You need wander only yards from the Brandywell Stadium to recognise Derry City’s position as no ordinary football club in no ordinary area. Slogans in support of the IRA, INLA and a united Ireland feature on the short journey towards the Bogside Inn. Likewise, a large mural making plain what some of those in the vicinity feel the Northern Ireland assembly has delivered since inception in 1998: poverty, unemployment, enforcing British government cuts and food banks feature on the list.
Derry City and Derry’s city – scarred by sectarian division, which still exists – are intrinsically linked. The old adage that sport and politics cannot mix is nonsensical in this electoral constituency where the vote to remain in the EU was the fourth-highest returned, at 78.3%. Derry City, the only Northern Ireland-based club in the League of Ireland, will kick off their season on Friday while – through no fault of their own – caught bang in the middle of political chaos. Little over a month into the season, the reality of Brexit means they will play every away fixture “back in” the EU, be it at Shamrock Rovers, Dundalk or Cork City. On Brexit Day, 29 March, they are due to host Sligo Rovers.
Officially, although besieged by questions, Derry City are making no comment about Brexit. The Football Association of Ireland has adopted an identical stance. The explanation for that lies in a theme common throughout the UK: uncertainty. The key themes, though, are easy to pinpoint: travel for supporters, movement of players, contracts, insurance, Uefa status. Derry City have a handful of players based in County Donegal, officially the Republic of Ireland. The core business of the club’s multimillionaire chairman and benefactor, Philip O’Doherty, has the same geographical status.
It is left to those on the outside, with experience of what border controls in Ireland mean, to use pre-Good Friday agreement times as a reference point for messy checkpoint practicalities. “There were long queues; you might well be pulled to one side and asked all sorts of questions about where you were going,” recalls Michael Kerrigan, who has barely missed a Derry fixture in more than three decades. “Maybe the bus you were on was a different colour five years earlier so you had to go through a process of identifying it: ‘Why was the bus colour changed?’ and that sort of thing. If you answered a question the ‘wrong’ way … It is much, much better at the moment; plain sailing.
“We don’t really know what’s going to happen regards the physicality of a border and of course we would have concerns. People can talk and talk but we don’t really know. We are hopeful things will be much as they are now. We aren’t politicians; we just want to go and watch football.”
Like so much in Northern Ireland, no assessment of an upcoming situation is possible without glances to the past. There remains resentment in Derry regarding the club being bundled firstly to Coleraine (because of security concerns) then out of the Belfast-based Irish League altogether in 1972. After a painful spell in the wilderness, Derry joined the League of Ireland in 1985, backed by home crowds of 12,000 and travelling support of routinely half that.
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