Bigotry should not be

dismissed as 'banter'

because it's about football

John Kelly

 

I feel duty bound to address the combined comments of Charles Lewis and Derek Patrick (6 September) whose responses to my previous article (30 August) are ridden with flaws, inaccuracies and untruths that cannot go unchallenged. On the surface, there appears to be some rather logical challenges to my arguments but scratching beneath this veneer reveals them to be fatally flawed rebukes.
     Mr Lewis dismisses factual evidence when it does not suit his agenda whilst stretching the barest threads of 'evidence' to artificially provide the 'balance' he and other Rangers revisionists seek. Good science is evidence driven not ideologically driven by preferential desires to artificially provide balance by being imbalanced with the evidence. It is here that I must take my fellow contributors to task for their careless and misleading use of flimsy evidence to suit their agendas – or if you prefer, their way of seeing the world, their ideological biases.
     We are all laden with ideological biases making any claim to be 'objective' null and void. However, to avoid dogmatic reductionism, we must try to be reflexive about our own biases, examine our evidence and submit it to scrutiny. Dr Patrick betrays his ideological biases when describing the actions of the British Army as 'activities' and the Provisional IRA's actions as 'atrocities'. Straight away, he exposes a latent value judgement that would be absent in scientific analysis.
     Similarly, Mr Lewis frames Irish Republican 'violence' in contrast to the British Army's 'presence' (in Iraq). The violent deaths of between 100,000 and 190,000 innocent civilians, at the hands of the British and allied forces are, therefore, ideologically transformed into 'activities' and a 'presence'. Let's deal with the facts, not the ideologically based presentation of them. Mr Lewis suggests the current ethno-religious debate is 'languishing in an intellectual cul de sac'. I'd suggest with some of the analyses presented thus far some are barricading themselves behind walls of dogmatism.

Let's return to the central point. One cannot support the provisional IRA actors without endorsing by proxy their killings/murders. These were Alasdair McKillop's original points which I supported and asked to be evenly applied without ideological prejudices. Nor can one support the actors without endorsing on some level their political ideology. It is ridiculous, for instance, to support the PIRA activists but to reject their cause. For what would the supporter actually support, simply the fact that a killer/murderer is prepared to kill/murder on his/her behalf even when they don't want them to? It is equally ridiculous to 'support the troops' whilst washing one's hands of their actions.
     Indeed, it may be worse to claim to 'support the troops' without supporting their cause, for to do so is to admit that you support someone killing/ murdering others on your behalf for a cause you do not even agree with. It is revealing that Dr Patrick describes all of this as 'twisting another correspondent's discussion of ideology'. The only thing being twisted is Dr Patrick's interpretation.
      If we actually untangle these issues and deal objectively with the facts, we see that when it is a cause or group to which someone views as legitimate they attain the ability to separate out the ideological cause from the actors and from the actions and outcomes of these actors' actions. So despite the deaths of up to 190,000 innocent civilians from their bomb dropping planes, Mr Lewis tells us 'the tradition in Britain is to support the troops while condemning the politicians who send them to war'. This is rather convenient for those who defend killing people in other people's lands. Yet, we're told the 1,800 killed/murdered by the PIRA cannot be separated from their actors or political cause. Some people want to have their cake and eat it based on their version of legitimacy that is always in flux and open to question, even when cloaked in the respectability of the 'democratic will of the people' – a people who are seldom the recipients of the bombs and bullets they have 'willed' on others.
     There's a further paradox here. On the one hand Mr Lewis attempts to legitimise the acts of British forces by telling us they are 'democratically controlled'. Yet, on the other hand, our democratic right to object and challenge them is to be shorn in favour of dogmatically supporting them as part of ‘tradition’. This doesn’t sound too democratic to me. Moreover when this alleged democratic right to deviate from the dogmatic 'support the troops' message is expressed, we find outrage and criticism directed towards these people – I'm accused of trying to legitimise the IRA and having an agenda.
     The Archbishop of Canterbury was demonised and branded a rabble-rouser attention-seeker for merely questioning the political decision to go to 'war'. Thus, up to 190,000 civilian killings can be dismissed as ‘democratically controlled' deaths and be neatly detached from the actors who carried them out whilst dissenters get silenced or demonised. I doubt the five-year-old child who loses her leg or her mother cares too much about whether or not the bomb and the bomber are 'democratically accountable' in the land from which they came.
     If one accepts the premise of the right of some to kill others on one's behalf, then one must accept others can do the same and may have alternative ideological ideas of legitimacy. Moreover, whilst you may believe it legitimate to kill on behalf of a larger community, other members of that community do not and are within their rights, nee morally obligated, to object and challenge this position.

Returning to football specifically, Mr Lewis accuses me of appearing 'to adhere to the theory that Rangers and their supporters are anti-Catholic and anti-Irish' before adding 'the problem with theories is that they need facts to support them and this one consequently fails'. This is an extraordinary juxtaposition that seeks to reveal the failure of my argument due to an alleged paucity of evidence.
    The beauty of facts, however, is that they cannot be denied, they can only be interpreted and, in Mr Lewis's and Dr Patrick's case, to suit a revisionist agenda. So allow me to remind readers of the non-revisionist facts regarding Rangers' (club and some of its supporters) anti-Catholicism and anti-Irishness: despite recent attempts among Rangers fans, including Mr Lewis, to re-write the history books and airbrush Rangers' near 100-year-long anti-Catholic signing policy, everyone and their granny knows Rangers refused to knowingly sign Catholics until the sanity of Graeme Souness – enabled by increasing external pressures – prevented it from carrying on after 1989. Alex Ferguson strips bare any camouflage of respectability here by exposing Rangers' bigoted attitudes towards him on the grounds of simply having a Catholic wife.
     More recently, Rangers has been fined and/or banned by UEFA three times in the last five years for its fans' bigoted behaviour. The club continues to cry foul over these decisions, telling its fans to stop it because it might get them into trouble rather than for being wrong in itself. Its fans have thrown potatoes onto the Celtic park pitch to mock An Gorta Mor. The club took Eggs Benedict off its menu once the new Pope was elected. Last year, thousands of Rangers fans sang the banned Billy Boys, the racist famine song and the anti-Catholic 'no Pope of Rome' at the League Cup final.
     Mr Lewis tells us that Rangers supporters have no interest in the religion of Rangers players. The religion of its own players (and their wives) is thankfully no longer a guarded obsession among Rangers officials or supporters, but the religion (or Catholicism to be precise) and ethnicity (Irish-Catholicism) of its main rivals among others continues to concern large numbers of Rangers supporters going by the evidence. In addition to the aforementioned evidence, let's consider the Rangers fans' en-masse singing of 'we hate Celtic, Fenian bastards…No Pope of Rome, no nuns and no priests and no rosary beads…The famine's over, why don’t you go home?'.
      The overall tone of Mr Lewis's article suggests that ethnic and religious bigotry is a 'minor' issue in Scotland. Given that Mr Lewis lives in the USA and is a retired partner in an accountancy firm, I'm unsurprised that he feels this way, as I suspect his world is not overly exposed to such problems. The evidence, however, reveals problems. Gerry Finn's study of the Scottish workplace evidences continuing ethnic and religious tensions, government figures around religiously aggravated crimes evidences an increasing trajectory of cases with allegations of an anti-Catholic nature in 64% of instances and of an anti-Protestant nature in 31% of instances. This study reveals that 1 in 3 of the accused reside outwith Glasgow and Lanarkshire, revealing it is not exclusively a Glasgow problem.

Since moving to Scotland and signing for Celtic, the Northern Irish Catholic Neil Lennon has had his life threatened, been seriously assaulted by Rangers supporters at least twice, had a letter bomb sent to him and been attacked in front of millions on television by an Edinburgh-based Hearts fan.
     In addition, bullets have been sent in the post to various other Catholics including a clergyman and two Northern Irish Celtic footballers. Donald Findlay QC received a knife in the post in an apparent isolated incident that remains unclear if it had any religiously prejudiced motive. Aidan McGeady, the Glasgow-born Irish Catholic, endured anti-Irish abuse in numerous Scottish football stadia and was subjected to unprecedented attacks in the Scottish media. Last year the football governing body –that, unlike its European counterpart, has failed to act on Rangers' bigotry – has had a referee lying to Celtic and an anti-Pope email ‘joke’ scandal, both leading to job losses.
     In recent years, high-profile Scottish journalists have laughed off the bigoted acts of Rangers fans' potato throwing in mocking reference to An Gorta Mor, labelling the offended 'desperate' and 'irate'. Sections within this same media felt safe in deriding aspects of Catholicism in ways they wouldn't tolerate in relation to other minority faiths. ('The fish on a Friday…you couldnae' whack it'; 'Celtic fans would probably rather have a bead rattling hoopy hound in the dugout'). They have racially caricatured the Irish ('grip on Irish politics is similar to that on an old Oirish dresser').
     When the Scottish courts were ruling the singing of the famine song illegal some of Scotland's top journalists were defending it as 'humour' whilst castigating Celtic fans for being easily offended and 'politically correct' whingers. Furthermore, some journalists have echoed the sentiments of the racist and illegal famine song, telling the Scottish-born Irish diaspora to ditch its 'plastic Irishness' or 'go home'.
     Whilst proving these are entirely or partly due to bigotry remains problematic, they furnish us with evidence that permits the theoretical connection to be made with bigotry – largely in the guise of anti-Irishness and/or anti-Catholicism. Whilst structural discrimination, in employment for instance, is no longer an issue, the more subtle re-cycled prejudices remain and, if left unchallenged, or worse, denied, threaten continued misery for some.
     The strength of my evidence is magnified when placed alongside the scant evidence of my fellow respondents. For instance, Dr Patrick insinuates Celtic FC has practiced anti-Protestantism by asking how many Protestants have been on its board. Given that until 1994 Celtic was run as a private company with a board consisting of a small number of families of Irish Catholic descent, it is neither surprising nor bigoted to find few, if any, Protestants on the board until modern times. Celtic's choice of 'greatest ever Celt' stands in statue form outside Celtic Park and it is the Protestant Jock Stein.
     Mr Lewis correctly asserts it is 'neither bigoted nor sectarian to criticise the policies and practices of the Catholic Church'. Given the overwhelming welcome the Pope received in Scotland last year, there is no widespread anti-Catholic Church activity here. Rangers fans singing about 'Fenian bastards' and 'No Chapels to sadden my eyes' is difficult, therefore, to interpret as a theological critique of the Catholic Church. Mr Lewis dismisses the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish chanting of many Rangers fans as 'winding-up' the opposition and bases this casual dismissal on the fact it has happened for a long time. One wonders if monkey noises and banana throwing would be dismissed quite so easily on such grounds if they still occurred. Bigotry cannot be dismissed as banter because it is football-related or has existed for a long time.
     I must condemn, in the strongest terms, Mr Lewis's wholly incorrect claims that I attempted 'to legitimise' or provide 'excuses for the IRA'. Neither did I seek to 'excuse offensive chanting by Celtic supporters'. These are figments of Mr Lewis's imagination and reveal his ideological biases. At no point did I seek to legitimise or excuse the IRA (of any variety). I merely reported the facts of the Provisional IRA's killings/murders alongside that of the British forces' killings/murders. I neither endorsed nor criticised the IRA or the British forces. In an attempt to apply scientific rigour, I merely provided factual analysis that revealed the double standards and revisionism at play from some within this whole debate.

 

John Kelly teaches sociology of sport courses at Edinburgh University and is currently co-writing a book on sport and social theory which will be published next year by Routledge