The picture of Cliftonville football team, before the Cup Final against Coleraine on Saturday, standing with heads bowed during the playing of ‘God Save The Queen’ has flashed around the world. it has echoes of the American athletes who have found ways of registering their distaste for Donald Trump by their pre-match posture, or James McClean’s brave stand against wearing a poppy on his football shirt. Loud and clear the Cliftonville picture tells the IFA and others (DUP , maybe?) that their effort to drive divisions between people here is disgraceful and rejected.
As Chris Donnelly pointed out in a pre-match interview, the playing of ‘God Save The Queen’ and reaction to it is not the point. Had this been an international game between England and another country, basic manners would involve standing during the playing of both anthems. But this was not an international. This was using GSTQ to rub it up the uppity fenians.
If unionism’s enemies had written the script of the Saturday game’s prologue, the message couldn’t have been clearer: we here are unionists, we run things, and if you don’t like it you can bloody-well lump it.
James McClean’s stand against poppy-wearing was courageous but solitary. The Cliftonville stand against sectarianising a soccer game was courageous and community-based. It was telling unionism that nationalists and republicans and even people with no political affiliation have had enough of stone-age political thinking. Whether unionism will have the wisdom required to absorb the lesson remains open to conjecture.
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