The Story That Wouldn’t Die — and the One That Did

Saipan is a small island in the Pacific. If you've heard of it at all, it's probably not because of its beaches or its role in one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War. It's more likely because of an argument — one that played out thousands of miles from Ireland, yet embedded itself permanently in Irish cultural memory.

I remember Saipan not as a place, but as a noise.

That summer in Ireland, it was the only story in town. Television news, newspaper front pages, radio phone-ins — all of it saturated by the fallout between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy during Ireland's World Cup preparations in 2002. It followed you everywhere: into workplaces, pubs, kitchens, and living rooms. Not because nothing else was happening, but because nothing else could compete.

People didn't just have opinions — they took sides. Long-standing friendships fractured. Families argued. Conversations paused and resumed days later exactly where they had left off. You could walk into a room and know which side someone was on almost instantly.

It became, in effect, a cultural civil war. An argument between two men on the far side of the world consumed an entire country.

What's striking now is not just the scale of the obsession, but the fact that this happened before social media as we know it. No feeds. No timelines. No algorithms.

Which is precisely the point: the emotional machinery was already there — AI has simply learned how to run it faster, cheaper, and without friction.

The amplification in 2002 came from repetition, from collective fixation, from a nation turning the same question over and over again: who was right?

More than twenty years later, it still has that power. Mention Saipan in the wrong company and the old lines reappear. Voices rise. Certainty returns. The facts haven't changed, but the emotional charge remains intact.

That endurance matters. Because it tells us something important about how memory works.

Saipan has another history — one that rarely intrudes on the argument. In 1944, it was the site of a brutal World War II battle. Thousands died. Civilians were caught in the middle. Many bodies were never recovered. The cliffs still carry that silence.

Yet this Saipan barely registers in popular memory. It doesn't provoke arguments. It doesn't divide rooms. It doesn't resurface in casual conversation. It lacks something the football story had in abundance: a shape that could travel.

And this is the uncomfortable part.

History isn't remembered according to importance. It's remembered according to amplification.

Human attention has always favoured drama over scale, individuals over systems, conflict over complexity. What has changed is not the instinct, but the machinery that now surrounds it.

If the Saipan football row happened today, it would be instant and total. Training clips dissected in real time. Leaked messages framed as proof. Positions hardened within hours. Silence interpreted as guilt. The loudest interpretation would win, not the most thoughtful one.

But here's the harder question: what if the other Saipan happened today?

If the 1944 battle unfolded in an AI-driven, social-media world, it would arrive as fragments first. Clips without context. AI-generated summaries before facts settled. Competing moral narratives splintering understanding into camps. Attention would spike — and then decay.

The danger isn't that tragedy would be ignored. It's that it would be consumed.

What gave the Saipan argument its longevity wasn't information — it was emotion.

Anger, loyalty, betrayal, righteousness. These are limbic responses, not rational ones. They bypass analysis and go straight to identity. That's why the argument never really ended. It didn't need new facts. It fed on feeling.

Modern technology understands this better than we do.

The most successful platforms in the world are not neutral publishers. They are emotion-detection and emotion-amplification systems. They are built to locate what triggers us — outrage, fear, tribal loyalty — and to feed it back at scale. Not because they are malicious, but because emotion is measurable, predictable, and profitable.

AI didn't invent this vulnerability. It mapped it.

In an AI-shaped attention economy, the limbic system beats the prefrontal cortex every time. Reflection is slow. Emotion is fast. And speed is what the system rewards.

That is why an argument about football can outlive a battlefield. Why certainty spreads faster than understanding. Why silence doesn't just lose — it disappears.

Saipan shows us the danger clearly. Not that we argue. But that we can be trained to argue endlessly, while far more consequential things fade from view.

This isn't really about sport, or war, or even technology.

It's about who gets access to our emotions — and what they choose to do with them.

And in a world increasingly shaped by AI, that may be the most important question of all.