Liverpool is a piece of Ireland stuck the other side of the sea

SPECIAL CITY'S REBELLIOUS STREAK RESONATES WITH US

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IT WAS May 1989, six weeks after the Hillsborough Stadium disaster when 97 Liverpool fans lost their lives.

I was a reporter for The Sunday Independent at the time, assigned to cover that year's FA Cup final.

That match, you may recall, finished 3-2. But it isn't the scoreline that sticks in my memory. It was something else.

The English love their pageantry. They love a bit of nostalgia, too. And they love their Royal Family.

But that day confirmed to me something that I already suspected, that Liverpool isn't a typical English city, because that day in May 1989, when the Duke of Kent walked onto the pitch to meet and greet the players, he was booed by both sets of supporters.

There they were, Liverpool and Everton fans, jeering a member of the royal family.

And there is a good reason for that. The tragedy at Hillsborough came down to a failure of policing. The subsequent cover-up exposed a failure of people in the establishment to tell the truth.

The Sun newspaper was a disgrace. They wrote bare-faced lies, fed to them by the police. The future British prime minister Boris Johnson wrote the line about how Liverpudlians wallowed in self-pity.

That's an appalling thing to say: inaccurate, hurtful, wrong.

And it all comes back to one thing — that Liverpool is not a traditional English city. It’s a piece of Ireland stuck on the other side of the Irish Sea.

Irish working-class people resonate with Liverpudlians because that city was the first port of call where the boat docked after sailing across from Dublin.