Final Word: We need to talk about the rugby

By Paul Moore

Everyone is talking about the rugby. Ireland it seems once more defeated England and there is great pleasure being taken from it. So there should be. The overwhelming arrogance of the English rugby establishment and their supporters are good value for any opportunity to knock them off their self-awarded perch. Unfortunately, I do not care a much as I might because it is rugby.

My experience of rugby is less than good and is, I know, one shared by many other older men.

I was fortunate/unfortunate to be sent to a second level school which was known for its rugby prowess. Since the rugby team, and those who played in it, had a position of power in the school if one was in any way adept at sport it seemed sensible to try and reach the heights of the first 15. It would have been helpful if someone had taken me aside and told me that, since my father worked in the shipyard, if I had been the best rugby player Northern Ireland ever produced I would not have been on the first 15. I also had the temerity to be good at soccer and was selected for the schoolboy international trials. My mother was sent for and told if I attended I would be expelled, something which I now know they could not legally do but, because my father worked in the shipyard, my mother believed.

The rugby team was trained by two genuinely sadistic men who terrorised those in their care.

They humiliated us – often by making us bend over and be beaten with a gym slipper – and ensured we were in fear at all times. My father died suddenly when I was 11 and on my return to the school I unfortunately had PE that morning.

The most evil of these two came in and seeing me announced, “I see the orphan is back.”

On another occasion when he felt I had not been engaged enough with a practice game he made my peers watch as he forced me to roll in the muddiest puddle on the pitch he could find. No doubt some of you reading think that was a jolly jape and did me no harm. He eventually went too far in his sadism and left the school, being moved three times by the rugby mafia to different schools until they could no longer protect him as his behaviour was so bad. Years later he apparently turned up at a school reunion saying he had accepted God and asked for forgiveness.

I was not there. I would rather have pins stuck in my eyes than attend a school reunion.

I am genuinely not seeking any kind of sympathy here since as I said I am certain dozens of people reading this have similar experiences. The point I am making is that at the core nothing has changed in rugby over the last 50 years. I say that because of the Paddy Jackson case and most recently I say it because of the Methodist College case where exactly the kinds of behaviour I and others were subjected to is still going on. It is wonderful that the young man in question in Methodist had parents who supported him to win a case against the school but it seems to me that there is little enthusiasm to bring those involved to any kind of public justice while the school makes a statement that the teacher concerned is still employed by the school.

If we ever want to have a more equitable civil space we have to stop making, or perhaps letting, these rugby playing young men believe they have a right to behave as they wish because they are good at a sport.

So yes everybody is talking about the rugby at the very moment while in fact, nobody is talking about the rugby.