a bigger story than it merits. Declan Rice is not an Ireland international. I don’t think he ever will be and I don’t think he ever should be. Let’s not turn this into another pathetic Grealish situation where we look like desperate peasants. Let O’Neill concentrate on the players he has. Rice may or may not turn into a world-beater, but he’s not Irish. Let him move on and for all of our sakes, move on yourself.

The extraordinary relationship between Denis O’Brien and Irish football took yet another twist when he was named an Honorary President of the FAI last week. This is a man who was found, in the course of a tribunal, to have donated huge sums of money to a politician, who then gave him information needed to secure a mobile phone license. The precise wording of the tribunal report reads as follows:

“Mr Michael Lowry, in the course of his Ministerial office, as Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications, by his acts and decisions, conferred a benefit on Mr Denis O’Brien, a person who made payments to Mr Lowry… and who was also the source of money in accounts held in the name of and for the benefit of Mr Lowry…”

In other words, in black and white, a tribunal of the State found that payments were made by Denis O’Brien to Michael Lowry and that Michael Lowry then secured a mobile phone license for him. Call it what you want, but that is what he was found to have done.

But you know this already. We all knew this years ago. The name of Denis O’Brien is now as synonymous with whatever you want to call the above activities, as it is with his business success. At least in Ireland.

Since the late noughties however, Denis O’Brien has turned his hand to a lot of other work. His activities in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake alongside Bill and Hillary, did indeed play a huge part helping that nation recover – yes he may have made money in doing so, but no-one can begrudge that in and of itself; and the views of the international community, such as those hugely-compromised Clintons, are a matter of repeated public records. The closets of people in those particular circles tend to be riddled with skeletons, however, and even the latest RTÉ documentary reputational  rehabilitation attempt cannot rewrite Justice Moriarty’s findings. His main role as far as our game is concerned, as you all know, was to pay half the wages of Giovanni Trappatoni from 2008 and then of Martin O’Neill until this year. All in all, €12m was “donated” by one rich businessman into the accounts of 2 rich sportsmen over the guts of a decade.

And we’re supposed to be impressed? We, the Irish soccer community, are supposed to be grateful for this benevolence? And we are supposed to be ok with the bestowing of a great honour on this man on our behalf even though his total contribution to Irish soccer was never invested in the game itself? The very presence of John Delaney in all of this is just further evidence of the sheer Oirishness of the whole thing. A man, Delaney, being paid an outrageous sum of money by international standards, metaphorically bending over so that a billionaire, found to have paid huge sums of money to a politician, can funnel outrageous sums of money to an underperforming pair of dinosaurs (Trap and MO’N). No wonder they have both seemed so arrogant and dismissive of dissent, or even light probing from the taxpayer via Tony O’Donoghue in the case of O’Neill. They’ve been largely bulletproof, shielded by this tag team of fellow travellers. Trap’s O’Brien-funded reign ended in absolute disgrace with several kicks to the soccer community’s teeth along the way. O’Neill has the Nations League to save himself, but it’s a long, long road to redemption after a dreadful, dreadful, performance in Dublin last November. And he can do so without O’Brien’s money at long last, as he no longer pays the wages. One wonders if the inflated pay-packet is now permanent – that we can never hire a manager for anything less. That is a truly worrying prospect – how much FAI money will be diverted from the game to men who will generally have made their big money before taking the job.

Let me remind you of the relationship that has developed between Delaney and O’Brien. (Satire really is dead.)

Of Delaney, O’Brien once said:

“John Delaney could run anything. He could run UEFA. He could run FIFA, certainly better than Sepp Blatter”

I’m not a Delaney basher. I can understand in Ireland, where GAA is intrinsically linked to the very idea of Irish nationhood and funded with that in mind, and Rugby intrinsically linked to the moneyed classes, that finding any room for football is difficult, and the presence of the Premier League monolith on our doorstep all adds up to a difficult task for the FAI and whoever is the CEO. I also had no problem with him embarrassing the aforementioned Blatter into a €5m gift. Fair play I thought.

This relationship with O’Brien, however, is too much to take. I’m conscious that the media mogul is prone to litigation and I chuckled to myself when the comments were closed on this story on the Journal on Saturday. He has even threatened Waterford Whispers News to the point where they took down one of their stories. He is not a man who I believe represents all that is good about community, society or sport in this country and I despised his role in funding our managers, regardless of what scant sporadic successes we’ve had during those reigns.

That’s a personal view that I am entitled to hold. I don’t regard him as worthy of the title “Honorary President”, whatever such title means. I don’t want to see his name in the programmes alongside the likes of Séamus Coleman or James McLean. Such a view I would hold even without O’Brien’s past, because I despise the corporatisation of our game in any case.

The World Cup this year showcased exactly why international football matters so much. It’s an escape from the over-hyped bullshit of the Premier League, La Liga and the Champions League; where Messi, Neymar and Ronaldo were brought down to earth with a bang – their wage packets and endorsements made irrelevant by lesser stars. Even the traditionally overblown English showed work ethic and togetherness mattered more than greed and selfishness. It showed that playing for your country matters more and that supporting your country can sometimes bring you to the heights of incomparable joy alongside the more regular periods of incomparable misery.

Meanwhile as we Irish looked on, we were safe in the knowledge that a billionaire was regarded by our CEO as worthy of the sporting equivalent of a knighthood. John, it’s bad enough that we are still expected to parade around with your latest corporate partner on our chests – the only nation on earth whose soccer fans must have the sponsor on their jersey – but this is a step too far. You’ve let us down again.