Morning View: Well done Uefa, fining Irish women's team for IRA chant

What a pleasant surprise for critics of IRA terrorism!

Uefa (the Union of European Football Associations) has fined the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) after its women's football team chanted a Provo chorus.

The shameful episode, in which the players sang ‘Oo Ah Up the Ra’, happened after the Irish female team played Scotland in October.

Why is the fine of €20,000 (£17,000) a surprise? Because as much of Ireland retrospectively embraces historic IRA terror, opinion polls of nationalists north of the border and of young people in the Republic show us that republicans seem to be winning the propaganda battle.

They are winning it in America, where insofar as the US thinks about Ireland (it rarely does) almost no-one challenges Irish myths.

They are winning it in west Belfast mural tours.

They are winning it in grossly one-sided artistic and cinematic depictions of NI and its history.

They are winning it in the courts, where state forces who prevented civil war face action after action, probe after probe, but IRA murderers face almost none.

They are winning it on social media, where naive folk think republicans woke (not violently sectarian).

So it might not have been a surprise if the Irish chanting had been dismissed as some freedom chorus.

But there is still some awareness of how revolting it is to celebrate terrorism, let alone a national team. Uefa said it violated "the basic rules of decent conduct".

Some senior Irish politicians who never stop scolding unionists or the UK government for this alleged infraction or that, and who are perpetually on the lookout for unionist sectarianism, acted as if the IRA chant was harmless horseplay.

In fact it was more proof for people of a unionist culture to avoid an increasingly pro IRA 'New Ireland'.