So Jamie O’Hara wants to become Irish. Well here’s something, Jamie. Go back to where you belong. You, or your kind, are not welcome here.
In many ways, the so-called good old days were the bad old days.
Days when the Irish players spoke, almost as one, with an English accent. When Tony Cascarino could bluff his way through Fifa’s eligibility requirements. When Mark Lawrenson, who would have been a certainty for England honours, would live to regret his all-too-premature decision to answer the call of the FAI.
Ireland and its famously widespread diaspora is a touchy subject
It was a curiously ambiguous thing, the relationship we had with Ireland’s football heroes.
We loved toasting Aldo’s goals with a pint of warm Harp in a packed pub. We leapt for joy when Ray Houghton put the ball in the English net. And the Italian net. And the Belgian net.
But those days are over and they should be over for good.
It’s better to have a crap team full of proud Irishmen than a decent side made up of failed wannabe Englanders.
Ireland and its famously widespread diaspora is a touchy subject. We all know that Irish men and women were compelled to leave the old sod in their droves as the fledgling republic and its downtrodding Catholic rulers struggled to create an economy worthy of the name.
"Plastic" heroes
We don’t have a problem with the Irishness of those forced to flee, who made corners of London and Liverpool and Coventry their own over the past 50 years.
Gary Breen was reared as an Irish child in London. He wore a green replica shirt into school on a Monday morning in 1988, a couple of days after Ray Houghton’s goal had done for England in Stuttgart, or so the story goes.
Kevin Kilbane considers himself a Mayo man. It’s an accident of chance and circumstance that he was born in Lancashire.
That Breen and Kilbane speak with an unfamiliar brogue does nothing to dilute their Irishness. This diatribe is not about them, or the rest of the exiled Irish community so disrespectfully tarred with the "Plastic" label.
No, the days when a row of Englishmen stand stony-faced for the Amhrán na bhFiann – or worse, as the famous old yarn about Terry Mancini goes, not even know which anthem is “ours” – are in the past, just where they belong.
Second-chance saloon
Jamie O’Hara, if we’re to believe what we’re told, has been invited before. He chose to stick with England, as is his right.
Kevin Nolan is another who refused to consider Ireland while his England dream remained alive.
Respect to Dave Kitson, the Stoke City striker who rebuffed overtures from the FAI earlier in his career because although he was eligible, he felt no connection with Ireland.
Kitson was English but not good enough for England. O'Hara is the same, but he could be offered a second chance by Ireland.
There should be no fallback option. After the events of the past few months, from Team 33 to Barca-gate, Irish football is a laughing stock. It would descend further into the gutter if we’re asked to cheer on someone like Jamie O’Hara.
Sometimes success at all costs just costs too much
