Two sides still at play 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement

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Despite achieving a political stalemate between conflicting identities, Northern Ireland has struggled to achieve momentum towards a society defined by equal citizenship. The society remains divided even two decades after the Belfast Agreement signed on Good Friday 1998. This has consistently been exemplified by the culture and practices that surround support for and endorsement of Ireland’s two ‘national’ football teams. Football has become a part of the broader culture war arising as a consequence of the Northern Irish state having not yet identified a shared vision of a wider society within which differing national allegiances co-exist as equals. Even two decades after the peace agreement, there is no shared vision of Northern Ireland that embraces its two main, distinct definitions of nationhood. Although other sports such as rugby union, boxing and cricket have been able to survive the physical and cultural divorce of Irish partition, football remains a platform for contestation. For unionists, the sport of association football has often been inextricably linked with their sense of politics and identity. For nationalists on the other hand, the act of showing allegiance to the Northern Irish football team mirrors that of showing similar allegiance to the broader state within which many feel that they have never been accorded the role of equal partners. In that Northern Irish state, a British Protestant hegemony still dominates in terms of symbolism and official narratives. Although an increasing body of work has examined the perspective of players in choosing one national team over the other, less has been written about how this correlates with contestations in the wider society. Partially, this is because even though the loss of young nationalist footballers to the Republic of Ireland’s team has forced the IFA to look themselves in the mirror with regard to the situation, there has been very little broader reflection on how football serves as a mirror for Northern Irish society. This chapter thus argues that unless such reflection takes place there can be no progression in terms of building a shared society in Northern Ireland within which there is genuine equity for symbols, identities and political aspirations. Though only one part of a very complex scenario, the game of football and the Irish Football Association hold considerable sway in helping shape such a conversation. More than 20 years after the signing of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, that conversation feels long overdue, particularly in a fresh era of political contention.