As Baroness Jane Ewart-Biggs talked to me she moved closer, backing me into a corner of the crowded room — the Union Society committee room, shortly after the close of the debate in which she had spoken. I can’t remember the motion that the house was debating, but I have not forgotten the bright emerald eyes with which she fixed me and the passion with which she spoke about her intention to use sport as a bridge between the Protestant and Catholic communities in Ireland.
Rugby is one of the few things that unites this troubled island, she argued then. Indeed, unlike some of the other main sporting codes in the British Isles, such as football and athletics, rugby is played by a single Irish team that draws from both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Island.
This was in 1985, a year or two after Ewart-Biggs had been given a life peerage for her services to peace-building, and a decade after her husband had been assassinated by the IRA just 12 days into his appointment as British ambassador to Ireland, in July 1976.
I have never forgotten my conversation with Ewart-Biggs; she convinced me there and then of the power of sport as a source of social unity with extraordinary peace-building potential, derived from sport’s capacity for transcending the divisions and conflict of “normal” everyday life.
Out of murderous death, she had summoned the courage to build a pathway to peace, in one of the most complex sectarian and deep-set historical contexts in the world.
This is a topical issue, given the international sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which include sporting sanctions: among many other bans, Russian athletes can no longer compete under the flag of the Russian Federation; St Petersburg has been replaced by Paris as the venue for the Uefa Champions League final in May; and Sochi’s Formula 1 race has been scrapped from the schedule.
There is debate, and controversy, over the efficacy of such sporting and cultural…
