[64] Scotland's Shame

Scotland, the nation of my birth, is blighted by religious sectarianism. For more than 300 years, Scotland has been predominantly a Presbyterian country. In the earlier part of the 19th century there were fewer than 50 Catholics living in the more populace Glasgow and West of Scotland areas, while parts of the Hebridean Islands were still predominantly Catholic at that time, and are still to this day, due to the Reformation failing to touch such far flung and isolated areas.

During and after the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1852) millions of impoverished men, women and children fled the Emerald Isle, landing in places like America, Canada, Liverpool and Glasgow. The more fortunate, who had something to barter with, were able to flee to North America, while the most impoverished and wretched had to settle for the relatively short sailing across the Irish Sea to the famous port on the mouth of the River Clyde. Tens of thousands of penniless and hungry Irish refugees sailed into the Clyde in the years following the terrible famine.

Ireland’s detritus were not welcome in Protestant Scotland and were faced with even more deprivation and squalor. They were forced to live several families in one room in run-down, damp and cold tenement buildings. There were no jobs for the men and certainly no social security benefits to assist the “invaders”. They were required to queue for hours to receive bread and soup provided by Protestant clergymen and volunteers, and in some cases were forced to denounce their Catholic faith as a condition of being granted the life-saving sustenance. Those Irish immigrants who made the effort to better their lot through hard work and enterprise were met with resistance from anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigots who resented their presence among them.

Eventually, the lot of the Irish immigrants improved as they slowly integrated into Scottish society and gradually moved further afield to places like Greenock, Croy, Carfin, and Dundee. From the less than 50 Catholics in the middle of the nineteenth century, Scotland is now home to over a quarter of a million Catholics. Despite this, as recently as the 1970s there was a number of major employers throughout Scotland who advertised for workers with the rider “Catholics need not apply”.

Today, religious sectarianism and bigotry in Scotland still exists, although it is much less prevalent than it once was and, it has to be said, it is a two-way problem. Since the early 20th century, there has been a backlash of the more rebellious Catholics against the Protestant “enemy”. In recent decades however, the problem has manifested itself mainly around the bitter sectarian rivalry between the two big Glasgow Football Clubs, namely Celtic – supported predominantly by Catholics, and Rangers – followed mainly by Protestants. Indeed, Rangers Football Club adopted a sectarian employment policy. Founded in 1878, Rangers did not sign a mainstream Roman Catholic football player until 1989 – more than 110 years later.

In the early part of the 20th century, the growing flock of Scottish Catholics led the leadership to negotiate with the Education Department to incorporate Catholic faith schools and the right of Catholics to send their children to be educated in Catholic schools was laid down in the statute book to become the law of the land. In view of the high level of anti-Catholic bigotry at that time, especially within the establishment, it is perhaps surprising that the Catholic Church was granted the freedom to establish faith schools in Scotland, especially with the protection of the law of the land and, more significantly, financed within the Scottish Education System itself. However, the truth is that the establishment was so eager not to have its own Protestant children sitting in the same classrooms as Catholic children, that the people were prepared to meet the cost of Catholic schools, an irony which is lost on today’s anti-Catholic bigots.

Now, in the 21st century, hardly a week goes by without a letter appearing in a Scottish newspaper calling for the abolition of Catholic faith schools. It is a very emotive subject and as such, it attracts very emotive language, to say the least. “It is divisive” they claim. “It encourages bigotry” they cry.

Strangely, there are Catholic faith schools in England, France, Germany, the United States and Australia, to name but a few countries. They don’t appear to have a problem with Catholic schools promoting bigotry and divisiveness. Could it be because these countries have a very low percentage of anti-Catholic bigots? Let me take this argument one step further.

When I grew up in the industrial heartland of Lanarkshire, I played in the streets and on the football fields with my neighbours and friends. Some of us were Catholics and some were Protestants. We went to separate schools each day, but that did not stop us from meeting up in the streets in the evening and having fun and playing together. We accepted that we were of a different religion and that was that.

If little Johnny says to his mother, “Why can’t I go to the same school as Peter?” what on earth is wrong with Johnny’s mother replying, “Because Peter is a Protestant and you are a Catholic, but you can still be friends.”? Peter and Johnny going to the same school does not invalidate the fact that they have different religious backgrounds, so how does them going to different schools cause division and bigotry? The answer is, when there are more sinister forces at work, ie bigoted and sectarian parents. The father who resents the existence of Catholic schools is the same father who will resent the fact that his son is sitting in the same class as a Catholic. Only sectarian bigots believe Catholic faith schools are divisive and the cause of bigotry and sectarianism.

Some 5 years ago, Celtic Football Club won the Scottish Championship on a Saturday afternoon. Rangers had lost out and as the Celtic fans celebrated in the pubs and bars, a crowd of Rangers fans in my home town of Motherwell went out to cause mischief. As the priest held evening mass at St Luke’s Catholic Church, attended by around 50 parishioners, mainly elderly ladies, the church was attacked as bricks and stones were thrown through the windows and anti-Catholic slogans were sprayed on the walls. Witnesses from nearby houses that overlooked the church told police and the press that the perpetrators were young and old and some were wearing Rangers colours. As the shaken priest was being interviewed by the police during the aftermath, he was heard to say, “I don’t know what school these thugs went to, but it must be a Catholic school, because everyone keeps telling us Catholic schools breed sectarianism.”

I lived in New York a few years ago and can recall how men and women who were born and bred in the United States, but who were of Irish, Italian or Greek descent, were happy to label themselves, and indeed were known by their peers as Irish, Italian and Greek. Yet in Scotland, if a man or woman who was born and raised in Scotland, but has Irish parents or grandparents or even great grandparents, calls him or herself Irish, he or she is regarded as a sectarian bigot, because only in Scotland is it considered an act of bigotry to claim yourself to be Irish.

In New York, the city holds an annual St Patrick’s Day parade on 17th March. It is a public holiday and the parade lasts several hours and is celebrated by hundreds of thousand of New Yorkers and visitors from all over the world. Other cities like Chicago, Washington DC, New Orleans and Seattle have their own St Patrick’s Day parades. Yet in Scotland, where 85% of the country’s quarter of a million Catholics are of Irish descent, any celebration of St Patrick’s Day is done in private; in Irish bars and clubs and dwelling houses. Try and organise a St Patrick’s Day parade in Scotland and you will have the full force of the law down on you, not to mention the violent bigots who would certainly not allow such an event to take place, even if the police saw fit to let it happen.

Yet in July each year, the Orange Order marches through the streets of Scotland’s towns and cities in a drunken rabble of a display of Protestant supremacy as they celebrate a battle which took place in Ireland in 1690.

Anyone who knows me will know that I am an atheist. I certainly have no love for any religion and subscribe to the Richard Dawkins camp which believes that religiosity is a nonsense and something to be abhorred; but that does not preclude me from standing up for the rights of a sizeable minority of Scottish people to celebrate their Irishness as and how they see fit, and to send their children to Catholic faith schools, without being physically attacked and accused of being divisive and bigoted.

Scotland is a great country with a lot going for it, but anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bigotry is Scotland’s shame. It used to be Scotland’s secret shame, but not any more. The days of the bigots are numbered.