Anti-Irish racism in Scotland swept under the rug

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Minority Reporter: Modern Scotland’s bad attitude towards its own Irishman, by Phil Mac Giolla Bhin (Frontline Noir, 9.99)

IMAGINE the public row that would erupt if football fans sang a song on the terraces demanding that a British-born black player return home. Then imagine that the barracks footballer is a Jew of British origin. Now imagine that the song is aimed at the crowd supporting the team of black or Jewish players.

Such unacceptable behavior would be labeled as racist and would cause an outcry. Given that the men were British, this would also be an example of blatant ignorance. But in Scotland, particularly in Glasgow, racist attitudes towards people of Irish descent, many of whose ancestors emigrated generations ago, persist.

While it’s not just happening inside football pitches, its clearest example is a shameful song which, despite being deemed racist by Scotland’s highest court, continues to be heard.

According to its opening verse, immigrants from Ireland during the famine years of the 1840s (and into the following century) brought us nothing but trouble and shame. Then comes the offensive refrain: Well the famine is over. Why don’t they go home?

This song is the centerpiece of a penetrating analysis of anti-Irish racism by Phil Mac Giolla Bhin, who was born and raised in Scotland. His book was published in 2013 and I am reviewing it a decade later for three reasons. First, because so little has changed; second, because it received no criticism at the time, itself significant; and third, because it makes a consistent and compelling distinction between bigotry and racism.

I could add a fourth. There is a definite connection between the anti-Irish attitudes found in Glasgow and those evident in Belfast, where loyalists have adopted the famine song as their own.

But let’s focus on the shame of Scotland, the tacit acceptance of racism that is unacceptable elsewhere in Britain. In 2017, a survey by a charity called Show Racism the Red Card found that 56% of 513 people living in Scotland who identify as of Irish descent said they had experienced anti-Irish racism.

In 2021, a large group of Rangers fans were filmed marching through Glasgow city center singing the famine song. It prompted then-Justice Minister (and now Scottish First Minister) Hamza Yousaf to say the footage “disgusted” him, calling it an example of anti-Irish racism.

Chief Superintendent Mark Sutherland, Police Scotland Divisional Commander for Greater Glasgow, also called it racist behaviour. However, his promise that proper action would follow resulted in very few arrests.

How the incident was reported was also important. It was, the BBC said, a sectarian chant. This, from the UK public service broadcaster, was completely unacceptable. This was not just a mistake, but a lie since it perpetuated the myth that there was an equivalence between racists and those they abused.

It is one of the major themes of Mac Goilla Bhins, that racism was not taken seriously because it was hidden in plain sight by the sectarian framework. It’s easy to do nothing if the blame can be assigned to both sides, each being seen as just as bad as the other. People here in Belfast need few lessons on this escape, which obscures the reality.

Another similarity between Glasgow and Belfast is the religious dimension. In this account, paralleling the sectarian fallacy, it is suggested that hostility towards the Irish is based on the religious division between Protestants and Catholics. Yet, as the author points out, many thousands of people of Italian descent do not experience undue criticism, if any, for their Catholic faith.

Another troubling factor about racial prejudice is how it leads to what might be called casual racism, the kind its authors seek to pass off as mere banter. Can’t the Irish be joking? Hence a gob-smacking comment by SNP MP Mhairi Black in 2018 on the plastic Irish, a jibe suggesting, without evidence, that people living in Scotland who continue to assert their Irish roots are somehow guilty of cultural appropriation .

No blabla about it, by the way. Which brings us to the other disturbing aspect, the lack of media coverage following the publication of Mac Giolla Bhins’ fascinating book. Was it a sign of embarrassment? Or was it, as is more likely, a refusal to give publicity to his finely argued polemic?

Ten years ago this week I wrote this in @CelticView about the need for a famine memorial in Glasgow. Tomorrow it will be unveiled at St Mary’s in the Calton – Celtic’s birthplace. ://t.co/GVGzU7Zwqv

Phil Mac Giolla Bhin (@Pmacgiollabhain) July 24, 2021

Once the red herrings of bigotry and religion are exposed as false and the evidence dispassionately studied, the reality of anti-Irish racism couldn’t be more evident. Mac Giolla Bhin, who left Scotland in 1996 to live in Donegal, recounts instances where he changed his mind.

With the famine song in mind and his explicit denigration of the crime of genocide in which a million people died and a million more were forced to emigrate, he wrote about the lack of a memorial in Glasgow to An Gorta Mr.

It took more than eight years later before one was finally erected outside a Catholic church where the Celtic football club was founded in 1888. But Glasgow City Council imposed one condition: the memorial must be shared with potato blight victims in Scotland. Highlands at the same time.

It was a cynical act, according to journalist Kevin McKenna, who accused the board of being evasive, deceitful and uncooperative during the previous 18 months of negotiations.

It is certainly significant that the Sunday Times chose to report the unveiling of the statues in terms of the possibility that it would escalate tensions within the community by being seen as a provocation by members of the Orange Order. Why should a memorial to a million people who suffered horrendous deaths provoke anyone?

This incident alone underscores Mac Giolla Bhins’ central point about anti-Irish racism. And, in these circumstances, it’s no wonder that Jeanette Findlay, Chair of the Famine Memorial Committee, responded to the undisguised intolerance by saying: Some would consider anything that commemorates the plight of the Irish to be controversial. The Irish in Glasgow, that is.

*Phil Mac Giolla Bhins’ latest novel, Native Shore, is available from Frontline Noir.

Do you have anything to say on this issue? If so, submit a letter for publication to Conor McParland at [email protected] or write to editor Anthony Neeson at Andersonstown News/North Belfast News, Teach Basil, 2 Hannahstown Hill, Belfast BT17 0LT

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