McIlroy’s right to choose who he represents should be respected

AS Rory McIlory walked from the 18th green on Sunday evening to the scoring room to present his card for the final round of his victorious US Open golf tournament somebody from the crowd threw a tricolour at him.

Our national flag hit him but was swatted away by one of the security men accompanying him, out of sight of the television cameras, but presumably onto the ground. I didn’t get the impression that McIlroy saw what had been thrown at him and I’m glad of that: the thrower had tried to put McIlroy in a difficult position, presumably unintentionally. Why in his personal moment of glory should McIlroy have been asked by some stranger to make a declaration of national identity by carrying the flag of the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland? What would the majority of people in Northern Ireland have made of that? How would people in the south have felt if McIlroy grabbed and displayed a red hand of Ulster flag?

There has been some nonsense this past week as to whether or not McIlroy is Irish or not, or whether he is British. Some people get worked up when British television channels describe his as British or, when things go badly, as they did at the closing holes of the Masters earlier this year, he is suddenly returned to the Irish moniker. Fortunately, such talk in recent times has been muted; most people have gone beyond it.