Naming Sporting Event After IRA Leader is Obscene

Imagine the outcry if a youth football tournament in England were named after one of the London Bridge terrorists. Or if a community sports facility in Manchester bore the name of the Arena bomber. It would rightly be condemned as grotesque, inflammatory and utterly incompatible with the values of a decent society. And yet in Northern Ireland, we are expected once again to swallow the farce of honouring IRA terrorists under the guise of “commemoration”.

The latest insult comes in the form of a Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) youth tournament named after Joe Cahill, one of the founding figures of the Provisional IRA, whose record includes gun-running from Libya and lifelong justification of armed violence.

Cahill was a convicted terrorist whose career spanned decades of bloodshed. He was unapologetic about the IRA’s campaign of bombings and killings, which left thousands dead and many more lives shattered. Naming a “Joe Cahill Gaelic Competition” for under 12s is obscene.

Worse still, this act of glorification is happening at a time when the UK government is preparing to pour £50 million of taxpayers’ money into the redevelopment of Casement Park, the GAA’s flagship stadium in Belfast.

Public money should never be used to prop up organisations that celebrate terrorism. It sends a damaging signal to victims, to wider society and to young people learning history through the prism of sport. How can we say we are building a shared future when one section of that future is lionising men who tried to destroy the very notion of peaceful democracy

This is not about cultural expression or historical memory, it is about rewriting the past to sanctify those who waged war against the people of Northern Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant. It is about embedding the message that political violence is not only excusable but honourable. For years now, Sinn Féin has walked this morally repugnant line, from honouring hunger strikers to naming playgrounds and GAA events after known terrorists. It is part of a calculated political strategy: to cloak murder in martyrdom and to push their narrative unchallenged into the mainstream.

If the GAA wants to be a truly inclusive sporting body, it must reject the impulse to lionise gunmen, no matter how prominent they were within republican folklore, and stand with the victims of terror. And the UK government must stop pretending that these issues are separate from its financial support. You cannot fund an organisation with one hand and ignore its moral failures with the other. £50 million buys responsibility, not silence.

Note: This was first published in the Thunderer column of The Times.

Baroness Arlene Foster is a former First Minister of Northern Ireland and Chair of TUKF