Kerry football hero set the standard we should apply to Love Ulster

They played together on the Kerry team that won the 1924 All-Ireland title

THERE is talk again about another Love Ulster rally in Dublin. This time the organisers, Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (FAIR), say they expect around 3,000 people and 25 bands to attend the march.

A lot has happened since the fiasco in 2006. The powersharing executive is now up and running. Of course, there are likely to be difficulties on the road ahead, but it is important we should show leadership in helping to break down the barriers.

We need to recognise that we nationalists in the South contributed to the problems in the North by our own intransigence. We talked a lot about Irish unity, but did little or nothing to promote it. Instead we pushed the unionists into more intransigent positions.

Eamon de Valera consistently said that resolving partition was his primary aim in politics, but he never advocated one positive policy to influence unionists in favour of a united Ireland.

He pretended that partition was the basis of his opposition to the 1921 Treaty, but he told the Dáil in private sessions he was prepared to accept partition both before the formal negotiations began and after the treaty was signed.

If only the partition issue could be resolved, all our problems would vanish. That was what we were essentially led to believe, but it was nonsense. Partition was being used to obscure the blinding ineptitude of a number of governments.

Only a handful of the opponents of the 1921 Treaty criticised the partition clauses of the agreement. One was Seán MacEntee, a native of Belfast. He was a member of the delegation that essentially negotiated the final dismantling of the treaty in 1938. For a long time de Valera tried to insist there could be no agreement in those negotiations unless the partition issue was settled. This prompted some clear thinking from MacEntee.

“The partition problem cannot be solved except with the consent of the majority of the Northern non-Catholic population”, MacEntee wrote to de Valera in the course of the negotiations. “Hitherto, we as the Government here have done nothing of ourselves to secure a solution, but on the contrary have done and are doing certain things which have made a solution more difficult. In regard to partition we have never had a policy.”

There was plenty of talk about not wishing to coerce Northern unionists, but nothing positive was done to try to win them over. “With our connivance every bigot and killjoy, ecclesiastical and lay, is doing his damnedest here to keep them out,” he argued.

Garret FitzGerald, who came from a mixed Orange and Green background, was the first of our leaders to recognise the need for positive initiatives. He was not able to change much himself, but he did manage to persuade people on the ground that so much of the anti-partition rhetoric was just empty blather.

In the North they put their rhetoric to music and marched to it. Their parades have triumphal connotations. What they are saying, in effect, is that they still have their distinct identity and they will not be subsumed by our nationalism. But our position has always supposedly been that we were not trying to subsume them.

There has recently been a distinguishable change of attitude in the North, even among some who were seen as bitterly sectarian. Probably the most potent gesture ever from the Republic was the televised spectacle in Croke Park of the Garda and Army No 1 bands earlier this year playing God Save the Queen at the Ireland v England rugby international, without a boo, a catcall or a derisory whistle from a crowd of more than 80,000 people.

This did not belittle or undermine our Irishness one whit. Indeed, one sensed the Irish people in the crowd were never more proud of being Irish.

They demonstrated this with a rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann that brought tears to the eyes of many of the players who then went on to crown those pre-match ceremonies with an awesome display of rugby that demolished England — the world champions, no less.

JJ Barrett demanded that the GAA museum return his father’s All-Ireland medals because God Save the Queen was being played at a rugby match in Croke Park. This was ironic because he had written a book, In the Name of the Game, which highlighted the positive role that the GAA played after the civil war in bringing people together in Kerry, where the conflict was fought with a particular ferocity. The atrocities at Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge and Caherciveen all took place in Kerry.

After the fighting, Con Brosnan, a Free State officer, managed to get safe passage guarantees for republican players like John Joe Sheehy and Joe Barrett to play games, and they used football to overcome some of the bitterness. They played together on the Kerry team that won the 1924 All-Ireland football championship, just the year after those civil war atrocities. Maybe this helps to explain why so many Kerry people treat Gaelic football as a kind of religion.

In 1930, Austin Stacks of Tralee won the county football championship and, thus, the right to nominate the captain of the Kerry team for the following year. Kerry were going for three-in-a-row, and Joe Barrett (JJ’s father) was offered the honour. But he asked that it be accorded to Con Brosnan, who had nothing to do with the club.

BARRETT’S gesture was in recognition of the role that Con had played after the civil war. Four other Austin Stacks players were also on the Kerry team that day, but the club accorded the honour to a man who had taken the other side in the civil war.

“Con Brosnan was the political bridge- builder of our time,” John Joe ‘Purty’ Landers, one of the five Stacks players on that Kerry team, told JJ Barrett for his book. “Regardless of pressure from within his own side of the divide, or from the other side, he did what he believed had to be done to bring about peace and healing. He was the ultimate peacemaker in Kerry football after the civil war.”

Con Brosnan went on to lift the Sam Maguire in September 1931, capping a magnificent example of true sportsmanship, and the value of sport in the healing process. We saw that again at Croke Park this year, and we should develop that Croke Park spirit.

In a sense the Love Ulster parade in Dublin will be a triumphal march for the Orangemen. They have long feared their identity would be subsumed in an All-Ireland set-up, whereas our national flag has emphasised that Orange and Green should coexist in harmony.

The parade would provide an ideal opportunity to prove that we have become a mature, inclusive and multicultural society that lives up to the symbolism of our national flag. In that sense the parade should be something that we could all celebrate. This would then allow us to focus properly on some other problems that require urgent attention.