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A Hundred Thousand Welcomes
... and 80 not-so-welcomes. It seems the winds of change are bypassing the Windy City.
A mostly young Northern Ireland team was picketed last night in Chicago by a small rabble of everyone's favourite schizophrenics demonstrating their shameless intolerance for the wrong kind of Irish. The Irish FA were attending an official engagement at the city's Gaelic Park, the main GAA club for the area, during a brief exhibition tour in which they faced Uruguay at the weekend and will play Romania on Friday.
The players and officials were reportedly heckled as they made their way from the ground entrance to the clubhouse with protestors wearing "IFA you're not welcome" t-shirts.
Follow up:
Obviously the fact that the Northern Ireland were invited in the first place shows that many Irish-Americans do not share the views of this rabble of bigots, masquerading as the "Committee Chicago Irish Against Sectarianism" (a name which is obviously either a joke or a prime example of newspeak). A club spokesman said that "At least 90% of the protesters were outsiders." Frankly I'm shocked that republican supporters would ever dream of shipping in protesters from outside the area so they can be "concerned" about something that's nothing to do with them. That would never happen in Northern Ireland.
No information seems to be forthcoming (either from the Tele report or from Google) about what exactly the Chicago Irish group were protesting about, nor whether it was the Catholic players on the team or the Protestant ones that they took issue with. Either way I think it's disgusting that such a blatantly sectarian incident should take place under the guise of a protest against sectarianism. My only guess is that they've swallowed the usual tripe about the "sectarian statelet" and "Free Presbyterian IFA" that those of us more adept at recognising blatant republican bullshit have become immune to.