Identity? It’s complicated.
For more than a decade Sian Mulholland, then a community worker helping young people find their way in Belfast, watched as a new generation began to build their own identities in Northern Ireland.
Increasingly, she found a significant percentage chose “Northern Irish” identity first.
“I think they didn’t feel aligned with those who lived in England, Wales or Scotland and they didn’t feel quite aligned to those who lived in Cork, or wherever,” she says.
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Now representing North Antrim in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the Alliance Party, Mulholland has watched how that “Northern Irish” identity has shaped much of the local reaction across the North to the Paris Olympics.
“I have noticed a real enthusiasm and a real excitement about those athletes who come from here, regardless of whether they’re Team Ireland or Team GB,” Mulholland says.
Clearly, she is not arguing that identity questions have disappeared, just that they have retreated.
“Look back a few years and remember the controversy about the flag that Rory McIlroy would be holding,” she adds.
So far, Northern Ireland has won four Olympic gold medals.
[ Ireland united in joy: Daniel Wiffen’s Olympic gold reaches across the divideOpens in new window ]
Magheralin, Co Armagh swimmer Daniel Wiffen and Newtownards gymnast Rhys McClenaghan succeeded under Team Ireland’s colours, while freestyle relay swimmer Jack McMillan from Belfast and Coleraine rower Hannah Scott competed for Team GB.
The choice of flag under which Northern Irish athletes compete has long attracted attention. Since 1999, the British Olympic Association (BOA) has used the “Team GB” moniker, though the official title is the “Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic Team”.
The decision to shorten the name to “Team GB” has long irritated unionists, with the DUP’s Gregory Campbell declaring in 2009, when he was Stormont’s minister for sports, that it “excludes, and indeed alienates, the people of Northern Ireland”.
Efforts were later made to get the title changed to “Team UK”, but that ran into hurdles when the BOA pointed out that the team also represents the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and overseas territories such as the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar.
All of the latter are not part of the United Kingdom, even though the UK is responsible for their defence and external affairs, so a “Team UK” brand would exclude Manx cyclist Mark Cavendish and dressage rider Carl Hester, from Sark.
[ Team Ireland shows what an all-island approach can achieve on the world stageOpens in new window ]
Here, it is worth remembering the text hammered out in the Belfast Agreement, one that was accepted by voters on both sides of the Border in separate referendums in 1998.
It recognises “the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both governments and would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern Ireland”.
The case of Jack McMillan probably illustrates some of the navigation required around the identity question in Northern Ireland, since the Belfast-born swimmer was a Team Ireland team-mate of Wiffen’s during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Back then, McMillan competed for Ireland in the men’s 4×200 metre freestyle relay before heading to Paris as part of the Team GB 4×200 metre freestyle relay team, where he won his gold medal.
In truth, the number of people in the Republic who would be able to identify him in a line-up of medal winners is a fraction of those who would be able to pick out Kellie Harrington, or the Skibbereen rowers Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy.
Equally, there are athletes such as the Markethill, Co Armagh hockey player Kyle Marshall, who competed for Team Ireland in Paris, holds more than 50 international caps for Ireland, yet once played for England at junior level.
In Wiffen’s case, he was congratulated by Armagh GAA after its All-Ireland football win, when it declared “Armagh goes gold again!”, and by DUP MP Carla Lockhart as “our own Magheralin man”.
The identity question is complicated or simplified, depending on one’s point of view, by the number of sports that have always been run on an all-island basis, especially the Irish Rugby Football Union, hockey, swimming or cricket. The list is a long one.
Few know more about the identity questions facing Northern Irish sportsmen and women than former rugby international Trevor Ringland, who won 31 international caps playing for Ireland and stood for Amhrán na bhFiann in Lansdowne Road, even though he regards himself as Irish and British.
Today, Ringland remembers cross-Border journeys in the 1980s and early 1990s during his coaching days travelling to games in Galway with “two prison officers and an RUC officer” in the car, or getting tickets for his RUC officer father for matches in Dublin.
Back then, the RUC would not offer an escort to the Galway-bound car from Enniskillen to the Border crossing at Belcoo where the road heads through Blacklion, Co Cavan, “because it was too dangerous” given the level of threat posed by local IRA units.
“You’ve never seen a quicker journey from there to Galway with the help of a Garda escort,” Ringland recalls during a conversation about sport, national identities and the Olympics.
For Ringland, the Paris games and the success enjoyed by Northern Irish athletes competing for Team Ireland or Team GB illustrates how much change has taken place over the last number of decades in Northern Ireland.
For many, the choices that have been made by many of the Northern Irish athletes on the road to the Paris Olympics evince “a Britishness that reflects their Irishness, or an Irishness that reflects their Britishness”, he says.
Ringland argues that these athletes “do not wear the tricolour in the way that it was displayed at IRA funerals in years gone by” and others do not wear the union flag “in the way that people used it, or use it as a negative symbol”.
Most people occupying the middle ground in today’s Northern Ireland “can get their heads around these identities and be relatively relaxed about it”, Ringland says.
“Everyone else needs to do the same.”
