The great hunger

It is appropriate that the Irish National Famine Memorial day should coincide with the meeting of two of Scotland's three great clubs of Irish origin.

In 1875, Hibernian were one of the first clubs in Scotland to seek to give the Irish community a place at the table of Scottish football. Dundee Hibernians, later to be known as Dundee United, came much later, in 1909, formed by businessmen with Irish roots. There were many others, which came and went, barely to be remembered now as anything more than curios appearing in historical reference books.

Some Scottish journalists railed against the early Irish clubs, decrying their use of the words, “Hibernian” or “Shamrock”, and urging them to come up with “proper names”.

In 1887, they got their wish with the foundation of Celtic. It could easily be forgotten that in the early days, it was Hibernian that was the inspiration for Celtic as well as being the more strident in its interpretation of how best to further the interests of an oppressed Irish Catholic community in Scotland.

Its early policy of favouring players of Catholic backgrounds is now nothing more than a historical foible, one that Celtic would choose not to follow. Yet, without Hibs – without the vision the Edinburgh club inspired – there may never have been a Celtic.

Today Hibernian FC is far removed from the ideals of that early club though it will still attract a greater proportion of supporters of Irish origin than its Edinburgh rivals, Hearts. Celtic, through the will of its supporters, clings more dearly to the culture and heritage that gave it breath – the Irish in Scotland.

It is apt that the club should commemorate Famine Memorial Day. Celtic was born of Irish blood, sweat and tears. Impoverished men built the first Celtic Park with their bare hands for no pay. They were not building a brand or a business but an ideal; a vehicle in which to invest the dreams of the wretched. They created something bigger than themselves, something enduring through which the humble might know glory, where people deprived of education might write and live a great story.

The league of legends is just one aspect of our club's history. The unnamed million is another no less deserving of commemoration. Some would say that we should speak less of them; that our inclusiveness demands it. Yet our origins and identity are embraced the world over, often by those without a drop of Celtic blood. In Catalunya, in Palestine, in post-Communist Europe – wherever people recognise a struggle for dignity and identity in a hostile culture, you will find people who see parallels with their own story. They see no barriers in the Irishness of Celtic.

Let us hope that those who direct the club's future remain as clear-sighted and that supporters will remain watchful should there ever be a hint that that identity might ever be diminished. On Sunday Celtic will wear a Celtic cross around the corporate trademark of Celtic plc, one more sign of changing values. But tradition is a thing that, once lost, you may never hope to re-find.

The club statement reads: “We are a club open to all and while we celebrate our traditions, it is important that we also celebrate our diversity.” We always have done.

• www.irishholocaust.org
  

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Keep politics - and poppies - out of football

In these times when supporters are urged to keep politics and football separate, it is unfortunate that an SPL dictat will see all players forced to wear a poppy during matches this weekend.

More disappointing is the foolish and insensitive actions of Celtic’s representatives at SPL level, apparently waving through this decision with as much resistance as is met by teenaged neds encroaching on the pitch on Champions League nights.

Predictably, and understandably, Irish supporters have expressed their concern. The Association of Irish Celtic Supporters' Clubs was quoted as saying in their statement:

“While respectful of the symbolism of the poppy in Britain and keeping in mind those Celtic players, employees and supporters who either lost their lives or those of family members and friends in war, we are disappointed at this decision (apparently taken without consultation with supporters' groups) in light of the fact that the poppy is seen as a more divisive symbol in Ireland where many Celtic supporters are based and from where many others claim their heritage.

“Many supporters in general and members of the AICSC in particular will have wholly negative views of the British army's operations in Ireland and, indeed, have also lost their lives or those of family members and friends as a result. We feel that they too should be remembered at this time and regret the potentially divisive nature of this weekend's planned initiative.”

The AICSC statement was measured and appropriate, not least in recognising that players and fans fought in those wars, a practice that was supported by no less than Willie Maley.

However, with respect to the club’s thousands of Irish supporters, Peter Lawwell and John Reid might have focussed on other interests of even more direct relevance to their responsibilities. That is to Celtic players themselves.

It is quite conceivable that Celtic could have four Irish nationals, a German, an Italian and a Japanese player featuring in this weekend’s match against Motherwell.

Even given the disdain with which the sensitivities of the Irish are routinely dismissed in Scotland, did Celtic officials consider the dilemmas posed to players like Massimo Donati, Andreas Hinkel or Shunsuke Nakamura to be forced to wear a symbol in remembrance only of those who were engaged in war against their ancestors and countrymen?

How, one wonders, would it be received if Nakamura was to instead prefer to wear a chrysanthemum or any player wear a white poppy as a symbol of peace?

It is every nation’s right to remember those who died in its armed forces, whether in defence of the nation or in blindly pursuing the political aims of its government. For that reason, audible or visual protests are not appropriate on these occasions.

However, questions must be asked of the Celtic hierarchy – not to mention those of other clubs. Did anyone ask Andrius Velicka or any of the other Lithuanian players in Scotland how they feel about the poppy, given that their country fought against the Russians during WWI?

What about Andis Shala, a Kosovar German playing for Dundee Utd?

Does anyone care about the feelings of the many Irish internationals at Dundee Utd and elsewhere, instructed to honour men who became Black & Tans or who were serving when Lloyd George threatened “an immediate and terrible war” in 1921, not to mention those who took part in the summary executions of the 1916 rebels?

Only those with Britain’s famed insularity could fail to recognise that wearing a poppy – while quite acceptable for those who choose to do so – has oppressive political connotations for those whose national loyalties and familial interest in the wars lie elsewhere.

That Celtic – and every other club – should fail to defend the interests of their own employees in such a matter is a disgrace.

The Scottish Poppy Appeal does a great deal of fine work for men and women who are deserving of the support of their nation.

That does not mean that anyone should be required to wear a symbol that, above all, celebrates victory in this the most obsessed of nations with its wartime past “glories”.

One need only witness the abuse directed at those who choose not to wear a poppy – or to wear a white poppy symbolising a commitment to peace – to understand that this is an intrinsically political statement

Is it really so much worse to sing The Boys of the Old Brigade (a song your writer would deprecate in any Celtic context)?

Given that our chairman, according to George Galloway, was once known to make it his business to educate new old Labour recruits in the Irish Republican songbook before going on to be an enthusiastic protagonist in Britain’s illegal wars, it is perhaps unsurprising that Celtic officials display a split personality disorder on this issue – even to the extent of neglecting the interests of their own employees.

The Celtic supporters, who better understand the identity of the club are likely to be less negligent, even if this is one occasion for silent dissent.





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Time to fight back against newspaper bigotry

"The hard end of sectarianism is that people can die on our streets as a result"
Rev Alan McDonald,
Convener of the Church of Scotland’s Church and Nation Committee, 2002

When Rev Alan McDonald addressed the General Assembly and urged that Scotland "consign bigotry to the history books, where it belongs", there was much public and media approval.

More than that, there was hope. Hope that Scotland was finally to enter a new, enlightened era; one in which there were no acceptable targets for discrimination, abuse and violence.

The Kirk’s action was commendable in many ways, not least for its honesty. It repudiated a previous Church and Nation report, delivered in 1923, entitled "The Menace of the Irish Race to our Scottish Nationality", caricaturing Irish Catholics as people who could never be assimilated into Scottish society.

The newspapers largely characterised the problem as being one of two equally responsible social groups

Meanwhile, as reported in the media, Pastor Jack Glass stood outside castigating those who had “betrayed John Knox”.

Rev McDonald went on: "We may also be judged in hindsight to have turned a blind eye to sectarian attitudes which will still remain on and under the surface of the Church of Scotland today."

His statement was one of honest self-awareness and regret, the stuff of which truth and reconciliation are made.

In the wider media discussions, some attention was paid to Rangers, who had finally accepted Catholics as players; an equal amount was devoted to Celtic, who had never been part of that particular story.

The newspapers largely characterised the problem as being one of two equally responsible social groups, with the worst manifestations being a matter of poverty, over-exuberance and education.

Largely, however, they missed or ignored the most profound message of the Kirk’s debate – that the fabric of Scotland was one in which Irish Catholics could not hope to play a full part. It acknowledged that the established church had by action and neglect, played a part in engendering a dangerous antipathy towards people who would still be seen as unwelcome incomers more than 80 years after the report.

To date, the Kirk is the only major influential body in Scotland to have done so. David Murray has led Rangers for more than two decades. He once described the club as the second most influential institution in Scotland, qualifying his assessment only to accommodate the possibility that Rangers could top that league.

He has, on a number of occasions, expressed his distaste at the “FTP brigade” at Rangers and assured us that his club bans fans found guilty of unacceptable behaviour. But on the issue of bigotry at Rangers, Murray has been joined by a legion of Rangers legends in adopting a policy of “never apologise, never explain”.

The Scottish media always has been, as today, an important part of the problem

And why should he? What would compel David Murray (or any respected figure amongst Rangers supporters) to condemn the hordes of Rangers fans who decry the Pope and utter their “Why don’t you go home?” song so reminiscent of the National Front in its pomp with its “Send them back” placards?

The truth is that the only way in which these attitudes would be challenged are through the media. But there’s the rub. The Scottish media’s record in this area is worse than patchy.

How often do people stop to consider why a goalkeeper could attract such vociferous disapprobation for a t-shirt yet the late Pastor Glass – described as “a bit of an extremist” by Rev Ian Paisley – should be accorded the status of an amusing Scottish eccentric even as he punched the air spewing hatred of all things Catholic?

Where was the media castigation of the decades of abuse of anyone or anything that seemed to represent Irishness or Catholicism? Of course the answer is that the Scottish media never was in a position to be part of the solution. It always has

When distortion is married to a lack of decency - a culture where bigoted loathing is still acceptable - it becomes abhorrent

been, as today, an important part of the problem.

For years, there was nowhere that anti-Catholic recruitment policies were more rife than in the Scottish newspaper industry. If the BBC was once so “hideously white” as to repulse Greg Dyke, that was nothing compared to the industry of white male Scottish Protestant Freemasons that produced our newspapers.

Much has changed since the former editor of the Glasgow Herald, Arnold Kemp, was asked for an assurance that he was not a Catholic before being confirmed in the position. Women and Catholics have a better chance of securing employment, though the bylines carrying Irish-sounding names are still so rare as to be collectable.

But if the recruitment policies have largely gone, their legacy remains. In the most nepotistic of all industries, the jobs for the boys (and girls) are still overwhelmingly going to the sons and daughters of that pre-selected cultural group. This is where bigotry truly becomes inherent.

When that merely produces skewed cultural perspective, it is unfortunate and potentially damaging. When that distortion is married to a lack of decency; a culture where bigoted loathing is still acceptable, it becomes abhorrent. Yet we are requested to continue to pay for their output.

Recent months have seen as biased and conspicuously anti-Celtic news reporting as has ever been witnessed. Worst offender by far is the Daily Record. Not satisfied with actively securing the position of being the endorsed newspaper for Rangers, the paper infamously carried a caption alluding to a campaign to smear Jock Stein.

It was also the paper that intruded on the tragic passing of Tommy Burns, defying all newspaper conventions to speculate on his final moments when he should have been left in peace with his family. Its sister paper, the Sunday Mail, has been no better.

The News of the World, also true to form, chose last Sunday to speculate on the private life of Artur Boruc on its front page while the Sun went so far as to mock the violent attack on Neil Lennon with a truly despicable cartoon and a derisory and factually false report on the incident.

The Evening Times has also shown its fine colours in recent weeks, not forgetting that they too splashed Scott Brown on their front page on news of the death of his sister, despite the family having asked for privacy.

Having paid Murray mouthpiece Derek Johnstone for years to say “Rangers are great, Celtic are terrible”, we might simply have laughed at his u-turn to demand action against referees in the aftermath of a small number of decisions going against his club.

Should we succeed, they may have a new application for the word “crisis”

The Evening Times next carried a back page demand for action in the face of this “refereeing crisis”. That, we could have put down to absurdity.

The Sports Editor then devoted his back page this week to a piece that was nothing more than crowing by Andy Goram, degenerate drunk and known supporter of Loyalist terrorists; a man who once wore a black armband for a notorious Loyalist killer.

For years, newspaper editors have acted in this way in the expectation that readers will buy the papers regardless, out of habit. Why should we?

The newspaper industry is facing a circulation catastrophe. Some of them may very well fold within the next few years if downward sales trends continue.

There has never been a better time to demonstrate that we too have power. The power that comes from keeping our money in our pockets.

This Sunday and Monday is as good a time as any to start. The editors expect strong sales to follow Scotland’s international match. I would suggest that Celtic supporters disappoint them.

Specifically, I propose that Celtic supporters simply decline to buy the Sunday Mail and News of the World along with Monday’s Daily Record, Sun and Evening Times.

To do so would be a demonstration of our refusal to accept attacks on our players; refusal to accept a tacit approval of bigotry and racism.

Should we fail, the papers will dismiss this as a gesture. Should we succeed, they may have a new application for the word “crisis”.

• Celtic Underground: A Good Time For A Break

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Rangers hate mob challenges police

“Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob”
Oscar Wilde
In terms of population and territory, Scotland indisputably punches above its weight.

With a population of just over five million and a surface area of slightly more than 30,000 sq. miles, this cold, relatively infertile northern part of Britain is a small country by any measure.

But that diminutive status has never stopped Scotland being noticed.

Ride roughshod over engineers like James Watt and Thomas “Colossus of Roads” Telford. Forget the literary legacy of Scott and Burns. Dismiss, if you will, the influence of David Hume and his contemporary Adam Smith whose book, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” caused some form of ripple in western political philosophy. Hang up on Alexander Graham Bell; leave John Logie Baird on standby; trade your prescription for Alexander Fleming’s antibiotics on the street corner.

No Scot need relate his or her contemporary life to the legacy of long-dead figures, who may – as far as anybody knows – be figures from mythology.

No, there are vibrant, living, breathing offspring of the Scottish nation whose outlooks more readily relate to those who consider themselves to be the Scottish racial, religious and cultural archetype.

When a new land across the Atlantic was being settled and colonised, Scots made their mark, and especially on the southern states. Scottish folk music laid the foundations of Blue Grass and Country. Scottish slave owners shaped the agricultural economy. They rose with the South in the great secession and Civil War; pledged loyalty to the Confederate States of America; even gave their saltire as a model on which to base a new flag.

When white supremacists found themselves disadvantaged by the victory of the Union forces, the romanticism of Thomas F. Dixon Jr., inspired the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.

Many years before, and thousands of miles from the slave-striven plantations of the South, Scots were seeded in their own plantations. It was Scots who were settled – this time mostly in the North – but the north of Ireland.

They founded a “language”, Ulster Scots, and more effectively an energetic hatred of the Catholic indigenous population that spawned the Orange Order and a plethora of British Loyalist/Anti-Catholic killers and even bigots.

It should be no surprise that the supporters of Rangers should scorn the achievements of great Scots and rather choose to vocally and aggressively express the sentiments most easily associated with the Klan or the Scottish sympathisers with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacists.

After all, this club with a poison at its core is unique in its identity. Without hatred; without a compulsion to denigrate, offend and oppress, there is barely a notion of Rangers as a positive independent entity.

Having revelled in anti-Catholicism, profiteered on hatred of Irish immigrants, Rangers today exists as a Neolithic oddity – devoid of the evolutionary refinements that position most clubs closer to the modern psyche than any regrettable historical embarrassments that shaped their early years.

Today, we are invited to witness that “superiority”, manifest in the utterances of several thousand civilised representatives at Celtic Park.

Starved of success, embittered through subordination by a Celtic that embodies an acceptance and celebration of cultural values they feel compelled to abhor, the songbook of Rangers has somehow become increasingly distasteful since football’s European governors embarrassed the domestic authorities, effectively proscribing ditties measuring supremacy in crude imperial units of Fenian Blood.

In the absence of admonishments from the SFA – and faced with an overwhelming silence in the Scottish mainstream media – it has been reported that Strathclyde Police have advised Rangers that supporters singing, “The famine’s over; why don’t you go home?” will be subject to arrest.

In response, certain Rangers supporters have issued a direct call for defiance of police instructions amounting to direct and wilful incitement to public disorder.

This compulsion to offend and denigrate Scotland’s Irish minority population is apparently so precious to some Rangers supporters that they will actively seek confrontation with the forces of law.

In the meantime, former Rangers player Gordon Smith, who recently expressed concern at disrespect for “God Save the Queen” has yet to be heard on the subject.

Sometimes silence is marked with a heavy price.





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