Last Sunday in Stade Félix Mayol the local band played a few tunes before Munster’s Champions Cup pool game at Toulon.
There was no reason to play the national anthems as it wasn’t an international match with a whole range of nationalities involved in both sides. But c’est la vie.
They played the thumping French anthem La Marseillaise and they played Ireland’s Call. If you were not Irish, you wouldn’t have noticed. An easy error to make, Ireland’s Call is still not the national anthem.
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The IRFU have done such an effective job in marketing Ireland’s Call as a sports anthem that, although it is not universally loved as a tune, most understand it’s a compromise for an island often hopelessly divided on certain issues.
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The Irish hockey teams, whose players come from all corners, also use Ireland’s Call, which was commissioned by the IRFU in 1995 to create an inclusive anthem for players and fans from all four provinces.
In hockey, which is also an all-Ireland team, the four provinces flag is also used, which recognises what rugby does: that some on the team and in the stands are Protestant, unionist and British and some are Catholic, republican and Irish.
None of these arrangements is perfect. None satisfies everybody, but people on both sides generally swallow the concept for a better good, which is the provision of a more comfortable place for athletes and the communities they come from.
Toulon’s quaint band of musicians played their music just as unionist party leaders and MLA’s were beginning to batten down the hatches with regards to the flag Northern Ireland athletes would use for this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
On BBC NI’s The Nolan Show, the chief executive of Commonwealth Games Northern Ireland (CGNI), Conal Heatley, explained he had been asking the government for guidance on which flag to use since November 2020 with no response.
Heatley said a more “inclusive” flag was required and the Ulster Banner – the red cross on a white background with the red hand of Ulster at the centre – was deemed offensive to some athletes.
“It’s recognised that the Ulster Banner holds cultural significance for a large section of one side of community in Northern Ireland ... there are people on the other side of community who don’t feel the same about that,” he told The Nolan Show.
The Ulster Banner was adopted as the flag of Northern Ireland by the Stormont administration in 1953. The administration was subsequently scrapped and in 1973 the flag ceased to have any official standing.
Despite that, it is still extensively used in Orange Order parades and along with the Union Jack is the flag that marks out the political territory in Northern Ireland. Those flags, along with that of Israel, are the three most prominent in loyalist areas across the north.
To paraphrase what Heatley was asking: listen up lads and lassies, the current flag is unacceptable to some team members, is there any chance you can come up with something else that is acceptable to everybody who is competing in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow?
The CGNI took it further and came up with a new logo, an abstract version of a red hand on a white background with Team NI in black lettering printed underneath.
Heatley was asking for an Ireland’s Call but in emblem form, one that had no political or sectarian connotations.
Then voices rose. Jim Allister (the TUV leader), Gavin Robinson (leader of the DUP), Ulster Unionist MLA Jon Burrows and the DUP Minister for Communities Gordon Lyons chimed in.
This week Heatley and the athletes got their answer as the political wagons circled. As ever, it had become a zero-sum game. Compromise be damned. The divisive Ulster Banner would remain.
Lyons, whose brief includes sport, wrote a two-page letter to CGNI criticising their plans to replace it.
[ Ulster Banner to remain NI flag for Commonwealth Games following guidance ]
“To remove or replace this flag now would not resolve division, it would create it,” he wrote on Tuesday.
“The Ulster Banner should be used as the flag for Northern Ireland athletes at the Commonwealth Games, including the upcoming Glasgow 2026 event and all future competitions.”
The CGNI accepted Lyons’s decision after what they said was “clear and unequivocal guidance.”
In the ebb and flow of NI politics, there must only be winners and losers. It’s the game they play, where every inch of turf is zealously defended or lost.
Conciliation is weakness. Normality is when artefacts from a previous administration from more than 50 years ago are held to so tightly that to preserve them politicians struggle around civic responsibility and duty to all the athletes they purport to serve.
The message going back to the Commonwealth Games team is loud and clear. The offended athletes are secondary to the issue of unionism’s sense of identity. Those politicians have the power to cling to an emblem and they will use that power.
Perhaps the upside is it might not be an ongoing issue. The colonial relic of the Commonwealth Games appears to be facing an existential crisis due to prohibitive costs and low profile.
Glasgow has just 10 sports listed for the summer after stepping in late on as host when the Australian state of Victoria pulled out.
If the games die, as many expect, perhaps one ugly aspect of politics on this island will go with them. Don’t hold your breath.
