Irish FA Set to Go to International Sports Court

There are many problems involved with writing about issues affecting Ireland whether they be political or even just football. The first is, no matter what you write, you may be subject to a volley of often heated diatribes from extremes on one side or the other accusing you of bias against their point of view, occasionally accompanied with an additional volley of sectarian abuse.

The second is that there is a plethora of acronyms – or alphabet soup as some locally call it, representing many organisations. They often have similar letter sets, though reflect very different interests. To help out with this story, it’s probably wise to start out with a simple explanation.

The Irish Football Association (IFA) is the football authority for Northern Ireland, and the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) represents the interests of football south of the Irish border.

The FAI recently made the headlines when it ran a campaign to get a World Cup qualifier replayed after a refereeing decision failed to call a handball against France in a crucial game, and then even more outlandishly called for them to be made the 33rd side in the World Cup. Radio Sounders has recorded a fascinating interview with Conor Brennan, yet to be released which tells the real whole story behind all that, including just how close the Irish actually came to achieving a historic replay, and which individual stood in their way.

The IFA, charged as it is with administering sport in a divided and once violent community, has had a different set of problems over the years. In the 1980s, they had to play many games away from home and even lost the services of their captain Neil Lennon, because of the threat of sectarian violence from terrorists on both sides. They have also had to deal with the thorny problem of sectarian chanting at Northern Ireland’s home games. To their credit, their “Football For All” campaign was launched and has been very successful in eliminating the unpleasant chanting, with the full support of Northern Ireland Supporters groups such as GAWA (Green and White Army). As a result, the image and reputation of Northern Ireland fans has undergone a radical transformation, and Windsor Park has become a more inclusive and welcoming environment for people from the Catholic community.

Still, many in the North’s Catholic community opt to support the Republic of Ireland rather than Northern Ireland, and this has now spilled over into issues affecting players’ loyalties.

People from Northern Ireland are entitled to apply for both UK and Irish Republic passports, thus technically making them eligible to play for the Republic. The IFA and the FAI had a gentleman’s agreement dating back to 1950 that the FAI would not select players from the north. That agreement was breached by the FAI under Brian Kerr and has remained a matter of dispute ever since and in 2007, FIFA’s legal department issued a proposal that people from Northern Ireland ought to be allowed to represent the Republic, causing an outcry north of the border.

Now the IFA is set to go to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in an attempt to prevent more Northern Ireland-born players following Everton’s Shane Duffy in his decision to defect. Duffy had played for Northern Ireland up to Under-21 level and was included in the full squad last year. Manchester United’s Darron Gibson, Carlisle’s Anthony Kane, Scunthorpe’s Michael O’Connor and Portsmouth’s Marc Wilson have also either switched allegiance or been selected for both nations in recent years.

The IFA anger stems from two rationales. Firstly and obviously, they are losing good players to another team. But there is something more sinister that would result from the practice. The likely defectors would probably come from the Catholic community whose political, ethnic and cultural loyalties often lie more with the predominantly Catholic Republic than with the North, which is still part of the United Kingdom. Taken to its natural end, this would result in a ghettoised team in Northern Ireland whereby the side did not represent both communities. The IFA fear this would set back by years their attempts to fully represent their population, and reverse the increasing number of Catholics turning out to cheer on the North.

To Russia with Love

The problem may be further confused by the feeling that FIFA owes the FAI a favour or two, due to the somewhat ham-fisted handling of the Thierry Henry affair by Sepp Blatter, although the CAS should not be taking that into account.

The CAS may well have to take into account however the legal theory known as the ‘floodgates argument.’ The floodgates argument is a legal principle under which a judge will not make a ruling for fear that it will open a gate to an unmanageable number of similar cases.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many of the newly independent Baltic States have been dealing with issues arising out of the large ethnic Russian populations planted in them during Soviet rule. It was a massive factor in the recent and as yet unresolved Ukrainian election. It has caused civil rights issues in the Baltic States as they have sought to apply linguistic tests for citizenship in the knowledge that their ethnic Russians still use the Russian language. Moldova is still a largely divided country between its ethnic Romanians and those with cultural and linguistic ties to Russia, whose territory Transnistria has declared de facto independence.

You can add the Bosnian issue to that where a large amount of its residents identify more with Serbia or Croatia than the fledgling Bosnian state, but have no geographical or family connection. It’s not impossible to make the argument also that in countries which rely heavily on immigration such as Canada, Australia and the United States, there is a vested interest in seeing that the laissez-faire attitude the FAI wishes the CAS to adopt remains unadopted. They may have cause to hope that the grandfather rule is restored as the sole governing principle, as opposed to a player’s own ethnic and tribal loyalty based upon his own choice.

First the CAS has to deal with the fall out of the Togolese decision to withdraw from the African Cup of Nations, refusing to order the CAF to include Togo in the provisional draw for the 2010 tournament. The FAI has made no statement so far other than it remains confident the CAS will not change the current position.

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