What is this mercurial substance "identity"? What is it that brings rugby supporters from the four nations, "the Home Countries", together in the British and Irish Lions, and cross the world in their support, or gather by the hundred in pubs across the country? And how can this commonality be seen by some to be a national compromise?
"It's an anachronism," roared my friend Proinsias, who is from Ulster, where they are well acquainted with anachronisms. "There's no reason whatever for players from this country to be playing in the same team as those . . . "
I think the word he use here was "phuqqing", one I'm not acquainted with - Brits. "It's a anachronism, so it is." Perhaps: but that union created enduring resonances. We know that we can slice an Englishman in a certain fashion and produce an Irishman, if only for the purposes of sport.
John Aldridge
John Aldridge or Tony Cascarino were as Irish as the Tower of London, but it was possible for our imaginations to accept them as Irishmen-of-convenience, in a way which wouldn't really be possible with a Russian or a German.
Simply, there are areas of commonality and confluence which bind the Irish and the British peoples, regardless of whatever it is you might want.
"Phuqq commonality!" roared Proinsisas, slamming his fist onto the desk and breaking it. "What about the Black and Tans? The Famine? Why should we be playing rugby with that shower?"
It's not just Proinsias, of course. The GAA community probably viewed the Lions tour of Australia with a diffidence which might have been sublime, if it hadn't been tinged with a certain hostile perplexity. What business have Irish players submersing themselves within a broader British and Irish identity, this B and I?
Good question: another question. Why does the GAA have a London team? Why do hurlers play a composite rules games with shinty? When two English gunmen shot an Irishman on June 22nd, 1922, how was it they were members of the IRA and he was a British field marshall? Reggie Dunne and Joseph O'Sullivan were born in England; their victim Sir Henry Wilson was born in Edgeworthstown.
Loyalties can be complex structures of opposing forces, like suspension bridges.
David Beckham in the shirt of Manchester United, one of the most powerful and all-conquering teams in the world, will have the impassioned support of vast numbers of Irish people, who normally love an underdog, against a team which hasn't got a chance; put him in the white shirt of England, an underdog team which hasn't won a sausage in 35 years, and most of those same Irish people would support a Gestapo team in preference.
IRA sniper
The IRA sniper who would happily shoot a teenage soldier from Leeds in the morning that afternoon could be cheering on the team the dead man would have been cheering too, if he wasn't in a morgue with a tag on his toe. And many of the stoutest opponents of B and Iism will as casually watch British television, buy British newspapers, consume British foodstuffs and be aware of British politics in a way which has simply no equivalent across Europe.
Identity doesn't merely bind, it excludes, often on spurious or ludicrous grounds. When delegates from the different tribes met in Sarajevo to discuss their future 10 years, they decided that they couldn't understand one another without interpreters, and insisted on Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Bosnian and Croat-Bosnian translations of everything which was said, though they understood one another perfectly.
This is an acute version of the phenomenon of finding tiny differences and turning them into talismans of identity. Part of this process requires a denial of commonality. Hence the furious rejection in some quarters in Ireland of the term "Home Countries", even though it is radiantly clear that the relationships between the people of these islands are more Scandinavian in their intimacy and their complexity than the relationship between Ireland and any other foreign country, or Britain and anywhere else.
Certain differences
This isn't to deny differences, only to state that they exist at levels which usually deny simple description. And we can put these differences away for an hour and a half for the duration of a football match, and then resurrect them with all their ferocious integrity at the final whistle, just as we can invent them for the same period and then abandon them. Part of us knows such differences can be dangerous things, a social plutonium that we contain in the lead-lined containers of things like the EU, the UN, and in more informal alliances, such as in a football crowd and social clubs, which are as much about uniting as they are about dividing.
In fact, we move in a swirl of conflicting loyalties, some of which are based on a created memory, others on geographical propinquity, and some - the Leeds-supporting IRA sniper - merely prove the strength of our desire to belong to some community, though it might exist entirely within our imaginations.
"Aye, but what about 1798?" rumbles Proinsias menacingly. "And what about 1916? Give me one good reason why an anachronism like the Lions is tolerated."
I can't, other than that rather like the giddy whirl of sub-atomic particles, we are bound by anachronism and accident, collision and contingency through time and space, endlessly and creating re-creating differing loyalties; and the Jonny Wilkinson whose boot I was cheering last Saturday, this coming October, I will be praying he misses every kick. For we humans like our many packs; and the B and I Lions was just another one.