It seems so obvious now to ask these questions, but the sportswashers relied on the media’s reluctance to mix up its own categories or to have someone like Miguel Delaney on a show like Today with Claire Byrne, talking about football and about matters beyond football. That’s all changed now, but it must continue until the last sinister oligarch is driven out of the game – forever, then. Indeed the absence of Neutrality was the very essence of a piece in which sportswriters Gavin Cooney and Joanne O’Riordan were talking to Claire Byrne about various rivalries, the intensity of which could be “absolutely turbulent”, as O’Riordan put it. Kerrigan emigrated to America, leaving his wife and four children in Ireland. “We have to go to sport...”

Source: Irish Independent March 20, 2022 04:09 UTC