On Thursday, the barrister and former Derry footballer Joe Brolly posted a short video clip of Abood ‘Bonnar’ Al Jumaili striking a hurl and ball against the august walls of Stormont – a forbidding edifice whose walls were not built with pleasurable purposes in mind.
Al Jumaili, an Iraqi who plays senior club hurling in Dublin, was visiting local Assembly members to talk about his cross-community work. The clip provoked an engaged response and included a detour into the interest of Edward Carson, the godfather of unionism, in the small ball. Carson’s hurling adventures during his time studying in Trinity College are the subject of academic dispute.
What next, someone asked Brolly, sardonically; an Orange band replacing the Artane Boys Band in Croke Park? ‘Not replacing. But it would be a good idea to invite one to perform before the Artane Boys or even do something jointly,’ the Derry man suggested.
It was a small, optimistic reminder that attitudes and possibilities are shifting in the North all the time.
Then, on Friday, a very different video circulated, featuring a gathering held in the recent past, mainly of young men in an Orange Hall and singing a taunting, jaunty song celebrating the murder, in 2011, of Tyrone woman Michaela McAreavey. There has been a lot of distressing film and audio footage released about sectarian events through the years. But this short, nauseating clip has left an indelible stain on those easily identified within the film, which stands as an irretrievable sneak-peek into a world of first-rank nihilism.
It’s an old-world Ulster summer scene: pressed white shirts, the walls of a big hall festooned with Orange paraphernalia and the long tables filled with beer cans. The mood is chirpy and the gathering is predominantly – but not exclusively – male. Not everybody is singing but everyone looks as though they are having a good time.
And it’s clear that those participating in the chant know the words off by heart; that this was not a once-off rendition. It’s the ease of expression set against the despicable sentiments of the ‘song’ which makes the few seconds so disturbing.
As an experiment in bleakness, it plumbs the depths: at once sordid and cowardly and ultimately the rallying cry of the soul-defeated. It’s a hollow attempt to drum up irrational hatred, using the memory of a young woman whose death occurred when some of the participants were just children. There are fathers, brothers, sons within the video, all dumbly parroting the words as though it is a football chant. It’s the banality of the moment which induces the nausea.
The response to the video, which was sent to Malachy Quinn, the SDLP councillor for Mid-Ulster and who made the decision to release it on social media, was uniform in its revulsion. Political leaders from all sides denounced the video in unusually strong language. The Orange Order launched an inquiry. The PSNI is investigating it. All prominent political figures from all shades of unionism, placed on the record their disgust.
Linfield football club issued a public apology and removed one of their coaches – in the club’s girls’ academy – who was involved in the making of the video. A Craigavon firm is carrying out an investigation to establish if one of its employees was involved in the film. By lunchtime, two of the participants were named and expressed their shame and offered unreserved apologies.
The murder of Michaela McAreavey, while on honeymoon in Mauritius, was one of those terrible moments when Ireland, North and South, traditions be damned, becomes reduced to a small village. It was an event which stilled the country; it made people pause and draw loved ones around them.
It so happened that she belongs to one of the most prominent GAA families in the country and although the mourning was general, it was deepest in Tyrone. Through a painfully long and flawed judicial process, the Harte family responded to their grief and trauma with extraordinary grace and managed to channel their daughter’s and sister’s spirit into an enduring and positive influence.
Naturally, many public figures expressed their solidarity with the Harte family in the wake of the despicable video. But in the truest sense, the Harte family and their wider community continue to live in an entirely different plane of existence to those in the video, who, on the evidence of that film, appear condemned to the psychological prison of deranged bigotry.
Their Ulster has always been big-hearted, celebratory, laden with effort and respect and striving for improvement. The conspicuous success they enjoyed with the Tyrone senior team was based on those virtues.
Sport, by its nature, has always provided an opportunity for the North to show the best of itself. As a community, it has punched above its weight across a bewildering variety of sports from soccer, Gaelic games and rugby to bike racing and snooker and golf.
Of course, sports occasions have also been hijacked as staging grounds for ugly displays of sectarianism down the years. But that is changing. All sporting groups and teams have made strides to not just eliminate sectarian thuggery and cowardice from its dressingrooms and terraces but to also promote and build cross-community projects and teams.
The instant outpouring of revulsion at representative and public level across Northern Ireland demonstrated once again that the place is on the verge of a new time. It was an instinctive repudiation of a reprehensible rendition of tired, inherited hatreds. And it achieved the almost impossible feat of having all Stormont’s elected officials united in agreement for an hour or so.
As a community, the North is still learning how to move away from decades of pain caused by sectarian violence. The steps are faltering and frustratingly slow. But the outcry on Friday suggested something that is a cause for hope: a determination to banish these occasional displays of bigotry so completely that even its practitioners can see it for what it is: a freak show and a deeply shaming moment in their lives. It was an important glimpse of what the future can hold; that there is a better society to which the vast majority in the North aspires – and that it is worth standing up for.
