Huddersfield Town’s Championship match against Stoke City
was halted on New Year’s Day for an announcement ordering home fans to stop
chanting, ‘Fuck the IRA’, or risk the match being abandoned.
James McClean, an Ireland international playing for Stoke,
complained to the referee about the chants, and in accordance with the
anti-discrimination protocol used by the Football League the game was suspended,
giving time for the official to talk to the two managers.
Michael O’Neil, the Stoke City head coach and former
Northern Ireland manager said, ‘James has been encouraged to report (any) abuse
he receives of a sectarian nature to the match official’. McClean has been
targeted by what he has described as ‘discriminatory abuse’ since refusing to
wear a ‘poppy shirt’ during the autumn Period of Remembrance - a protest
relating to the Bloody Sunday shootings in his home town of Derry, in January 1972.
The Equality Act 2010 both consolidated and updated the
numerous prior Acts and Regulations that formed the basis of
anti-discrimination law in Great Britain.
The Act introduced nine ‘protected characteristics’; age,
disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and
maternity, race, religion and belief, sex, sexual orientation.
On 22nd February 1972, just three days after the
Shots defeated Hartlepool at the Rec, the Official Irish Independence Army
(OIRA) targeted the headquarters of the British Army 16th Parachute
Brigade in Aldershot as a revenge attack for Bloody Sunday. Seven civilians
were killed and 19 were wounded by the massive car bomb delivered in the boot
of a Ford Cortina.
The OIRA issued a statement after the killings – ‘Any
civilian casualties would be very much regretted’.
Of course, there is a right time and the right place for considered
observation ….
No comments:
Post a Comment