After bile of Windsor Park 1993, peace came ‘dropping slow’ for the North
The recent announcement of a joint FAI/IFA bid for the 2023 Uefa U21 Euros, to include stadia from Ballymena to Cork, is an example of the current good working relationship between the two associations.
And tonight, the Republic of Ireland play Northern Ireland in a friendly at the Aviva.
It is a stark contrast to 25 years ago and that November night in Belfast when Alan McLoughlin’s equaliser sent the Republic to the 1994 World Cup in the US.
The hatred and bile of that evening inside Windsor Park has been well documented.
The sporting stories, good and bad, have been recounted at length: Billy Bingham appearing to incite the crowd in his last game in charge; the Northern Ireland captain Alan McDonald entering the Republic’s dressing room after the game to acknowledge their qualification; the friendship that the goalscorers, Jimmy Quinn and Alan McLoughlin, forged at club level at Swindon.
For those of us now in our mid-40s, and from ‘the South’, the Northern Ireland football team that qualified for the World Cups of 1982 and 1986 provided the only international football glamour of that decade — Jennings, Armstrong, Whiteside, mixed with Arcanada, Socrates, and Zico.
We cheered for them. We liked them. And in our childish naiveite we wondered if, under Bingham’s canny management, we could unite them with our talented but underachieving team of Lawrenson, Whelan, and Brady.
I remember practising Billy Hamilton’s falling-man header (his equaliser against Austria at the 1982 World Cup) in the garden and a few years later going to watch him as player-manager of the then Limerick City.
For many in the South, the ‘cold house’ — to paraphrase from David Trimble’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture of 1998, awarded jointly with John Hume for their peace efforts — that was Windsor Park in November 1993 sundered that sympathetic view of the Northern Ireland football team.
And yet talk of football and sports stories sanitises the appalling circumstances surrounding the evening of November 17, 1993 in Belfast.
The game is important in Irish sporting history, but it is an inconsequential footnote in Ireland’s recent history: Our shared and sorry history.
October 1993 had been a bloody month.
On October 6, 1993, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), carried out a gun attack on a pub in west Belfast. Jason McFarlane, 20, was
killed. Earlier in the day, he had been out buying a suit for his St Stephen’s Day wedding. He left behind his fiancée and a child.
Less than a week later, Joseph Reynolds, 40, also a Catholic from west Belfast, was on his way to work as a subcontracting painter at the Shorts aircraft factory in east Belfast.
Driving a van full of his workmates, he stopped at a pedestrian crossing on the morning of October 12, 1993, to allow two men to pass.
The two men, wearing blue boilersuits and flat caps, crossed slowly. Once they drew level with the van, they opened fire with a handgun and a rifle. The van was also attacked by gunfire from a stolen car which had pulled up behind it. Joseph Reynolds died, leaving behind a wife and five children.
On October 21, 1993, another subcontractor on his way to work was shot in broad daylight in Belfast. The IRA killed John Gibson, 51, whose firm did building work for the RUC.
Two days later an IRA bomb would explode in a fish and chip shop on the Shankill Road in west Belfast. Fifty-seven were injured. Ten were killed in the worst single atrocity since the Enniskillen bombing of 1987.
The youngest victim was Michelle Baird. She was just seven years old.
Her parents, Evelyn and Michael Morrison, were also killed in the blast. Their deaths orphaned their other two children, a nine-year-old boy and six-week-old girl.
In the next week, 13 died in retaliatory violence. It began on the Monday when Seán Fox, 72, the honorary president and stalwart of St Enda’s GAA club, was tortured and shot by the UVF in his home.
It ended, only briefly and horrifically, on October 30 when the UFF killed seven at the Rising Sun pub in Greysteel, Co Derry. The oldest victim was James Moore, 81, who had come in for a pint at the bar owned by his son.
At first those in the Rising Sun had thought what was happening was a Halloween weekend joke because, on entering, one of the gunmen had shouted “trick or treat”. Trick or treat would later be heard chanted by sections of the crowd on November 17.
The Greysteel killings brought the total number of deaths to 27, making October 1993 the worst month for fatalities since 1976.
And then, in mid-November, a football match took place.
After the football, the killings continued into December 1993.
On December 5, a Catholic taxi driver, John Todd, at his rank in Liogneil in north Belfast, was injured in a drive-by shooting. He later died of his injuries. His passenger, Brian Duffy, died instantly. He was 15.
A contemporary report by the UPI press agency said that the boy had been inside the rank talking to his father and had just entered the taxi when the gunmen opened fire. Brian Duffy’s father dragged his son and the driver, a close friend, from the car. He cradled his son in his arms until paramedics pronounced him dead.
On December 12, RUC officer Andrew Beacom was shot dead alongside reserve Constable Ernest Smith by the IRA on Main Street Fivemiletown, Co Tyrone. Drew Beacom lived on that street. His wife was first on the scene.
The year of carnage ended on December 30 when a British army soldier, Daniel Blinco, 23, was shot dead by a sniper while on patrol near Crossmaglen.
Amidst all this, peace came ‘dropping slow’.
On December 15, 1993, four weeks after the game, the then-Taoiseach Albert Reynolds agreed the Downing Street Declaration with British Prime Minister John Major. John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, continued his dialogue with Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin.
Hume faced fierce criticism, led in typically unrelenting, polemical, and personalised style by Eamon Dunphy, whose ire had previously been reserved in sport for Ireland managers such as Eoin Hand and Jack Charlton.
Later and into 1994, came another shocking, sports-related incident. On June 18, 1994, just after half-time in the Ireland v Italy World Cup game held at the Giants Stadium, two men in boilersuits and balaclavas entered a pub in Loughinisland in Co Down and shot indiscriminately into the crowd. Six died.
One of the dead was Malcolm Jenkinson who had been watching the game with his son’s best friend, Colm Smyth. Smyth was shot four times but a protective push from Jenkinson had saved his life.
In a published diary of the events, bodies and glass strewn about him, Smyth recalled: “‘Turn it off!’ I shout. I can’t understand why the ref didn’t stop the match when the shooting started. And then I realise that he doesn’t know.”
1994 was a particularly bleak and vengeful year in Troubles’ history — 64 people were killed — but it remains the worst year since the violence gradually ended. In August, the IRA announced a ceasefire and though broken, and though Northern Ireland would still have to suffer its worst single atrocity — the Omagh bombing of 1998 — and though Brexit may test it, peace remains two decades after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
That agreement recognises “the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose”.
In part, this constitutional provision, and not Fifa’s regulations, underpins how Shane Duffy, Darron Gibson, Eunan O’Kane, Daniel Kearns, James McClean, and others have since declared to play football for the Republic and not the North.
Compared to 25 years ago, what is happening on our island, in its sports stadia and on our streets, is what politicians like to call ‘progress’ but, as with many words in Northern Ireland, such a phrase can have multiple meanings.
A quarter of century since that Belfast night in November, the poet Alan Gillis in his poem ‘Progress’, probably puts it best:
They say that for years Belfast was backwardsAnd it’s great now to see some progress.So I guess we can look forward to taking boxesFrom the earth.
