Just who are those masked men?
Remembering the days when Scottish pros played Donegal nixers in disguise. Plus: how power-sharing deadlines are a moveable feast.
Eamonn McCann, 06 Apr 2006
Every imperialist onslaught in history has been accompanied by cartoons.
The people being targeted must be dehumanised through caricature so as to suggest that they are mad or bad or anyway unworthy of rights appropriate to regular human beings.
The depiction of Africans as blood-crazed savages or of the Irish as simian beings of menacing aspect are cases in point.
The Danish cartoons suggesting that Muslims epitomise terrorist atrocity come into the same category. They are an element of the War on Terror. They are war propaganda. To defend their publication on grounds of free speech is to miss the main point, and to take the wrong side.
Chewing the fat about football in Eddie Mahon’s sporting emporium, the talk turned to Jimmy Johnstone and the curious omission from the mainstream obituaries of one of the clubs he’d turned out for.
Celtic, San Jose Earthquakes, Sheffield United, Dundee, Shels and Elgin City were all mentioned. But no reference to Carfin Emeralds.
The Emeralds date from the golden era of the North West Summer Cups, when every Donegal townland with a sprinkling of get-up-and-go hosted a knock-out football competition for sizable cash prizes. The equivalent of 10 grand at today’s prices to the winner was by no means unusual. Nor was a gate of 5000 at a final.
The basic arrangement was that the players and a mentor or two divvied up the winnings, so it paid anybody who could play a bit to join a team and have a go. Scottish professionals back in ancestral Donegal for the summer were the stars of many a side – invariably under false names, sometimes in disguise, so as not to alert their regular employers to the holiday nixer.
The Emeralds’ possibly unique distinction was that they played in masks. Fans used to stand on the sidelines debating whether the guy who’d just fallen over the ball could really be Ian St. John. But there was never any doubt about Jinky.
So, the complete and accurate list of the genius Jinky’s clubs would read: the Bhoys, the Quakes, the Blades, the Terrors, the Reds, the Marbles and the Emeralds. Glad I could clear that up.
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