Is Olympic success a sign that Ireland can be made attractive to Northern Protestants?

In all the wonderful hype about Ireland’s four Olympic gold medallists, there was one aspect that went relatively unreported – at least here in the republic. The fact that two of them – Daniel Wiffen in the 800 metres swimming final and gymnast Rhys McClenaghan on the pommel horse – were from Northern Ireland was, of course, widely highlighted. What was missing from most of the coverage I saw was that these Olympic champions were two rather atypical Northerners wearing the green of Ireland: Daniel Wiffen may be a Catholic but he speaks with the same northern English accent he had when he arrived in NI from Yorkshire aged two, and Rhys McClenaghan is from the solidly Protestant and unionist town of Newtownards.

You won’t see any Irish tricolours at Larne Swimming Club in County Antrim, where Wiffen was a member, or in Origin Gymnastics, the club McClenaghan and his coach Luke Carson opened in Newtownards earlier this year. These are bedrock unionist areas. Yet McClenaghan told the Irish Independent: “Not one person has said one negative thing to my face about what country I should represent.”

Maybe I am reading too much into this, but it seems to me to be a sign that for somebody from a Northern Protestant and/or unionist background to represent Ireland has become more acceptable in that often fearful and blinkered community, paranoid about all things Irish. Of course Northerners of that persuasion have been playing rugby for Ireland ever since partition. And boxers from Protestant areas of Belfast such as Wayne McCullough and Carl Frampton have never had any problem with wearing the green of Ireland in the ring.

Northern Ireland being the binary place it is, athletes from the province also won medals competing for Great Britain: Hannah Scott from Coleraine and Rebecca Shorten from Belfast getting respectively a gold and silver as part of rowing teams, and Jack McMillan from Bangor, who switched from Ireland to GB in 2022, getting a swimming gold as part of the 4×200 metres relay team. Northern Ireland athletes competing for both nations brought back six medals, only one less than Team Ireland did.

In the Irish Times Ronan McGreevy pointed out that of the 41 athletes from the North, 34 chose to represent Ireland in Paris. For some of those athletes competing for Team Ireland was an expression of their identity, but for others it was a purely sporting decision. He went on: “Team Ireland is a reminder that most Irish sporting organisations ignored the rupture of partition and carried on as if it never happened. The GAA is the most obvious example, but it also extends to most international sports. There is only one Ireland rugby, cricket, hockey, basketball, show jumping, swimming, boxing and athletics team [the major exception, of course, is football/soccer]. Sporting bodies in Ireland have long understood that it makes no sense to have separate entities on a small island.

“Rhys McClenaghan had already represented Britain and Northern Ireland as a youngster before his coach, Luke Carson, was made redundant from Rathgael Gym in Bangor. Gymnastics Ireland stepped in and provided him with the training facilities that he needed. McClenaghan is British enough to accept a British Empire Medal for his service to gymnastics and Irish enough to respectfully stand for Amhrán na bhFiann and for the Tricolour.”¹

It was not only the large proportion of Northerners which showed that Team Ireland was truly representative of the ‘new Ireland’. The most popular champion of all was lightweight boxer Kellie Harrington, who won her second successive Olympic gold medal in Paris. She is a married lesbian from a poor inner-city area of Dublin, who wears both her gay and working class credentials with impressive pride. Another particular heroine was Rhasidat Adeleke, a 21 year old Irish-Nigerian woman from the Dublin suburb of Tallaght, who came fourth in an intensely competitive women’s 400 metres, but is clearly destined for greater things.

I believe our new sporting prowess – in rugby, as in athletics, rowing (Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy from Skibbereen retained their lightweight double sculls title, and the north-south combination of Philip Doyle and Daire Lynch won bronze in the double sculls), swimming and gymnastics – is part of a new, strong, confident Ireland that is riding on the economic success of recent years. We are no longer the poor, emigration-ridden, barely solvent small nation we were when Ronnie Delany won Ireland’s last athletics gold medal in 1956 (he was nearly not sent to the Melbourne Olympics because of lack of funds). I wrote in March that we are now rated as the eighth best country in the world according to the UN’s Human Development Index (based on life expectancy, education levels and GDP per capita).² So why are we surprised when we are now in the top twenty nations when it comes to winning Olympic medals?

As Irish Times columnist Una Mullally wrote: “The self-assuredness among so many creative Irish people – and sport is a creative endeavour – demonstrates a novel openness to success.” She quoted Rhys McClenaghan commenting while watching footage of children from Newtownards leaping in delight at his achievement: “Anything that you put your mind to, believe in it enough, are dedicated and determined enough – you might one day achieve it.” That’s American ‘can do’ with a Northern Irish accent! Mullally concluded that there is a huge amount going in in Ireland these days in sport, cinema, literature and music, and urged people “not to break the spell, because there’s so much pleasure to be found in just sitting back and enjoying this green and golden generation.”³

This is what I have been trying to say for many years. An economically, socially and culturally fair and successful Ireland is the best passport to some kind of eventual political unity. It won’t come next year, and probably won’t come next decade. But if we make the new Ireland a good place for ordinary Northerners – including ordinary thoughtful unionists – I believe many of them will come round to understanding that their most hopeful future is to find a way of sharing this wonderful island with their erstwhile nationalist adversaries. Persuasion, however difficult, remains the key. Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, Sir James Craig, was right when he said over a century ago that coercion was the last way to persuade Ulster unionists of the value of unity.

That is why I think sport is so important. Sport is a life-enhancing activity that makes everyone feel good. I feel at my best when I come down from climbing a mountain in Wicklow or the Mournes, or come out from a sea swim at Seapoint, or pedal across Ireland on my annual cross-country cycle. Similarly, some of my happiest memories are of watching great Irish rugby and soccer teams successfully take on the world. I have a vivid memory of Dubliners in the streets in January 1999 – nine months after the Good Friday Agreement – cheering Ulster fans returning from Lansdowne Road after their team had won the Heineken Cup European rugby championship. I have a similarly strong recollection of sitting in a bar in Rome at 3 o’clock in the morning after the Republic of Ireland were narrowly beaten by Italy in the quarter finals of the 1990 World Cup with a farmer from Macroom and a Protestant schoolteacher from Belfast.

The Wiffen and McClenaghan families were happy and proud to wear green Ireland t-shirts when celebrating their sons’ Olympic success. For obvious reasons Irish tricolours were not much in evidence in Magheralin on the Down-Armagh border (the Wiffens’ home place) or in Newtownards. Do we need to tone down the flag-waving side of Irish nationalism – most unionists associate the tricolour with Sinn Fein marches and IRA men’s coffins – if that makes it easier for Northern Protestants and/or unionists to feel Irish and identify with Ireland? I have always thought that a green banner with a gold (or orange) harp on it would be the perfect flag for a re-united Ireland.

So I agree completely with Ronan McGreevy when he concluded: “Team Ireland reflects the long-stated axiom of John Hume that you cannot unite territory without uniting people first. The Irish athletes have done that with the minimum of fuss. They are the true ‘Team of Us.”

¹ ‘Team Ireland shows what an all-island approach can achieve on the world stage’, 9 August

² ‘Ireland in 2024 is a rather good country, despite the begrudgers’

³ ‘Ireland is different to the begrudging country that I grew up in,’ 5 August

Andy Pollak retired as founding director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in July 2013 after 14 years. He is a former religious affairs correspondent, education correspondent, assistant news editor and Belfast reporter with the Irish Times.