Sports stars shocked at racism

Show Racism the Red Card Poster launch

By Karl Mc Ginty (Irish Independent)

"FIX," snorted an urchin at the back, his voice rich with Dublin devilment and just a touch of disappointment.

Like most young lads in the large, sweltering room, he'd had his eyes on the prize, a soccer ball signed by Liverpool's UEFA Cup-winning heroes.




Yet the winning ticket was held by Adetoyese Kemi, a student at The Kings Inn Secondary School for girls.

Of course it wasn't a fix. Just a delicious twist of fate which brought yesterday's formal launch of soccer's "Show Racism the Red Card" campaign in Ireland to a splendid conclusion.

With 20,000 free posters of the Republic of Ireland team and an educational CD-Rom available for distribution to schools, the campaign is making a determined effort to educate the nation's children through sport.

And as Kemi went up to collect her prize, one of her chums, just 17 and also from Nigeria, chatted briefly about the harsh realities of being young and black on the streets of Dublin right now.

Though immensely happy in school, she told of the sickening catalogue of abuse she endures daily from complete strangers and which, she confessed, "makes life miserable for blacks.

"We are usually told 'f..k off back home to where you came from' or they call us black monkeys," she said, fixing me straight in the eye as she asked: "Do I look like a monkey to you?"

She told of drivers shutting bus doors and speeding off before she can board. Or how "sometimes when I sit down, the person beside me will get up and go elsewhere.

"I don't understand it. Where I come from, if we saw whites we welcomed them warmly. But it's not just blacks. It applies to Russians or Chinese as well. People don't want us. Any of us."

The stars of English soccer have long played an influential role in making young people aware of the evils of racism.

Now the gospel according to Jed Grebby, the Newcastle United fan who started the hugely influential "Give Racism the Red Card" movement in Britain five years ago, has spread here.

At a function in the Irish Film Centre similar to many which have taken place at Premiership grounds all around England, Ireland aces Curtis Fleming and Kenny Cunningham sat with Steve McGuinness and Liam Kelly of St Pats and spoke frankly to a group of youngsters of the problem and the hurt it causes.

Grebby and the campaign's Dublin organiser, Gareth Mullen, opened proceedings by showing a 20 minute educational video featuring 73 famous football players, managers and personalities from 18 different nations.

Many Irish faces, from Paul McGrath to Niall Quinn, were prominent yet the words of England superstar Rio Ferdinand were particularly striking.

Ferdinand told how he'd be repeatedly stopped, as often as twice in ten minutes, by police suspicious of a young black driving an expensive car, to which Fleming quipped: "There's only two options, you're either a wealthy sportsman or a drugs dealer."

The chortling stopped when the £18m Leeds ace revealed that he had been a school with Steven Lawrence and of his fond regard for a cheerful, inoffensive youngster beaten to death by racists on a London street, a murder for which, controversially, there have been no convictions.

When the video stopped playing and questions were invited from the floor, up popped a little hand at the back. "Curtis, were you ever slagged off in school," asked a lad whose ginger hair matched his Manchester United jersey.

Revealing he was born and bred in Ballybough, Curtis said he and his brother had a few scrapes in the playground. "We got called nig nogs and all that ending up with me going home and crying. I'm 32 now and I still remember it. Maybe that tells you how much it hurt."

Fleming and Cunningham, though resident in England for the past 10 years, spoke of the unsettling aura they have noticed on the streets of their native city on recent visits home.

"I was used to being just one of the lads here but the looks I get now are a little different, until I open my mouth and they hear my Dublin accent," Curtis explains.