Sport and Northern Ireland's political prisoners

What is it about?

Much of the recent literature on sport, political violence and terrorism has been focussed on security issues and, more critically, their potentially damaging implications for civil liberties. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the place of sport in the lives of the so-called terrorists themselves. This essay draws heavily upon personal experience of interaction with loyalist and republican prisoners in the Maze between March 1996 and October 1999. The main focus of the essay is on the ways in which these prisoners talked about and related to sport and the insights that discussions with them offered in terms of their wider political views. Sport was never dismissed by any of the prisoners I met as being of secondary importance to other matters - a diversion from the real world of politics. In fact, as our discussions revealed, politics was often presented as being intimately bound up with and embodied in sport cultures. On the other hand, their interest in sport also highlighted the fact that these were rather ordinary men, some of whom had shown themselves to be capable of committing seemingly extraordinary crimes.

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Why is it important?

The uniqueness of this article is that it is based on experiences not shared by any other sociologists of sport and very few social scientists more generally. The access to prisoners convicted of terrorist offences which the author was given made it possible for him to establish relationships with them and acquire meaningful insights into their lives and their attitudes to sport and much else besides.

Perspectives