Voices
As ever, there is a lot of false consciousness out there. I had to disappoint a couple of friends from England last week who had formed the idea that, when it came to Meghan Markle and the Royal Family, Irish people were observing the proceedings with a detached bemusement, taking a position of lofty disdain and ignoring the whole thing, in acknowledgment of our centuries of suffering.
Unfortunately, RTE’s decision to purchase and broadcast the interview exposed this conceit and may well have to be considered a treasonous act in itself. The country takes great comfort and solace in these difficult times by feeling superior to Britain so anything which threatens that sense of smugness is clearly not in the national interest.
The viewing figures showed that many people had stubbornly resisted the charms of, say, Seachtain na Gaielge and instead of singing songs in Irish last Monday night, they were watching Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah.
Some people may have watched while reciting the 1916 proclamation or anything else which let it be known that they were viewing under protest but we can’t be sure of that. All we can be sure of is that 725,000 people watched it on RTE last week, a figure which amounted to an audience share of 53.5 per cent – rising to 64 per cent among 15-34 year-olds – on the night. And while many of them are clearly in need of re-education, we should be reluctant to scold.
The figures were similar in Britain which demonstrated once again that the cultural alignment between Ireland and the UK remains strong, even if it is skewed. We know a lot more about them than they do about us, something that is galling at times, even if the upside is that it makes it relatively easy for an Irish person to settle in Britain, armed as they are by shared cultural reference points.
The most powerful of these cultural reference points is, arguably, sport. The Premier League supporter in Ireland has often been viewed with the same contempt by Irish culture warriors as the long suffering royal family fan.
In 2015, research by the UK’s Tourism Authority showed that of 800,000 overseas visits to Britain which included a trip to a football match, 121,000 of them were made by Irish people.
In February 2020, The Irish Times reported that a survey for An Atlas of Irish Sport, had found that nearly half of all adults in Ireland said they supported a football team, with Manchester United the most popular, just ahead of Liverpool.
Most said they watched the games on television but 3 per cent said they travelled regularly or had a season ticket, which would equate to 40,000 people travelling in early 2020 to the UK on a regular basis to watch their team.
Anybody who had been in an Irish airport on a weekend before March 2020 would have felt those figures were accurate as people gathered to travel to the great industrial cities of the UK and sometimes points in between to support their team.
For a minority of supporters of League of Ireland clubs, Premier League fans are ‘bar-stoolers’, artificial fans of an inauthentic product which can’t compete in terms of integrity with the experience of attending a local game.
There are, it must be said, a lot more League of Ireland supporters who also follow Premier League clubs or are aware that blaming the public for not being as interested in something as you think they should be is not the best way of getting the public on your side.
Irish football has always had a cultural affinity with English football, especially the northern cities like Manchester and Liverpool which welcomed emigrants. Irish players like Liam Whelan, Tommy Eglington and Peter Farrell played for great clubs in those cities and cemented those bonds before others like Ronnie Whelan, Liam Brady and Frank Stapleton did the same at Liverpool and Arsenal.
When the Premier League was formed, the presence of Denis Irwin and Roy Keane in the dominant Manchester United side drove its popularity but if those links are now broken – and likely to become even more severed thanks to Brexit – the connection to the clubs is stronger than ever.
The selection of Caoimhin Kelleher for Liverpool may bring more interest, but Liverpool’s Irish fans will be engaged whether he plays or not.
The Premier League shut down last March but has continued this season, mainly without fans except for a brief period before the latest lockdown. Clubs in the Premier League and Championship are anticipating losing around £800 million in revenue as a result.
Supporters are expected back in line with the UK’s opening up before the end of the season but it is fitting that the club most equipped to deal with the loss of revenue, Manchester City, looks certain to win the league this season.
The League of Ireland resumes next week as well with clubs’ existence even more threatened by the absence of supporters and with a timeline for their return unknown.
If there was a world outside our houses or outside our 5km then the attractions of this season’s Premier League would be diminishing. As things tand, it seems to be marginally better that it is on than not on.
Occasionally a game can transcend its environment – as happened with Juventus-Porto in the Champions League on Tuesday night – but more often, the reality of sport in empty stadiums overwhelms any other feeling.
It began as a novelty, for example, to watch games without crowd noise, but now that silence has become a reminder of the bleakness of our existence. The option of fake supporter sounds is a way of hiding that reality, like sleeping with the radio on at night.
There are no bar-stoolers now either. We watch sport in our atomised reality which may if we’re lucky sometimes expand to a bubble. This isolation could have brought a collective recognition of our common problems, but in a world fuelled by culture wars, it has instead made us more determined than ever to highlight our differences.
