Keeping Them Under Pressure: Masculinity, Narratives of National Regeneration and the Republic of Ireland Soccer Team

Abstract

Since 1988 the Republic of Ireland soccer team has been cast, in Irish media, as both symbol and material example of social, economic and cultural regeneration in Ireland. This paper argues that such claims are narrative discursive constructions, ways of collectively imagining national identity and interpreting recent social change by elevating individuals within the national team to the status of heroic national representatives and conjunctural markers of the tension between tradition and modernity. Two versions of this narrative are identified. The first is the construction of the team in terms of a narrative of postcolonial national ‘becoming’, which characterised the early years of Jack Charlton’s managerial reign, Charlton himself being the key symbolic figure. The second is the more recent figuring of the team as symbol and example of the recent ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom, the key player in which was Roy Keane. In both narratives, aggressively competitive masculinity is romanticised as a gauge of national achievement, and narrative progression is figured as the progressive displacement of outmoded masculinities by new forms. The interplay of constructions of national identity and masculinity reflects the interdependency and contingency of both forms of collective identity.