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Northern Ireland

Maggot

Maggot

The Cake of Liberty
How come Sports people from Northern Ireland are in team GB, when Northern Ireland isn't in Great Britain?
 
i assume they use GB as a lazy abbreviation of 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'

though why they dont just use UK instead of GB i dont know. maybe there's another reason
 
Because the channel islands & Isle of Man are not in the UK
 
are there any other national teams with such ambiguous names? what's the difference between United Kingdom, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Great Britain etc. What is the actual name of the country that we compete as in the olympics and have the british olympic committee arbitrarily decided to call the team Great Britain and Northern Ireland for any particular reason?
 
Don't think so. These islands have some interesting constitutional arrangements
 
JTG said:
Because the channel islands & Isle of Man are not in the UK
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but neither are they in Great Britain as that's just the name of the island that contains Eng, Sco and Wales

have they twisted the rules to let Cav in?:D
 
No, Britain is the name of the island we're on.

Great Britain means this island and all the associated islands like the Hebrides, Isle of Man etc.
 
So:

Britain is the big island

Great Britain is the big island plus all the associated wee islands

Great Britain & Northern Ireland is what we call the Olympic team

The United Kingdom is the state we live in - which doesn't include the Isle of Man or the Bailiwicks of Jersey & Guernsey
 
just got this from wikipedia but it does say citation needed so may not be 100% accurate

Politically, "Great Britain" describes the combination of England, Scotland, and Wales, and therefore also includes a number of outlying islands such as the Isle of Wight, Anglesey, the Isles of Scilly, the Hebrides, and the island groups of Orkney and Shetland, but does not include other outlying islands such as the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands.
 
JTG said:
yeah but that's politically, I'm on about geographically
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Geographically Great Britain is the name of just the big island and not of any country. Politically it seems to include the Isle of Wight, Anglesey, the Hebrides, Orknies etc; as in 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' which is actually a united kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and sundry other islands which cannot be added to the full title of the country because there are too bloody many of them and everyone's passport would have to be nine feet long.

e2a: I'm all for abandoning that clumsy and pretentious 'united kingdom' moniker and just calling the whole country Britain. Of course that would work better if we conquered the rest of Ireland again, then 'Britain' and 'British Isles' would become synonymous; tidying up the nomenclature still further.
 
You may be right

but we still can't call an olympic team the 'United Kingdom' when it contains elements which are not part of the UK
 
JTG said:
You may be right

but we still can't call an olympic team the 'United Kingdom' when it contains elements which are not part of the UK
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They're not part of Great Britain either, in fact 'Great Britain' covers even less people than does 'United Kingdom' :hmm:
 
But GB & NI, which is the official name of the team, covers exactly the same number of people as UK under your definition.

Under mine it covers more

so ner
 
The whole thing's a bloody shambles any way you slice it. If it weren't for all those sappy liberals we could just enter a single British Empire team and mercilessly crush all opposition. With cavalry if necessary.
 
I quite like the fact that nobody knows what this country's called or which bits are part of it :D
 
Incidentally, the Irish team competes just as 'Ireland'

And according to Wiki: Although only representing the Republic of Ireland, the team competes as Ireland. Many athletes from Northern Ireland compete for the team, since sports organised on an all-Ireland basis are affiliated to the OCI.

Link
 
skyscraper101 said:
Incidentally, the Irish team competes just as 'Ireland'

And according to Wiki: Although only representing the Republic of Ireland, the team competes as Ireland. Many athletes from Northern Ireland compete for the team, since sports organised on an all-Ireland basis are affiliated to the OCI.

Link
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If they'd only thought of doing that with everyone and not just olympic athletes we could have avoided a rather long and unpleasant war :rolleyes:
 
Wikipedia has this:

Great Britain is the name used by the United Kingdom at the Olympic Games. The United Kingdom was one of 14 nations to compete in the first Games, the 1896 Summer Olympics, and has competed at every Games. Athletes representing the UK have won 669 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, and another 21 at the Winter Olympic Games. The United Kingdom is the only nation to have won at least one gold medal at every Summer Games.

The term 'Great Britain' is often used to mean the United Kingdom as a whole, and was the name assigned to the United Kingdom team by the International Olympic Committee for the 1908 Summer Olympics along with the IOC country code GBR.

Under the terms of a long-standing settlement between the British Olympic Association and the Olympic Council of (the Republic of) Ireland, athletes from Northern Ireland can elect to represent the neighbouring Republic of Ireland team instead of the Great Britain team.
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Lots of stuff I didn't know there :)
 
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