Ireland United needs to add shades of Cruyff to its white socks
On last Wednesday night at Lansdowne Road an Irish team faced the Tricolour and sang the Irish national anthem.
They lined out in green and white with hardly a trace of orange to be seen. It seems that the orange of the Irish flag remains something of an afterthought or an embarrassment.
It would, for example, have been perfectly logical for the white socks of the Irish players to have had orange rather than green tops (shades of Cruyff).
Since that letter I have noticed no obvious diminution in the level of vituperation. Not even letters to the Irish Examiner are capable of producing so benign an effect.
But even I did not think that Fr Alec Reid, one of the two independent clerical observers of the IRA decommissioning of arms, would in the immediate aftermath of this momentous event compare the unionists in Northern Ireland to the Nazis of Germany (against whom indeed they fought so valiantly).
It is a small mercy of the conflict in Northern Ireland, but a mercy for all that, that there have to date been no death trains and no gas chambers to set beside the sectarian killings.
An arbiter of peace cannot and must not allow himself or herself the indulgence of such language. Words matter, and in the context of Northern Ireland they can cause long-lasting alienation. We must first learn (a hard lesson) to speak well of one another if we are to act well towards one another.
We must strive to keep in its central place the white between the green and the orange.
Dr Gerald Morgan
School of English
Trinity College
Dublin
