Originally Posted by Strabane_Harp
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OK, just to try and get it back on track, a bit of history re Pats supporters clubs / groups, which might go some way to answering David's question.
Independent Saints was started up about six years ago with two main aims - organising trips to away matches and providing a channel for the club to actually talk to the fans. This was during the Dolan era when the club had effectively stopped doing either. The trips were successful but the dialogue part never really took off, apart from the odd token gesture - Dolan wasn't really into it as such.
Although IS never took an official position on Dolan, it just so happened (ahem!) that the entire committee was active to some degree or another in the Dolan Out campaign. There was a conscious and fairly flagrant refusal to have a democratically-decided IS position on the whole thing which I am absolutely NOT gonna go into here. Dodge and WWS will remember it though.
There was a bit of a Pats civil war over Dolan and I remember at one game down in Longford what we called the "Under 5s" singing "You can shove your Independent Saints up yer árse" at us IS heads; later on that night the night porter in the Longford Arms made everyone go to bed before a shouting match in the residents bar between the opposing factions escalated into an internecine digging match.
After the success of that campaign, the Shed End Invincibles was resurrected / spawned as a loose offshoot of IS. No offence to either David's sensibilities, or anyone who's a republican, but the best analogy was coined by WWS who compared IS-SEI to Sinn Fein-IRA. IS did the nice respectable organising away trips and dialogue parts (and since Andy O'Callaghan came in there's been more of a spirit of glasnost about the Pats board), while the SEI got to do all the fun pyrotechnical stuff with flares, smokebombs and banners. There was a fair overlap in terms of the people involved.
The SEI has been kinda dormant for the last two years or so, mainly cos Pats were cráp.
Pats For Richmond has seen a coming together of a lot of the people who are involved in IS plus a lot of the older Pats fans who used to be in the now-defunct St. Pats Supporters Club - a blend of youth and experience if ever there was one. One of the interesting aspects of that is that it's brought together people (well, two anyway) who literally came to blows over Dolan Out a few years back.
Parallel to that, and probably directly related to the upturn in our fortunes this season, the last few home games have seen a bit of a renaissance of the SEI, led by what used to be the "Under 5s". It was never a formal membership-based thing, more to do with a state of mind, but over the last few home games, the Shed has been fuller and a lot more vocal than for the last couple of years. It's almost as if the next generation of SEI is starting to assert itself which bodes well for the future.
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