ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the prevalence and impact of racism within Irish football. In due course, when focussing on the situation in the Republic of Ireland, it will also outline a response to these issues by detailing the work of Sport Against Racism Ireland (SARI), a not-for-profi t organisation that seeks to promote social inclusion through the medium of sport. Its achievements in convincing national governing bodies (NGBs), notably the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), of the need to offer an adequate riposte to racism in that country demonstrate the capacity of voluntary agencies to generate meaningful change. In so doing, this chapter argues that there is a specifi city to racism on the island. The factors that give rise to its existence in Northern Ireland are different to those that permeate in the Republic of Ireland (McVeigh 1998). Thus, in the former case, racism is partly symptomatic of a society that has been divided in many different ways since its inception in 1922 and which require explanation in order to make sense of racially motivated behaviour in the present day. In the latter instance, there is evidence of an abject denial by some of the very existence of racism, and it appears that the inertia surrounding those who govern and manage sport is only successfully overcome by the energy of highly motivated, socially responsive grass-roots bodies (ibid.). This chapter refl ects on, and critically engages with, these two situations in the context of an overarching debate around racism in football in modern Ireland.
