Hoping faraway hills truly green for next generation

Chances are that, unless you are part of that the minority among us who claim membership of the athletics community, you have never heard of Sanura Eley O’Reilly.

If you haven’t, don’t worry, that will probably change.

O’Reilly represented the USA at the World Junior Athletics Championships in 2010 but will wear a green singlet the next time she takes to such a grand stage. Born in Ireland, brought up in the States and with an Irish dad and American mum, she has already trained with the 4x400m squad.

There’s others like her: people whose names, skin or accents disguise an allegiance to the auld sod. People like Kourosh Foroughi, a Drogheda boy with an Iranian background who can boast a PB of 2.20m in the high jump and finished ninth at the World University Games in Shenzhen, China last year.

Or Seamus O’Connor. With a name like that, you might expect him to hail from Drogheda, too. He doesn’t — he’s from Utah — but his grandmother does and his granddad is a Dub which allowed the 15-year-old snowboarder declare for us. The plan is we’ll see him at the Socchi Winter Olympics next year.

Multi-culturalism is already prevalent on our streets so it was only a matter of time before it transferred in similar volume to the pitch, track and piste. We are already being treated to the sight of Latvian-born Sanita Puspure, Polish native Andrzej Jezierski and California’s Tori Pena competing for Ireland in London while Malike Benrouggibi and Cemel Ramadana represented Ireland’s U15 football team recently.

The DNA of our entire sporting body is changing and that process will gather speed in the coming years. There are more than 500,000 people living here with a nationality other than Irish but there are worrying signs that recent arrivals are struggling to integrate into the sporting fabric.

The Irish Sports Council’s most recent Sports Monitor Report recently found that, while 44% of the population participated in sport in the week prior to being canvassed, that figure dropped to just 36% amongst other EU nationals and down to 28% for those born beyond those boundaries.

Killian Forde, chief executive of The Integration Centre which is a non-governmental organisation committed to the integration and inclusion of people in Ireland, describes those figures as “worryingly low” and the warning bells need to be heeded sooner.

12% of the overall population in this country is aged 65 or over but, take away Irish and British nationals, and that figure shoots down to just over 1%. The problem is that, while participation levels among those with migrant backgrounds are high in schools, they evaporate post-Leaving Cert.

Forde has seen it happen regardless of sport, location or nationality and points to athletics as just one example. “We need a lot more analysis on it but the figures we have show that, while migrant names are heavily represented among those winning at schools levels, they almost disappear when it comes to athletics clubs.”

It’s no-one’s fault. The same trend is discernible worldwide and sports here are attempting to change it.

The GAA and FAI employ dedicated integration/inclusion officers while boxing’s IABA has been progressive as well, all of them mindful that embracing such policies and people is a win-win situation for everyone.

One problem is that funding to sports bodies for integration and participation programmes has contracted from a high of €505,000 four years ago to €253,000 in 2011, although Forde believes there are ways to do more with less, such as asking clubs what integration programmes they have attempted when grants are considered at Government level.

But it’s not just at the grassroots level where obstacles await — brace for that horrible phrase — the ‘New Irish’. Since January 2005, people born in Ireland are no longer guaranteed automatic citizenship which has compounded a difficult situation for immigrants who also have to contend with this country’s painfully slow processing of refugee claims.

So, we have situations like that of Nigerian-born Seye Ogumlewe, who ran with Celbridge AC, had a PB of 10.31 for the 100m and was an Irish Schools champion, but left Ireland after years marooned in bureaucratic limbo. It is believed he is now in the UK.

It is also why Kelvin Ekanem stopped running. An Irish Schools sprint champion, his hopes of representing this country were undone by the same legal maze. He has since abandoned athletics and taken up junior rugby. One hopes he excels at his new sport but it is impossible to escape a sense of a talent lost. These are people who are/were living amongst us and yet the lethargy with which their cases were handled lay in stark contrast to the speed with which football players born in Britain have been ushered into the national team’s ranks whenever a Jack Charlton or Steve Staunton clicked their fingers down the years.

“It’s not just about social participation either,” says Forde. “It’s about people cheering on athletes that look or speak differently to them. It’s about blurring the sense of what people consider to be Irish — in a good way — and that we are more than just white and Catholic. That can only be a good thing.”

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