Whilst I personally don't really sing any rebel songs I think there is a difference between old rebel songs and Troubles era rebel songs. I think GR agrees with this. However even if one doesn't think the song itself is offensive one must recognise that it has the capacity to offend some. JD even recognised this when he said he didn't have to agree with every lyric in it. So, at the very least he is guilty of bad judgment, and bad judgment in the context of being CEO of a body whose sport in UK and Ireland has issues with sectarianism rooted in Irish politics and Irish history.
I personally think that could be a resigning issue in many other organisations by itself. However, he hasn't resigned and there has been a lot of internet and newspaper letters support for him because he's only an Irishman singing an Irish song. The Irish Times is peddling a West Brit Agenda. I don't agree, but again that's not the big issue.
The big issue now is the instruction given to lawyers to deny it was JD and to threaten newspapers for telling the truth. Furthermore JD didn't have the decency to admit it was he who issued the denial, it was someone else who gave the lawyers this erroneous info. Then when it became obvious it was him in the video he claimed he was uncontactable by his colleagues because his partner was being cyber bullied (because some idiots wrote about her on YBIG.ie - which I presume she would have to have been reading at the time because the offending posts were deleted) which caused the misunderstanding between the FAI and the lawyers. We are asked to believe she was so shocked that he needed to console her for, what was it, two days? Then she goes and directly forwards insults to Emmet Malone's Twitter account, showing that maybe she is not so sensitive to the issue of cyber bullying after all.
Then the FAI issues a statement saing that the cyber bullying prompted its formal response and that the BoM thinks he doesn't have a case to answer and the matter is now closed. He deserves his highly unusual contractual arrangement because he has done some good stuff.
Nobody has any idea what degree of due process was involved in the BoM arriving at this view.
That's how I see it. We have moved on from the song.
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