Michael O’Neill has no right to assume Ceadach O’Neill’s bloodline – and neither do we

It’s hard to say whether the Ceadach O’Neill thing has quite reached saga proportions yet but we might not be all that far off. We have, for sure, passed the curiosity stage and there’s maybe enough juice in it now for it to qualify as an affair. Let’s just say that if the Israel unpleasantness wasn’t colonising the soccer pages, we might have tipped over the line already.As it stands, the young Arsenal player’s withdrawal from the Northern Ireland squad on injury grounds this week means that at least one immediate endpoint to the story can’t happen for now. Had O’Neill played against Georgia next Friday, a three-year waiting period would have kicked in before any putative switch of allegiance to the Republic would be possible. Had he followed up with minutes against Hungary the following Monday, that would have drawn a permanent line under it.We should say from the outset that Ceadach O’Neill has never said in any public forum that he wants to switch countries. He has never intimated any level of unhappiness with his status as a Northern Ireland footballer and indeed appeared to be delighted to earn his two senior caps in the games against France and Guinea back in June. “Grateful” was how he captioned an Instagram snap of himself keeping tabs on Kylian Mbappé. That was all of three months ago.So pretty much all of this is conjecture, essentially. Nobody would be talking about it at all had he not left just enough grey area in a BBC interview he did in preseason to make some people wonder if the door was still ajar. Northern Ireland manager Michael O’Neill clearly intended to slam it shut this week by naming him in the Nations League squad but the injury nixed his opportunity to do so. The player could end it all quite easily with a single social media post but he hasn’t yet and so here we are.READ MOREO’Neill (the manager) is clearly sick to the teeth of talking about the whole area of dual eligibility. It’s not hard to see why. For a start, the traffic only ever goes in one direction. A young lad born in Derry can decide to play for the Republic, whereas his equivalent born in Donegal can’t declare for Northern Ireland without an ancestral or residential link. While there are very good reasons for that, it’s still a pain on the arse when you’re the Northern Ireland manager.[ Arsenal teenager Ceadach O’Neill at the centre of a tug of war between the FAI and IFAOpens in new window ]Particularly so when one of the stated aims of the FAI is to ramp up efforts to attract a percentage of your already shallow playing pool. The FAI’s shortcomings in the area of player development famously stretch back decades and it’s not the job of the IFA to help them out of a hole of their own digging.Michael O'Neill, Northern Ireland manager. Photograph: Marco Luzzani/Getty Images Michael O’Neill has always come across as a fairly even-tempered sort of cat. But some level of pointy elbows is perfectly reasonable here, especially when the player in question is making waves in and around the best team in England. Ceadach O’Neill could be anything or he could be just another promising youngster who fizzles out in time. Either way, he has come through the Northern Ireland system and the Northern Ireland manager is well within his rights to get cranky at any attempt to unsettle him.O’Neill made a boo-boo this week though (again, the manager, not the player). “Ceadach doesn’t have a bloodline to there,” he said at one stage, ‘there’ being the Republic of Ireland. “But obviously the rules permit them to make that approach.” If a phrase like that doesn’t quite make it into a saga, it at least has the potential to bring us somewhere saga-adjacent.[ Ceadach O’Neill injury could keep Republic of Ireland switch on the cardsOpens in new window ]When the battleground is football systems and player pathways and so on, that’s one thing. When you start talking about bloodlines, particularly in the context of the rights of everyone in the six counties to decide for themselves what those bloodlines mean, you get into much dicier territory.It’s not in Michael O’Neill’s gift to tell anybody what bloodline they have. If you’re a young footballer from a nationalist background, you get to choose what that means to you. Maybe it means the world, or maybe it’s not important. Maybe you’re somewhere in between and haven’t given it a lot of thought. Whither or which, nobody gets to say it on your behalf.That goes for us too. It’s equally wrong for Irish football fans, North or South of the Border, to assume anything about Ceadach O’Neill’s views on his own bloodline. Just because he played Gaelic football growing up and because his uncles Paddy and Eoin Bradley are two of the best forwards Derry have had this century doesn’t give us any right to claim him.In fact, it’s the height of arrogance on our part to imagine that he is open to being claimed at all. We can’t, on the one hand, spend decades criticising the IFA for making the Northern Ireland football team a cold house for Catholics, only to take the hump now when the likes of Conor Bradley or Ceadach O’Neill find a welcome there for them.That’s what post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland is supposed to be, isn’t it? A place where everyone can be who they want to be. Where nobody’s future is dictated by their bloodline and definitely not by anyone else’s assumptions surrounding them.Michael O’Neill has every right to be annoyed by the FAI’s belated and, let’s be honest, slightly grubby pursuit of one of his best young players. But if he gets into the habit of airily deciding people’s identity for them, he might find he pushes more traffic the FAI’s way than he intends.[ Arsenal teenager Ceadach O’Neill at the centre of a tug of war between the FAI and IFAOpens in new window ]