The bullet sent to the good cardinal was actually delivered in September before the papal visit, it isn’t connected to the recent spree of letter-bombs and bullets that have been sent to players and staff at Celtic Football Club.
I guess I don’t understand. Would you care to explain please?
Being a Glaswegian and Irish-Scot I guess I am an authority on the matter.
Like
LDNCatholic stated it is essentially a sectarian conflict with a sporting element. After
an Gorta Mór (the Irish famine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century) many Irishmen and their families emigrated all over the world and established communities. America and Australia (though with Australia there was already an penal-Irish presence) come readily to mind.
Scotland was also one of the nations in which large numbers of Irishmen emigrated to. Scotland at that time was a very staunch Presbyterian nation. The Church of Scotland (Protestant) had it’s fingers everywhere, from educational establishments to orphanages and local government. The mass influx of poor Irishmen who were primarily Catholic (though a great many from Ulster were Protestant) clashed with the established culture in Scotland. The typical problems one experiences from mass-immigration were existent with an added element of sectarian conflict (and it was primarily due to Irish Protestant emigrants that the political and sectarian conflicts of Northern Ireland became to entwined in Scotland, especially the west of Scotland).
The media was rabidly anti-Catholic and the clerics of the Church of Scotland were not better.
So, in something we say all over the world, the Irish and the Scots formed their own ghettoes. They kept to themselves. Catholics weren’t allowed to go to Protestant schools so we founded our own etc.
And Celtic Football Club was born out of such Catholic initiative. A Marist brother, Brother Walfrid from County Mayo in Ireland, established the Celtic Football Club to raise money for poor Catholic children in the east end of Glasgow. From it’s very beginning Celtic has always been associated with the Irish Catholic tradition.
Over the years Rangers Football Club came to be associated with the Protestant community of Scotland… for no other reason than that they were a) non-Catholic and b) were Celtic’s biggest rivalry (in the beginning, friendly).
Over the years there has been violence interwoven through our history. The majority of the youth gangs in Glasgow and the surrounding area are old and draw their origins in the Catholic-Protestant divide. In fact some of the youth gangs go right back to the 1800s (Bridgeton Billy Boys). And then there is the obvious violence that accompanied football in general through the 20th century.
This football’s season will have seen no less than
seven clashes between Celtic and Rangers. That is
a lot and we have one this Easter Sunday.
It will be a little too much to go into the characters of the recent drama but for a brief summary… Celtic has traditionally drawn a good few Irish players. Neil Lennon (who is now our manager) and Quinn for example. Lennon also used to play for the national Northern Irish team… until he was driven out by Loyalist terror squads for being Catholic (“Hang Neil Lennon high” accompanied with a hang-man drawn is a favourite on northern Irish and west of Scotland walls). Recently before an Old Firm match (the fifth I believe) bullets were sent to a few Celtic players. This heightened tensions. After a post-match and even in-match bust up between players and staff mail-bombs were sent to Neil Lennon. The bust up has got politicians etc. involved.
Now what you have to understand is that… it really is entirely on the Rangers half of things. They have an institutionally anti-Catholic team. Their support base is draw from the dregs of British society. They partake almost gleefully in the siege mentally of the northern Irish Protestants. They are violent and abusive anti-social scum. That goes for the
majority of their supporters. They are also supported by all aspects of Scottish football society. The SFA and SPL both go easy on them and give them free-passes. Referees are routinely bias in their favour. The government will not face the facts that the issue is Rangers its self and insists on lumping the Celtic support and club in with them.
Now I am not saying that there are not idiots in the Celtic supporter’s community. That would be stupid off me. But it is no where near the degree that exists in the Rangers’s support. Celtic fans are loved the entire globe over. When we go to Spain we bring bin-bags to clear away the rubbish we make… Rangers fans urinate on public monuments and trash the town they occupy… Rangers fans rioted in Manchester just the other year… because their big-screen TV wouldn’t work… not to mention stabbing a Russian youth inside the stadium its self after loosing the UEFA cup…
But UEFA its self does nothing.
All in all we label the football rivalry the “Old Firm” derby.
