It has become the norm that James McClean is beaten like a piñata around this time every year.
The blind rage that follows him around is something to behold. The Wrexham player even received an endorsement of sorts from Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of British tabloid, The Sun.
Lest we forget, MacKenzie made his name with a front page following the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989. During that year’s FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest 97 people were crushed to death.
The Sun falsely claimed fans urinated on cops. It falsely claimed fans pickpocketed victims and falsely claimed fans beat up cops giving the kiss of life to injured supporters. Subsequently Liverpool, with its significant Irish heritage, boycotted the paper.
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This week MacKenzie added to the rage bait on social media as McClean stood apart from his Wrexham team-mates during a Remembrance Day minute’s silence before Saturday’s game against Mansfield Town. The Derry player was not wearing a poppy.
For that MacKenzie referred to McClean on X, and to his 97.1k followers, without irony, as “That scumbag James McClean”.
It is now 12 years since McClean took a personal decision not to wear a poppy for Remembrance Day. Every year since, the ululating gets louder, the yowling ever more shrill and the abuse more and more fantastic.
And every year McClean doubles down on his right to not engage in a remembrance that champions an army that did such lasting damage, particularly in the place that he grew up in Derry.
His wife Erin even took to social media during the maelstrom. “I don’t know about the rest of you . . . but this is just boring now, 12 years on you’d think it’d be old news”.
Her tone was one of resignation and defiance, and that 12 years would likely become 13 as the career of the player with ‘You are Now Entering Free Derry’ tattooed on his leg continues. It begged the question why anyone might believe the steely, uncompromising position her husband first adapted in 2012 would change. Most importantly perhaps, she implicitly supported him.
McClean also put out an explainer on Instagram last Sunday.
“The poppy which originally stood for world war 1 and 2 has now been adopted into honouring and remembering British soldiers that have served in all conflicts . . . including those who opened fire and murdered 14 innocent civilians on Bloody Sunday Jan 1972, in my home city.
“The poppy represents for me an entire different meaning to what it does for others, am I offended by someone wearing a poppy? No absolutely not, what does offend me tho, is having the poppy try be forced upon me.”
He might have explained to listeners of GB News, readers of The Daily Mail and former Sun editors that when the Bogside, where McClean comes from, started to become overcrowded from the 1940s onwards, the Londonderry Corporation agreed to put nationalist families in the same ward as the Bogside to prevent them from breaking out into other wards and upsetting the carefully calculated headcounts. That process, known as gerrymandering, ensured continued unionist control of the corporation.
He might have explained the phenomenon of ‘restricted franchise’ by the Northern Ireland government. It was what it said on the tin, where only rate payers and wives had the right to vote, while in other local elections across Britain during the 1960s all adults aged over 21 had a vote.
He could have informed them that, in addition to those restrictions, limited companies were allotted six votes each. Catholics, who were denied houses and did not widely own limited companies, therefore lost voting strength.
His critics might have hit back with ‘what has that to do with Remembrance Day’ and McClean might have spoken about his parents and how the Civil Rights movement grew out of Derry and not Belfast.
He could have told them how six of the people subsequently shot dead by the British Army’s parachute regiment on Bloody Sunday in 1972 were from his district in the Creggan, while some months prior to that in August 1971, the same regiment shot dead 11 people including local priest Fr Hugh Mullan in a weekend killing spree in west Belfast.
McClean makes people remember another history, one they probably don’t wish to remember. He asks the question if the poppy is also venerating those soldiers, that regiment and the killing of those civilians.
The British Legion speaks on its website of the spring of 1915, when shortly after losing a friend in Ypres, a Canadian doctor, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was moved by the sight of poppies in a field and that inspiration led him to write the famous poem In Flanders Fields.
The site also says: “Our red poppy is a symbol of both Remembrance and hope for a peaceful future. Poppies are worn as a show of support for the Armed Forces community . . . Wearing a poppy is still a very personal choice, reflecting individual experiences and personal memories. It is never compulsory . . .”
MacKenzie may wear his poppy each year with pride. The man he calls a scumbag, who lives with threats on his life, wears his every day. They are inked on his arms and legs. Those are his poppies.
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