The last time the England football team visited Belfast in 1987 they were greeted by a car bomb going off in a Windsor Park side street.
The only danger they’re in tonight is of having their eardrums perforated by 12,800 powerfully lunged Norn Iron fans who bellow their way through every second of the World Cup qualifier.
Shamed into action by the campaign of sectarian abuse that led to Neil Lennon, a Catholic playing for Celtic, hanging up his green shirt, the Irish Football Association have spent the past three years weeding out the Billy Boy bigots whose party piece was a spirited rendition of ‘Up To Our Necks In Fenian Blood’.
Along with the standard blurb about alcohol and threatening behaviour, the IFA’s Code of Conduct demands that home fans refrain from ‘Using sectarian language or displaying sectarian or racist emblems’; ‘Singing sectarian or racist songs or chants’; and ‘Booing Northern Ireland players’.
That last point is reinforced by the request to ‘Support all our players equally.’
“What was it like in the old days?” says David, a 36-year-old Windsor Park regular from the Catholic Springfield Road area of Belfast. “Fucking awful! I’ve been known to tell somebody they’re a shit footballer myself, but screaming that you’re going to rape them and their children is just pure evil. A friend of mine complained to a steward about the abuse and was told to, ‘Sit down and stop making trouble.’ No one I know blames Lennon for quitting, or doubts that it’s what made the IFA pull their fingers out.”
Following the lead of Glasgow Rangers who’d addressed the same problem ten years earlier, the Association used CCTV to identify the knuckleheads and refuse them entry to games. They also used the internet to spread the message to supporters’ groups who took decisive action of their own.
When World Cup qualifier season tickets went on sale in 2004, they block booked in areas like the old Spion Kop, which had previously been populated by the Billy Boys. By the time the Poles came a-calling, the Northern matchday experience had been changed from one of poisonous hatred to hoping that Northern Ireland would find the back of the onion sack (they famously went 1,242 minutes without scoring).
“What’s happened post-Neil Lennon is a good start,” David continues, “but you’re not going to get equal numbers of Catholic and Protestant fans at games until there’s a move away from Windsor Park to a neutral location.’
David is referring to the fact that the ground is owned by Linfield, a club that despite its own clean-up initiative is still plagued by a Loyalist hooligan element.
This was brought into sharp focus in April when their away trip to Protestant rivals Glentoran culminated in on-the-pitch rioting between the two sets of supporters. PSNI intelligence quickly established that the violence was premeditated and linked to the internecine UVF and LVF feud.
Against that background, the carnival atmosphere at recent Northern Ireland games is all the more remarkable.
The ‘No Surrender’ chants that punctuate ‘God Save The Queen’ aside, there’s no sectarian singing during the England game with the green-bedecked crowd preferring, ‘We’re not Brazil, we’re Northern Ireland’, the pogo-inducing ‘Let’s do bouncy bouncy’ and Rooney-baiting ‘You fat bastard, you fat bastard, you eat all the pies.’
The Windsor Park faithful also prove themselves to be clairvoyant with the mass cries of ‘We’re going to win one-nil’ starting a good 20 minutes before David Healy breaks English hearts, this one included.
Congratulating Northern Ireland on their victory, the chairman of the One Small Step anti-bigotry group, Trevor Ringland, says: “The IFA has engaged in a long-standing campaign to remove sectarianism from the game and has worked extremely hard to try and ensure that Windsor Park is a friendly and welcoming place to watch matches. I’m delighted they’ve been rewarded with such a positive result.”
Sadly, not everybody was so magnanimous with the paper founded by former Sinn Fein councilor Mairtin O Muillear, Daily Ireland, running with a Republic v France cover and relegating Healy & Co.’s heroics to page 43. This was on top of their columnist, Robin Livingstone, declaring on the eve of the game that he wanted England to give Northern Ireland “a trouncing, a rout, a spanking, a tanking, an embarrassment. (Windsor Park) is like the eleventh night but without a bonfire for entertainment.”
According to a recent survey, 40% of Northern Irish football fans support the team based at Windsor Park, 40% follow the Republic and 20% (including Billy Hutchinson) shout for England. We know this because the PUP man told Eamon Dunphy last week on his Newstalk 106 breakfast show that he was still smarting over the 1-0 defeat.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to Hutchinson’s allegiances if plans for a 30,000-seater national stadium on the site of the former Maze Prison are green-lighted.
Along with football, the Northern Ireland Office want “the all-inclusive facility” to be used by the GAA and the IRFU, which throws up the possibility of Ireland rugby internationals being played in Belfast.
Now, that really would piss the bigots off on both sides.