The new football season is nearly upon us and with it will come the renewal of one of sport’s most toxic rivalries. Glasgow Rangers have been promoted back to the Scottish Premiership, meaning this season they renew hostilities with cross-city rivals Celtic. Despite improvements over the years, poisonous sectarianism is still very much a feature of the Old Firm.
Thankfully, there’s a sportsman from Northern Ireland setting a fine example in how to combat bigotry and sectarian division. His name is Carl Frampton, a boxer who goes by the nickname The Jackal. Frampton is an unbeaten world champion at super-bantamweight, but this weekend he moves up to challenge featherweight king Leo Santa Cruz in New York.
Frampton, a Protestant married to a Catholic, draws his support from both sides of the Belfast divide. When he fights in his homeland, he does so in front of rabid sold-out crowds. There’ll be a large contingent of Ulstermen – known as the Jackal Army – following him to America to watch their hero take on Santa Cruz, a wily, dangerous Mexican.
Frampton’s story is remarkably similar to his manager’s, boxing legend Barry McGuigan, whose son Shane also happens to be Frampton’s trainer. McGuigan, a Catholic who married a Protestant, brought Northern Ireland together in celebration of his triumphs in the ring, the high point being the victory over feared Panamanian Eusebio Pedroza at Loftus Road in 1985. Back then, the Troubles had turned Belfast into a war zone and although, clearly, the situation has calmed, old habits continue to die hard. In March a prison officer died after being targeted in a bomb attack by dissident Republicans.
McGuigan once said that Frampton’s story shows “hope for a new kind of Belfast”. Let’s hope that Frampton wins tomorrow and keeps that anti-sectarian narrative going. Maybe even those Celtic and Rangers fans obsessed with maintaining ancient feuds might take notice.
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The great Irish dramatist Brian Friel died last year aged 86 and the Donmar Warehouse in London is paying glorious tribute to him with its current production of one of his greatest plays. Faith Healer runs until later this month and if any tickets are available I’d strongly advise deploying whatever means necessary to get your hands on one.
Via a series of monologues, Friel pieces together the story of charismatic healer Francis Hardy as he trawls far-flung corners of Scotland and Wales for places to perform.
The mega-budget Harry Potter two-parter is the big news in theatreland at the moment, and Friel’s stunning play is perhaps its antithesis: an exercise in unflashy, exquisitely detailed and lyrical storytelling.
Faith Healer is about the mysteries of faith and miracles, and the all-consuming power of love. Most pertinently – and surprisingly, considering it appears, superficially at least, to be a kind of Irish folk tale – it also speaks powerfully to our political moment, our era of Trump, Johnson, Corbyn and the rest: opportunists who are capable of capturing imaginations and taking people for a ride.
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Speaking of political opportunists, Nicola Sturgeon has to be one of the worst we’ve got. She’s currently doing her utmost to persuade people that a vote for Brexit wasn’t exactly what she and her SNP buddies wanted, but her delight seems pretty clear to me.
In the past few weeks, Sturgeon has been able to lay the groundwork for a second independence referendum by throwing around big talk about the importance of keeping Scotland in the EU.
It’s a position that makes no sense for a few reasons. Taking Scotland out of the UK, her political raison d’etre, would, in turn, take Scotland out of the EU with no guarantee that, as a wee country on its own, it would be readmitted.
It was also only two years ago that Scotland voted resoundingly to maintain the union, so logic surely dictates that the SNP should accept the Brexit result and get on with it, like the rest of the UK, instead of trying to weasel its way to a second independence vote. And, isn’t it a strange irony that a political movement seeking independence is so desperate to tie itself to a supranational organisation such as the EU?
I voted remain, but I accept that my side lost. A lifetime of supporting Brentford FC has taught me how to take defeat graciously. Sturgeon seems never to have learnt a similar lesson. She’s one of those politicians who can’t abide democracy when it gives them an answer they didn’t want.
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