James McClean, Wrexham’s new signing who suffers ‘more abuse than any other in England’

Editor’s note: This article has been updated in light of James McClean signing for Wrexham

Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2023. View the full list.

It came at a corner kick, as it so often does. James McClean trotted over and, as he got closer, he heard jeers, shouts, catcalls and horribly familiar words cascading down from the terrace behind the goal.

“F***ing Irish c***”, “Fenian b******”, “F*** off, you Irish Fenian c***”.

One guy near the front got up to walk to the next block and taunt the Wigan Athletic midfielder by waving a large flag at him — the Northern Irish flag, the Ulster Banner, representing the country of his birth but, as his provocateur must have known very well, not his sense of national identity.

McClean looked at them, the individuals spouting this bile from behind a barrier, and gave them his usual death stare.

He then turned to a steward and one of the assistant referees and told them what he had just heard, but the abuse continued. So, as advised in football’s anti-discrimination protocol, McClean walked over to the referee, Thomas Bramall, to tell him what was being shouted. The crowd jeered. One guy in the front row made a “crybaby” gesture.

Bramall noted the complaint and then told him to carry on with the game.

McClean trudged back over, pulling up his shorts, giving his detractors a flash of the “Free Derry” tattoo on his left thigh, and then — along with some kind of object — a chant rained down from the terrace, backed by a drumbeat.

“F*** the pope and the IRA, f*** the pope and the IRA.”

Wigan this is the blackpool fans response to him yesterday pic.twitter.com/3booTlGryl

— ryan (@ryandunbar1996) April 16, 2023

It got louder and louder. This wasn’t just a handful of fans, it was a substantial minority. But McClean had been told to get on with the game, so he did.

The same thing happened when he took another corner from the same position just before half-time.

“F*** the pope and the IRA, f*** the pope and the IRA.”

Just another Saturday afternoon in the life of James McClean – adored back in his home town in Derry but claims to be the subject of “more abuse than any other player in England”.

Ireland manager Stephen Kenny confirms James McClean will receive his 100th cap tomorrow against Gibraltar and will captain the team to mark his incredible achievement 🇮🇪

Our Jimmy 💚 pic.twitter.com/Jup5TLlwzV

— Ireland Football ⚽️🇮🇪 (@IrelandFootball) June 18, 2023

The date was April 15, 2023, and the place was Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road stadium, the stage for a fraught six-pointer in what was, ultimately for both clubs, a losing battle to avoid relegation from the Championship, a league two levels above Wrexham’s.

But it could have been almost anywhere, really. Because this stuff — variations on the same deeply unpleasant theme — has followed McClean up and down the country for more than a decade in English football.

It isn’t always as blatant as it was at Blackpool, where the chants were so loud, so clear and so explicitly anti-Catholic that the English Football Association announced an investigation.

Blackpool were charged with misconduct by the FA and fined £35,000 as they “failed to ensure that spectators and/or its supporters (and anyone purporting to be its supporters or followers) conduct themselves in an orderly fashion whilst attending the Match and do not use words or otherwise behave in a way which is improper, offensive, abusive, indecent or insulting with either express or implied reference to religion.”

Blackpool also stated that “an action plan has now been imposed to deter a recurrence of any further misconduct. Should an incident such as this happen again, further implications could be imposed such as increased financial sanctions or the possibility of fixtures taking place behind closed doors.”

It is only the second time a club has been charged in relation to abuse of this nature. The previous case, three years ago, saw Barnsley fined £20,000 for sectarian chants directed at McClean when he was playing for Stoke City.

But McClean would say these two cases — plus when Kirk Broadfoot, then a defender for Rotherham United, was banned for 10 matches for using “abusive and/or insulting words” towards him in a match in 2015 — were merely the tip of the iceberg.

Over the past year or so, The Athletic has witnessed it at Wigan matches against Sunderland and Stoke, two of his former clubs, and Bolton Wanderers. To that list, McClean would add matches against Luton Town, Millwall and even a game against Bristol City, where he claimed people in the Wigan end (not necessarily Wigan fans, he said) shouted “sectarian abuse”, including “a song that celebrates the death of Catholics”.

Accrington Stanley, Queens Park Rangers, Barnsley, Portsmouth, Rotherham, Plymouth Argyle, Huddersfield Town… north and south, cities and towns, the list of alleged flashpoints goes on and on.

And nothing — almost nothing — is done about it. And beyond McClean’s Instagram account, almost nothing is said.

Because, as Roisin Wood, the former chief executive of the Kick It Out anti-discrimination charity, tells The Athletic: “It’s something the football industry and the football community doesn’t understand.”

Brings it on himself, doesn’t he?

Sometimes he does. Some of the things he has said and done over the years — most notoriously an egregious social media post in which he wore an IRA-style balaclava in a joke about giving his children a “history lesson” — have inflamed the situation and invited opprobrium.

Watching him at Stoke in April, winding up the home fans he once labelled “uneducated cavemen”, he looked like someone revelling in the hostility.

McClean facing his old club Stoke in April (Photo: Gareth Copley/Getty Images)

“I’ve said to James he doesn’t help himself at times,” says his former Sunderland and Ireland team-mate David Meyler. “There have been times when he has reacted and it has got worse. There have been times when I’ve told him I wish I could take his phone off him to stop him jumping on social media.

“But at the same time, I can understand him reacting because the level of abuse he gets — anti-Irish, anti-Catholic — is beyond belief. For a long time, it has been swept under the carpet and it’s sickening to think it has got to this level and carried on for such a long time.

“No higher authority has spoken up for him. As a friend and a team-mate, I wish I had done more to speak up for him publicly and say: ‘This abuse he’s getting is not acceptable. This needs to stop.’

“And this goes all the way back to 2012 when he was a young player at Sunderland. And the poppy.”

For the first 15 months of his career in England, McClean’s was a feel-good story.

He had been a late developer, coming through the youth ranks at Institute, a semi-pro club in his home town of Derry in Northern Ireland before moving on to Derry City and then, aged 22, getting a move to the Premier League and joining Sunderland in a £350,000 deal in August 2011.

He forced his way into their team and made his debut for the Republic of Ireland two months later. He had represented Northern Ireland at youth level but switched allegiance to the Republic — always a controversial move but one that had been taken by Darron Gibson and Shane Duffy, also from Derry, over the previous years.

Upon being called up for the Republic’s Euro 2012 squad, McClean explained that, as a Catholic from Derry, he had never felt he belonged in the Northern Ireland setup and that it had been “hard to stand for that national anthem (God Save The Queen) and see all the flags, the sectarian flags and the chants as well”.

“You don’t feel part of that,” he said. “Especially me, from where I grew up.”

That attracted a backlash on social media, with one Twitter user calling him a “dirty Fenian b******” and telling him “I’ll make sure you get shot when you set foot back into gods country” (sic). Another said he deserved to be shot.

McClean, typically, had a go back, mocking Northern Ireland’s failure to qualify for those Euros. It got a lot of publicity in Ireland, but in England, the media coverage focused more on his reaction — hastily deleting his Twitter account — than on the nature of the abuse that had driven him to do so.

Everything changed for McClean later that year. Sunderland were playing away to Everton on November 10, the day before Remembrance Sunday, and both teams were given shirts with red poppies embroidered on the chest — the red poppy being worn, according to the Royal British Legion, as a symbol of remembrance and a show of support for the Armed Forces community.

McClean immediately objected, saying he would not wear a shirt bearing the poppy. He said that doing so would offend people from his community in Derry, the scene of the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1972, when 14 men, all Catholics, were shot dead by British soldiers during a protest march.

During the game, it was spotted that McClean’s shirt had no poppy. Journalists sought clarification from Sunderland officials, who confirmed the player’s decision and said it had been his “personal choice not to wear a poppy on this occasion”.

McClean – without a poppy on his shirt – chases down Everton’s Seamus Coleman (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

This time, the backlash in England was more aggressive and more sustained. Some called it a disgrace. Others suggested he should not be allowed to earn a living in England if he was not willing to pay his respects to those who lost their lives while fighting for their country.

McClean asked if he could explain himself publicly. The Sunderland hierarchy responded by telling him to keep his head down and say nothing rather than risk inflaming the situation. He would later say he had been “hung out to dry” by Sunderland — silenced “more for the club’s benefit than mine”.

The abusive messages kept coming and he was booed by some Sunderland fans when he came on as a substitute in their next game, away to Fulham. Sunderland’s then-manager Martin O’Neill, who had captained Northern Ireland at the 1982 World Cup, revealed afterwards that McClean had received death threats and been interviewed by police the night before the game.

“It was the way the whole situation was handled,” Meyler says. “It was just dumped out there: ‘He’s not wearing it.’ And you saw how people reacted to it.”

McClean’s wife, Erin, says she watched that match on television “in absolute fear” — her first experience of a feeling of dread that has become all too familiar as the years have passed.

In 2021, McClean shared a series of messages that had been forwarded to him by his younger brother, Patrick, who played for Glentoran in the Northern Irish Premiership.

In the first of these messages, a stranger — seemingly a teenage boy — said he hoped all the McClean family would burn in a house fire.

The same stranger then sent a follow-up message, correcting himself. “No,” he said. “I would much rather James go up in flames on a chair while his kids are tied up opposite to him on three separate chairs to watch their dirty, stinking, Fenian, rebel b****** of a dad burn to a crisp. Maybe that’s better than dying in a house fire.”

“Where do you start with that? It was actually sent by a kid. This is a kid writing this,” James McClean told Irish sports show Off The Ball in 2021. “He looked about 13, 14. Where is that hate (coming from)?”

It was these messages that prompted his wife to issue a statement of her own, saying there isn’t a day goes by without one of them receiving “a message of some sort, whether it be a threat or else telling us to get the f*** out of England. We’ve been spat at, shouted at. Nights out have been ruined by people making remarks towards him”.

Erin said they had become largely immune to the abuse. “But what we cannot accept,” she said, “is threatening our family home and our children’s lives. They don’t deserve this.”

There is often a tendency to downplay such threats, recalling former Manchester United defender Phil Jones’ colourful description of “keyboard warriors” who post abusive messages while sitting in their underwear “eating a Pot Noodle”.

But one of the threats McClean received after the poppy controversy at Sunderland — which included images of 5.56mm bullets and the suggestion the player “deserves to be shot dead + body dragged past the Cenotaph” — was found to have come from a 29-year-old former soldier named Cody Lachey, who described himself as an “enforcer” and subsequently served time in prison in connection with gangland crime.

Several years later, posting a comment on an article about McClean, Lachey described him as “a dirty f***ing Republican anti-fascist prick” and a “brain-dead, thick-as-pig shit, typical thick Irish lad, brainwashed over the history of his shitty country”. Another line: “Inside every Irishman, woman and child is a frustrated ENGLISH man trying to get out”.

Lachey added that Bloody Sunday “was one of the greatest days in the history of the British Army”, declaring himself to be “a proud former soldier and proud fascist”. He did not respond to The Athletic’s attempts to contact him for this article.

At the end of the 2018-19 season, McClean attended an event in Dublin to promote the FA of Ireland’s community work. He was talking positively about the event when a reporter asked him whether the abuse was still happening.

McClean said it was. He said he had been ignored by the English football authorities — not just the FA but also Kick It Out, the game’s leading anti-discrimination charity.

He said both organisations had rightly supported England forward Raheem Sterling when he had been racially abused on social media and in a match at Chelsea, but that he had suffered abuse regularly “for the past seven or eight years — and there hasn’t been a peep, a single word or contact”.

“Nothing will ever be done,” McClean said. “I’m a white Irishman. To put it bluntly, that’s not high on the agenda in England.”

It struck a nerve. “James called us out publicly… and you know what? He was right,” says Troy Townsend of Kick It Out.

“I reached out to him around that time. He pretty much slaughtered everybody and, to be honest, he was within his rights to. I went up to Stoke and we had a really good talk about the whole situation.

“James felt let down. He felt football was just ignoring the abuse he received — and that when he snapped and reacted, they would punish him for that. He talked about the impact on his family and his children. He showed me some of the abuse he receives. It was appalling.

“When it’s a black player receiving abuse of that nature, people are rightly in arms about it. When it’s James McClean and it’s anti-Irish and anti-Catholic abuse, it seemed to be getting ignored.

“It’s as if people are frightened to talk about it, or they don’t want to, or they don’t know how to, or they don’t understand it.”

For an explanation of why McClean has rejected the poppy, it is perhaps best to quote directly from the open letter he sent to Wigan chairman Dave Whelan in 2014 in an attempt to explain his stance.

In that letter, McClean expressed his respect for those who died in the two world wars and said: “If the poppy was a symbol only for the lost souls of World War I and II, I would wear one.”

But, he added: “The poppy is used to remember victims of other conflicts since 1945 and this is where the problem starts for me.

“For people from the north of Ireland, such as myself — and specifically those in Derry, the scene of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre — the poppy has come to mean something very different.

“Please understand, Mr Whelan, that when you come from Creggan like myself or the Bogside, Brandywell or the majority of places in Derry, every person still lives in the shadow of one of the darkest days of Ireland’s history — even if like me you were born nearly 20 years after the event. It is just a part of who we are, ingrained into us from birth.

“Mr Whelan, for me to wear a poppy would be as much a gesture of disrespect for the innocent people who lost their lives in The Troubles — and Bloody Sunday in particular — as I have in the past been accused of disrespecting the victims of WWI and WWII. It would be seen as an act of disrespect to those people, to my people.”

As Dervla Murphy wrote in her book A Place Apart: Northern Ireland In The 1970s, Derry is different.

Geographically, it lies three miles inside the border separating Northern Ireland (and thus the UK) from the Republic of Ireland. Spiritually, it lies far beyond.

The Battle of the Bogside in August 1969 — a fierce clash between nationalist protestors on one side and police and loyalist protestors on the other — was followed by riots across Northern Ireland. British troops entered Derry that month and occupied the city throughout The Troubles.

Over almost three decades of conflict, more than 3,500 people were killed, more than half of them because of terrorist acts by the Provisional IRA, an off-shoot of the Irish Republican Army that had contested the Civil War half a century earlier.

This April saw the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace — relatively speaking — to Northern Ireland. But in Derry, tensions remain.

It is still a city that is divided, as well as disconnected (in terms of both geography and infrastructure) and disadvantaged. Creggan Central and Creggan South are among the most deprived council wards in the UK.

The city still bears the scars of The Troubles. The huge sign that tells visitors “You are now entering Free Derry” is striking — as are the murals on street corners in the Bogside, several of which commemorate the victims of Bloody Sunday, when soldiers from the British army’s Parachute Regiment opened fire during a protest march.

The Bogside area of Derry in Northern Ireland (Photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The atrocity on the day was followed by a British government inquiry that largely exonerated the soldiers, until the Saville Inquiry, published in 2010, concluded that the victims were unarmed, the British paratroopers “lost control” and that, while there was some shooting by republican militaries, “none of this firing provided any justification for the shooting of civilian casualties”. It also said that many of the soldiers involved had “knowingly put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing”.

David Cameron, then the UK prime minister, said the conclusions were “absolutely clear: what happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable”. Lord Saville said: “Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded — and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.”

This is what McClean means when he talks about being raised “in the shadow of one of the darkest days of Ireland’s history”.

Stadium of Light, Sunderland, October 15, 2022. Wigan are on Wearside for a Championship game, the first time McClean has faced his former club since January 2017. Time has not been a healer.

As the two teams line up to kick off, a chant starts in the South Stand.

“F*** the IRA, f*** the IRA, f*** the IRA.” 

The chant is aired repeatedly throughout the game. It’s one McClean hears almost on a weekly basis, but rarely as loudly as this.

The FA has occasionally expressed discomfort when it has been chanted by England fans; there was an apology after it was sung during a friendly against Scotland at Glasgow’s Celtic Park in 2014. But because it is not considered to reference nationality or religion specifically, no action is taken when it is chanted at McClean.

After all, “F*** the IRA” is a sentiment that would be echoed by many across Britain and Northern Ireland. According to a research project by the University of Ulster, the Provisional IRA was responsible for 1,705 deaths over the course of The Troubles — among them 1,009 British military personnel, 312 British law enforcement personnel and 508 civilians.

But… should a player with known Irish nationalist sympathies be faced with chants of “F*** the IRA” up and down the country, week after week, and so little be said or done about it?

It isn’t just the chants. It’s the shouts and catcalls directed at McClean throughout the game.

McClean faces former club Sunderland for the first time in more than five years (Photo: Michael Driver/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

One Sunderland season ticket holder of Irish heritage, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals, says he left at half-time “because I couldn’t stand it”.

“I can handle ‘F*** the IRA’, but not ‘Irish b******’, ‘Irish c***’, ‘Fenian b******’,” he says. “I tried to tell the stewards about it. You just get, ‘I’ll listen out for it’, but nothing happens.”

Sunderland responded to McClean’s complaints at the time by stating its “zero-tolerance policy against all forms of discrimination” and condemnation of “any supporter found to be engaging in any form of discriminatory behaviour”. The club referenced “multiple incidents” in the opening weeks of the season that had “resulted in ejections, stadium bans and criminal investigations”.

But there were no ejections that day. There were certainly no arrests. A spokesperson for Northumbria Police says they “received a report of hate crime”, which was “fully investigated, but due to a lack of evidence in the case, a prosecution could not be progressed”.

It was the same away to Blackpool in April. Lancashire Police have told The Athletic that having “received a third-party report that a player was subjected to racist abuse” during the match in question, “despite our best efforts we have been unable to identify a suspect at this time. The investigation has been closed pending any new lines of enquiry coming to light”.

Chelsea launched an investigation in September 2021 after video footage emerged of a spectator shouting anti-Catholic abuse at John McGinn, Aston Villa’s Celtic-supporting Scottish midfielder. As he prepared to take a corner, McGinn was subjected to shouts of “You f***ing Fenian b******.”

No formal action was announced at the time, but it has emerged that Chelsea identified the spectator in question and banned him. The season-ticket holder who sold him the ticket for that match was also suspended.

The Sunderland fan mentioned earlier believes, like Kick It Out, that there is a wider problem —  one that goes beyond McClean and the club he left under a cloud a decade ago.

“People will say it’s only James McClean who gets it and it’s nothing to do with him being Irish, just the way he left the club,” the fan says. “But that doesn’t wash with me. I’ve heard fans getting off the train in London singing about being ‘up to our knees in Fenian blood’. I’ve sat there by the corner flag and heard a fan shout ‘Fenian b******’ at one of our own players.

“And this is Sunderland — a city with a big Catholic population and a club with strong links to Ireland and some great Irish players. A large number of people in that stadium have Irish heritage. But it’s not related to one club or one player. I genuinely believe there is a sectarian issue around the sport.”

Liam Beckett was McClean’s manager when he was a young player breaking through at Institute.

“And you might not believe this, but he was the quietest lad in the dressing room,” says the 71-year-old, who also managed Ballymoney United and Cliftonville. “I know the lad and I like him. He’s a decent young man. I feel for him at times. I try to stick up for him — and I have to say it isn’t always easy when, like me, you come from the other side (of the religious divide).”

Beckett makes no bones about it. He believes McClean “made a rod for his own back by making his political views public”.

“Northern Ireland is a country where everyone has political views,” he says. “But most people keep those views to themselves. And high-profile sportsmen should definitely keep those views to themselves.”

In Beckett’s case, that meant bowing his head solemnly when, playing for Drogheda United on the other side of the border at the height of The Troubles, he faced the tricolour as The Soldier’s Song, the Irish national anthem, was played before matches.

It even meant keeping quiet when, despite being a Protestant, he would attract shouts of “Fenian b******” from opposition fans on account of his Catholic-sounding first name.

Specifically, Beckett believes McClean was wrong to reject the poppy, wrong to state his reasons for doing so, wrong not to turn to face the English flag while God Save The Queen was played before his West Bromwich Albion side faced Charleston Battery during a pre-season tour of the United States in 2015, and terribly wrong to make that Instagram post with the balaclava in a severely misguided joke about home-schooling his children during the Covid-19 pandemic.

McClean has admitted the balaclava post, for which Stoke fined him two weeks’ wages, was “ill-judged on my part”. “It was supposed to be funny, the balaclava and the caption,” he told Off The Ball in 2021. “It’s only a few minutes later you think of the hurt it might cause some people.”

Meyler winces at the mention of the incident. This is what he means when he says his former team-mate “doesn’t help himself at times”.

But he also suggests some of McClean’s more provocative acts — the social media posts, the exchanges with opposition fans — should be seen in the context of “10 years of constant abuse”. A defence mechanism, perhaps, or an attempt to “own” the abuse rather than be dragged down by it.

Either way, the suggestion McClean, or any player, should be forced to wear the poppy, as a professional footballer in England, is a strange one.

For one thing, it shows an ignorance of his personal feelings, which stem from his upbringing in a city — and specifically an area of a city — in which the British armed forces were regarded as the enemy before Bloody Sunday, let alone afterwards.

For another thing, even the Royal British Legion charity defends the individual right not to wear a poppy.

Remembrance Sunday is meant to be a time of quiet dignity and respect rather than some of the overblown tributes witnessed over the past decade as football clubs have tried to “outpoppy” each other — all part of a discourse which, in the social media age, seemed to start in 2008 with a furious reaction to the Girls Aloud singer Nadine Coyle, also from Derry, appearing without a poppy during a performance on leading breakfast-time show GMTV.

The Royal British Legion said: “The decision to wear it must be a matter of personal choice. To insist that people wear it would be contrary to everything that it stands for. We offer our full support to James for exercising his right to choose not to wear a poppy.”

In November 2018, Serbia midfielder Nemanja Matic issued a statement on Instagram to explain why he had not worn a poppy on his Manchester United shirt in their match against Bournemouth.

He said that he had “total sympathy for anyone who has lost loved ones due to conflict”, but added that, to him, the symbol “is only a reminder of an attack that I felt personally as a young, frightened 12-year-old boy living in Vrelo as my country was devastated by the bombing of Serbia in 1999”.

Matic, too, attracted criticism and abuse on social media. One Twitter user told him he should “f*** off home if he doesn’t respect the poppy”, adding that he and McClean “can go and die in the same hole”.

But it passed over very quickly. As far as anyone at United can recall, there were no death threats or anti-Serbian chants or shouts from rival fans, despite Matic being a much higher-profile player at one of the biggest clubs in world football. His explanation was taken at face value and widely understood; he did not have to go into specifics about the NATO bombing campaign or the background to it or face accusations that he was on the wrong side of history.

Yet the abuse McClean got in November 2012 was precisely in response to him not wearing a poppy.

It was nothing to do with provocative social media posts or winding up opposition fans. That all came later.

It sounds like a double standard: while Matic’s decision and explanation were quietly accepted for the most part, McClean (born in the UK but identifying as Irish, as the Good Friday Agreement permits) was simply expected to fall into line.

Should he have stayed silent? That didn’t do him much good at Sunderland, given the amount of abuse sent his way. When he outlined his reasons publicly after joining Wigan for the first time in 2013, it seemed to bring some degree of understanding among the wider public but more hostility from the terraces.

Damned if you do explain, damned if you don’t — as if the only option acceptable to his detractors was to do as Beckett suggests: accept the path of least resistance and wear the poppy — even if McClean felt doing so would have been “a gesture of disrespect” to his own community.

Nobody could accuse McClean of failing to stand up for what he believes in.

But some have accused him of a blinkered view of history — “brainwashed” as Irish sportswriter Tommy Conlon wrote in his column in The Times in 2019, “with a simplistic version of the distressing story that surrounded him in Northern Ireland”.

Conlon supported McClean’s right not to wear the poppy: “For anyone who believes in freedom of expression, it is not a misdemeanour at all.” But he took issue with the player’s line about beliefs being “ingrained into us from birth”. That, Conlon wrote, “is an admission that he has been force-fed a version that leans heavily on denial, self-pity and sentimental nationalism”.

Many commentators have referenced a new wave of “romantic nationalism” in Ireland, celebrating not just Wolfe Tone, the father of the republican movement, and the Irish Republican Army of the Civil War period, but, among some, the Provisional IRA.

McClean’s favourite quote after facing abuse from opposition fans (“They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn’t want to be broken”) is a line from Bobby Sands, the Provisional IRA member who died on hunger strike in 1981 in protest at the treatment of prisoners.

Along with his fondness for band the Wolfe Tones — declaring on Twitter that his favourite song is their The Broad Black Brimmer, which is about a boy learning about his father who was killed fighting for the (original) IRA during the Irish Civil War — he leaves little doubt about his nationalist leanings.

That is not the same as endorsing terrorism or the Provisional IRA. McClean stated in an Off The Ball interview in 2020 that the “F*** the IRA” chants don’t bother him because he has “never been a member of the IRA”.

In that open letter to Whelan, he said he was “not a warmonger or anti-British or a terrorist or any of the accusations levelled at me in the past. I am a peaceful guy. I believe everyone should live side by side, whatever their religious or political beliefs, which I respect, and ask for people to respect mine in return”.

Of his love of rebel songs, he told the Irish Independent in 2015: “Like, I’m from Ireland. Was it a crime me listening to Irish music? Music that I’ve grown up with? That I’d say 95 per cent of the population I grew up with listened to.”

And yes, there might be a simplistic, sentimental nationalism in Ireland — green, white and orange, no shades of grey — but similar might also be said to apply in Britain, where the shame of Bloody Sunday is so often glossed over, like other aspects of its colonial past.

But whether it is “sentimental nationalism” or something else, Ireland has become more polarised, not least since the Brexit vote of 2016.

On the day of the referendum that took Britain (and that includes Derry) out of the European Union, McClean tweeted: “Reignition of the flames of (Irish) reunification” — a line that proved far more perceptive than the assurances from UK government ministers who rejected talk that Northern Ireland might prove a complication in the years of Brexit negotiations that followed.

In a Northern Ireland Life And Times poll in 2016, 63 per cent of Protestants described themselves as unionist and 53 per cent of Catholics described themselves as nationalist. The equivalent poll in 2021 brought figures of 69 per cent and 64 per cent respectively.

A recent poll in The Sunday Times said that only seven per cent of 18-to-34-year-olds in the Republic of Ireland gained most of their learning about The Troubles from school — as opposed to family members (21 per cent), television (21 per cent) or social media (18 per cent).

Thirty-seven per cent of the same age group believed the British army was responsible for the greatest number of deaths during The Troubles. Only 14 per cent suggested it was republican paramilitary groups such as the Provisional IRA. Official studies attribute eight per cent of the fatalities directly to the British Army and 58 per cent to republican paramilitaries.

That disparity hints at what Conlon wrote about it regarding inaccurate, sentimental interpretations of The Troubles.

In English and Welsh schools, on the other hand, The Troubles are barely touched upon.

As former Kick It Out chief executive Wood says, when you are in mainland Britain, to talk of the Civil War is to conjure images of a 17th-century conflict — “rather than the one that was part of your country in the last century”.

Bet365 Stadium, Stoke-on-Trent, April 18, 2023. Wigan are in town, desperately needing a win in their battle to avoid relegation to League One.

And that means McClean is back, ready to renew hostilities with Stoke, the club he left in 2021. He clashed first with supporters (“uneducated cavemen” as he called them, remember, after hearing chants directed at him over the poppy) and later with Michael O’Neill, their Northern Irish manager at the time.

He was greeted with boos, followed in the 12th minute by chants of “F*** James McClean” from the Boothen End. It was all fairly half-hearted at that point, but it became more visceral after half-time.

“F*** the IRA, f*** the IRA, f*** the IRA.”

When Wigan took a 1-0 lead, McClean turned to the home fans in the Tile Mountain Stand with his arms outstretched. Then he cupped an ear to the fans in the Caldwell Construction Stand. From this point, public enemy number one status was restored.

Martin Smith, who edited Stoke’s long-running Oatcake fanzine, is a former serviceman who served in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, but he never begrudged McClean’s stance on the poppy.

“He won a lot of people over — not everyone — by working his socks off for the team,” Smith says. “He won the fans’ player of the season award when he was here. That’s people judging him on what he did for the team. And then, sadly, things went the other way and it brought him into direct conflict with the fans.”

Smith cites the fall-out with O’Neill as one factor, but also a weariness with McClean’s social media posts — not just the infamous “cavemen” and “balaclava” posts, but those of him wearing Germany and Italy shirts before they faced England at the European Championship two years ago.

“The word is ‘shithousery’,” Smith said. “He was performing for a crowd back home in Ireland and I think it upset a lot of Stoke fans.”

Some had been against him from the start. “The minority who make the headlines, some of them went too far,” Smith says. “To most of us, he was a good player who did well for Stoke, lost his way a bit and did some daft things, which didn’t help. To some of the others, the ‘No Surrender’ brigade, James McClean was everything they hated.”

Every summer sees Feile Derry, a festival to promote the city’s arts scene. Before last year’s event, the people behind it talked about various ideas, which included commissioning some new street art.

“Like in many cities, there’s a lot of unsightly graffiti, so we wanted to work with street artists to try to bring some colour to the area,” says Gareth Stewart, one of the festival’s organisers. “We thought, ‘Who would be a good role model?’ There were a number of very good candidates, but the obvious answer was James McClean.”

The mural in Creggan, by a Dublin-based artist known as Aches, is enormous and striking, painted on the side of a building known locally as the Corned Beef Tin.

“James McClean grew up just a few yards away,” Stewart says. “The primary school he went to is a few hundred yards away. He played football on a pitch just behind where that wall is, and the mural has had such a positive impact.

“Creggan has had a lot of negative coverage, but this is a very positive story. People here are very proud of where they’re from and they’re very proud of James and what he’s achieved in his football career. It’s inspirational.”

Most obviously, McClean has fought his corner when it came to the poppy issue and the backlash he has faced, standing up for a community whose voice is seldom heard.

“It would be very easy, getting paid a lot of money every week, to become ingrained in the footballer’s life over there and forget about his life and the people back home,” Stewart says.

“James is the opposite. He comes back here and he does a lot of charity work that goes unseen — helping people out, helping organisations out. He doesn’t shout about it. He’s a proud Irishman, a proud Derryman, proud of being from Creggan, but he’s a very modest fella and we just wanted to say we’re proud of him.”

Many footballers do charity work, but what stands out about McClean’s is its spontaneous, low-key nature: paying for two boys from Derry to go to Disneyland after they lost their father; inviting a five-year-old girl with cerebral palsy to be his guest at an Ireland match after seeing online footage of her being mocked by a spectator at a League of Ireland game; donating PPE equipment to frontline workers; even, as a Stoke player, a £5,000 donation to help pay the staff wages at Wigan after the club went into administration in 2020.

Most uplifting of all, perhaps, is a story that doesn’t involve money.

In 2017, Kevin Morrison, a Derry City fan, mentioned on social media that his son Adam was in a Down’s Syndrome football team, Oxford Bulls, but they couldn’t find anyone to play against them.

The next day, he received a Facebook message from someone purporting to be McClean, saying: “I’m playing a match on Tuesday night but I’ll be back in Derry at lunchtime on Wednesday. How does that sound?”

Morrison was sceptical, but, sure enough, the Ireland international turned up with some friends and played against Adam and his friends. The footage is wonderful.

Above all, McClean supports autism charities, a subject that has been close to his heart since his daughter Willow-Ivy was diagnosed at the age of four. He was heavily involved in the launch of a new sensory hub at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, where Ireland play their home matches.

In March this year, McClean announced that, having learned more about autism, he had put himself forward for assessment and he too had been diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. He had been unsure whether to go public but decided World Autism Acceptance Week was the time to do so, to let his daughter know “that I understand and that being autistic won’t and should never hold her back from reaching her goals and dreams”.

McClean’s 99th full international appearance, away to Greece on Friday, was not a happy occasion. Ireland lost 2-1, a second consecutive defeat in their Euro 2024 qualifying campaign, and his impact as a second-half substitute was negligible other than an overhit corner in the closing stages.

But his 100th cap, against Gibraltar, a 3-0 victory, was a significant landmark with McClean as captain.

“He’s been an incredible servant to Ireland,” Kenny said ahead of the game. “You see (Croatia’s Luka) Modric playing at 37. You wouldn’t (discount) James playing to that age.”

McClean questions the referee during the Republic of Ireland’s defeat by Greece (Photo: Seb Daly/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

McClean is no Modric; he has spent the majority of his playing career in the Championship as a spirited, industrious, determined but unpolished winger or wing-back. But he is still going strong at 34. He was recently named Wigan’s player of the year, his third such award following one in his first spell at the club and another with Stoke.

He is only the seventh man to win 100 caps for Ireland — and their first centurion to have been born in Northern Ireland.

“It wouldn’t matter if James played for Real Madrid,” former Derry player and manager Tony O’Doherty told the Irish Mirror. “The green of Ireland would always mean more to him.”

At a pre-match news conference before playing Gibraltar, McClean was asked to pick a highlight from his 99 caps. His debut? Playing at Euro 2012 and Euro 2016? A dramatic, thunderous winner away to Wales in a key World Cup qualifier in 2017?

“Representing Ireland,” he replied. “Being able to do that just once was special.

“I’ve never hidden the fact of how proud I am to be Irish. To be given the opportunity to step on the pitch and affect games for your country. That’s what I’m proudest of.”

When the independent commission met to discuss what happened at Blackpool that day in April. It is not about whether the “F*** the pope and the IRA” chants happened. It was about whether the Lancashire club “failed to ensure” that its supporters behaved in an orderly fashion.

In the case involving Barnsley three years ago, one detail to emerge from the commission’s report from that case was that Barnsley’s deputy safety officer at the time told the match officials: “He’s a professional footballer. He should be used to it by now” — a statement that the commission said they found unacceptable.

McClean is certainly used to it, though. It has been happening for more than a decade.

And yes, there have been times when he has done himself no favours. But there have also been long periods when McClean has felt isolated, under attack, with no support, feeling like he needs to speak out but fearing it will only make things worse, locked in a vicious circle.

(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)