It covered the Famine Song story as the involvement of the Irish consulate in Edinburgh broke.

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Racists always make sense. They make sense to themselves and other racists (presuming of course that they are of the same perceived racial/ethnic group).

For the last 500 years the dominant ethnic group on the planet has been the white western European group.

That much is undeniable and self-evident.

The top of that particular racial pile-100 years ago-were the British.

The Germans tried to topple the British, but they failed.

However despite their failure to take out Britain Germany drained the strength of the London state and, in the end, the colonials in America had to save the old country with Lend Lease.

The North European white tribe had a new leader.

The old boys in London didn’t realise this until Suez in 1956.

Now, of course it is the Americans that are top dogs and the British bulldog knows it.

 The Ivy League Blue Bloods who have run the American state since the creation of the USA represents an unbroken racial supremacy dating back to Henry VIII.

Within western Europe the expansion of strong states to incorporate “ peripheral culture s of low prestige” was brilliantly mapped out by Michael Hechter in his “Internal colonialism”(1999) he used the example of the expansion of the London state to become the dominant power in the north European archipelago.

If all the subject peoples of these islands the rural Irish. Remaining catholic after the reformation and emotionally thirlled to the Brehon laws, even after Cromwellian ethnic cleansing, remained outside the emotional contract.

Like all peoples of internal colonies they provide military and industrial recruits to the power centre.

The Irish who flocked to British cities were no different to Bretons and Corsicans who provided the French republic with its soldiers and factory fusiliers.

The descendants of these reluctant arrivistes have several paths to take-these routes are often marked out for them by the powerful.

They can remain distinct by being systematically excluded and ghettoised like European Jewry.

They can fully integrate and become indistinguishable like the Cornish who provided greater Wessex with agricultural labour.

The Glasgow Irish over the last 150 years are probably somewhere in the middle.

At no time were the Irish locked up in ghettoes although there was a limit to their social mobility. In Scotland there was a tartan ceiling that the Irish could not pass through.

As late as the 1960s a certain major Scottish bank had a formal ban on Catholics being employed there.

Now of course that Scottish bank is no longer a Scottish bank, but in the 1960s the Scottish bank in question was owned and run by Scots.

Catholic was a handy badge to identify and exclude members of the Irish.

However the social division was never truly about religion.

Just like Rangers football club-everyone-including the Catholics knew the rules.

Some Catholics did better than others.

Rangers supporters sing and chant about “Fenian Bastards” not “Catholic bastards”

It wasn’t a crime to be an Italian Scot. They remained fiercely catholic. Their homeland was a republic and was home to the Pope!

Italy had sided with the Axis powers in WW2.

Yet a benign integration ,while being allowed to remain distinctly Italian, was afforded them.

Perhaps if only the Irish had been able to make ice cram!

As ever politics is in everything.

Despite being catholic from the losing side of WW2 the Italians in Scotland did not represent the threat to the entire British project that the Irish did.

In the late 19^th century a Scottish catholic cleric Bishop Grey was concerned about the Irish refugees and argued with an Irish colleague Bishop Devine.

Given that both Bishops were probably Catholics we can rule out religious intolerance as well in this one!

What was the issue was that the Irish were Fenians.

The Irish had among their number revolutionaries who wished the empire nothing but ill will.

Karl Marx was alive and writing at this time and noted a definitive difference between the Irish and the British proletariat.

The Famine and the Land war in Ireland had produced the Fenian Brotherhood.

The first act of asymmetrical warfare in modern times in these islands –the Clerkenwell explosion- introduced dynamite to the arsenal of the Irish revolutionary.

The Catholicism of the Irish was never the issue for the host community.

Fenianism was THE issue.

The armed threat to the state was the issue, not transubstantiation.

The Fenian fuse finally reached its logical destination in Easter 1916.

The Proclamation is the written statement of a cultural revolution.

It mapped out the end of Greater England.

Historians may yet write that it was the start of the beginning of the London state’s grip on this archipelago.

The Republic of Ireland is-as Alex Salmond says-  “an independence success story”.

That long journey to being such a success story started in Easter 1916.

Easter 1916 is justifiably celebrated by the Irish people and the Irish state. The British send their representative and wreaths are laid by the Irish Army and the British army.

Thankfully all of this is in the past and the Dublin state and the London state could not be closer allies on many issues.

Anti-Irish racism was a creation of the centrifugal force of the London state at its zenith. Although there had been writings about the barbarous Irish as far back as the twelfth century. Giraldis Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) was also very catholic….

That centrifuge is slowing down now. We maybe in the end of days for the British state.

It will not, in my opinion, survive full Scottish freedom. Finally the Auld sang could begin again. That new beginning for Scotland will, necessarily be the end of “Britishness”. The Scots who berate the Glasgow Irish may finally stop wearing England shirts at Ibrox and realise how appallingly they behaved when they were England’s docile natives.

One cannot explain the “Famine song” of recent controversy without understanding the different roles that the Catholic Irish and the Protestant Scots played in the British Empire when that empire was in existence.

The British Empire is, of course, a thing of the past.

A historical fact, but something that is done with, over, finished and never to return.

The centre of that empire-that once spanned the globe- is now also in terminal decline. The UK is now struggling even to be a junior ally of the US empire (which is also starting to stumble in the imperial game as China waits their turn).

The new Scotland can have no place for the league of empire loyalist with their visceral hatred of the Irish.

Scotland, like Ireland can play a full part in the development of a European polity.

The “mother country” so loved of the England shirt wearing Rangers fans will soon be too busy dealing with the home grown Jihadis in Bradfordistan to notice that the descendants of a successful English annexation in the 18^th century are finally being themselves again-just like the Irish.

I am confident that more and more Scots will find their confidence and their voice to take their place among nations once more.

I am glad I came home to Ireland, but I wish the country of my birth well in dealing with their British problem at Ibrox.

For if Scotland is to progress and takes its place among the nations of the world then the Ibrox psychosis will need to be finally dealt with.

Last week and without any great fanfare George W Bush broke from deep cover and moved to strike at the enemy.

He took out the free market.

Bush is a commie!

All these years the free wheeling oilman from Crawford Texas with the rich daddy and well-connected Saudi buddies was actually a closet leftie.

He had us all fooled.

It was a brilliant cover making the Manchurian candidate look like false nose and glasses from a Christmas cracker!

Had Hugo Chavez moved on the financial system of Venezuela in a similar fashion then we could safely assume that the lads in Langley would be planning another coup.

In fact what Bush did with his move in state control of the economy was much less than what Salvadore Allende did in Chile in the early 1970s.

The democratically elected President of Chile offended US business interest he paid with his life, as did thousands of other Chileans who were tainted with leftism.

The Bush administration on Saturday formally proposed a vast bailout of the United States financial system, requesting unfettered authority for the Treasury Department to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions based in the United States.

The US state is now the owner of major financial institutions and millions of US homes.

The most right wing, free market US president in a generation has nationalised banks and taken a huge housing stock into public ownership.

Read that sentence again, because it doesn’t look right does it?

What we are trying to witness is as ungraspable as what the people of the developed world started to witness in 1929.

We have no idea what is unfolding-we only know that the epoch is about to change.

In 1929 Hitler was a nobody. A sick deluded man with a handful of followers. Then a huge financial tsunami, which no one had predicted, catapulted  him to be the saviour of the German people.

Millions of sane rational Germans voted for him five years after Wall Street crashed.

You know the rest.

Who will be the new Hitler?

Where will the new Nazis emerge?

We have no idea.

Not a single one of us.

History-contrary to popular misconception does not repeat itself.

Similar things to reoccur again and again-like wars over scarce resources in times of shortage.

That is the human story, but the circumstances of the new conflict are never exactly the same as before.

I was born in the 1950s.

All of my life the world financial system-set up after World War Two-has worked.

There have been recessions, downturns, readjustments and blips.

Through all that the system worked.

Historians will argue about whether or not these eight years of Bush was the key pathogen in a global catastrophe.

The ideological drive to de-regulate and then de-regulate some more was a coup d’etat against the financial order that the world had enjoyed since the end of World War Two.

It could have been different if people in powerful judicial positions in Florida in 2000 had acted with good authority.

They didn’t.

President Gore would undoubtedly have taken corrective action as envisaged by J.M. Keynes and by the smart men who met and concocted the “Bretton Woods agreement” while Hitler and the Empire of Japan had yet to be defeated.

This was admirable forward planning.

The new world order was being planned and the IMF was a key part of that every bit as much as the UN.

Now the US federal debt is a number that I cannot pronounce .I have to count and recount the numbers of zeroes and work out what it is as a word.

Historian Niall Ferguson said that the US Empire, in his book “Colossus”, had three deficits.

Manpower, Finance and attention.

The middle one just got a lot worse.

China now owns a sizeable chunk of the US economy just as America bailed out Britain during World War One.

The geo-politics of the planet are starting to tip towards China again for the first time in 500 years.

While the American legions are embroiled in the battlefields of the Middle East central Asia Beijing quietly builds up its power.

The invincible US military has found its own forests of Germania just as Britain over-reached itself on the Somme.

Islam is bleeding America dry and the Jihadi cannot be parleyed with. There will be no Paris Peace accord with the Al Qaeda franchise that is opening up a branch near you soon.

The old men of Beijing have no war to fight with Islam, but quietly buy up US assets while their people labour in the new workshop of the world.

The Chinese curse could not be more apt.

These are indeed fascinating times.

Damn it!

Racists are not happy when their victims will not be quiet and accept their allotted role as lesser beings.

In the Deep South of the United States the “Uppity Nigger” was something that could not be allowed by all right thinking white folks.

Soon those “folks” maybe ruled by their worst nightmare.

I hope that comes to pass.

I have the facility of allowing or not allowing comments onto this site.

This is a power that the victim of racism usually doesn’t have the luxury of.

Where the comments have been non-abusive and non-threatening I have approved them.

People are free not to agree with me as I reserve the right to disagree with them.

However that liberal attitude to a lively debate is a red rag to a racist bull.

The people who have objected to my opposition to the “Famine Song” do not believe I have the right to object.

That is what the famine song is all about.

It reflects the 19th century Punch cartoon view that Victorian Britain had of Irish people.  Probably only among the rougher elements of Rangers supporters do those attitudes to Irish people still persist.

Like the poor white trash of America when they see successful African Americans they long for the days when the blacks  “knew their place”.

The Irish of the global gaeltacht are no longer Britain’s victims.

We are a success story of the third wave of the info sphere and the de-massified media. Alvin Toffler could have written for the script for this new Irish Diaspora.

The Rangers supporters who sing the “Famine Song” with such gusto hark back to an old culture of the certainties of the British Empire where the Irish had no choice, but to know their place. In that world the community that supported Rangers had a few more crumbs from the imperial table. A few extra crumbs were all that it took. They were not the bottom of the pile in Clydeside in the old days. Rangers football club throughout most of the 20th century did not field players who were known to be Catholics. Recently a Rangers player from the 1960s Sandy Jardine said when he arrived at the club in 1964 there were no Catholics at the club even in the backroom staff. It wasn’t a written policy, but that is how the place operated. Everyone knew, everyone understood. That was the emotional contract with the paying public. The world tilted slightly since 1989 when Rangers, under a new management team signed an ex-Celtic player Maurice Johnston who is a catholic.

Since then many Rangers players have been Catholics these players have been from France, Italy and Spain as well, of course, from Scotland. Their religion has not been an issue. Rangers first catholic captain was Italian Lorenzo Amoruso. The Rangers supporters took him to their hearts. His religion wasn’t an issue, nor of course should it have been. Amoruso embodied what was at the core of the Ibrox psychosis. That Lorenzo Amoruso was a catholic was, at the end of the day, no big deal. What their captain could not be was an Irish catholic. For a player to be able to say he was a Rangers and Republic of Ireland international is simply an appalling vista for the hordes who lustily belt out the “Famine song”. There are Catholics in Scotland of Italian descent as there are Catholics of Irish descent. The Ibrox hatred is aimed at the latter. In my writings in the Irish Post in the 1990s I made this point again and again. This is about ethnicity and nationality in Glasgow not about religion.

Rangers football club has issued a statement saying that if their fans sing “The Famine song” at a match then they are in danger of being arrested for a “racial breach of the peace.” This was the advice that Rangers had received from the Scottish police.

So the police think this song is racist.

When Rangers were formed in 1873 Britain was the world’s unrivalled global superpower. It is hard to imagine that now. Within this archipelago the Catholic Irish were clearly first of many victims of that empire. That is why Irish people have a natural affinity with so many other peoples who also were forced to live under the union flag. Happily that flag is almost gone from the planet as a symbol of imperialism.

Rangers as an institution grew up in the early 20th century to be a power in the land as a focus for anti-Irish sentiment in Glasgow. The Irish of early 20th century Britain, especially on the Clyde, would be analogous to how some people view British born Muslims today. The Irish were always the enemy within for imperial Britain par excellance.

The world has moved on, but a section of the Ibrox support is still caught in that time warp. Scottish journalist Graham Speirs, himself a Rangers supporter and committed Christian, said that the Ibrox club had a “white underclass attached to them. They are financially and intellectually impoverished.” Speirs, who said this in a radio show just after Rangers fans had rioted in Manchester at the UEFA cup final, has become a hate figure for the representatives of this underclass who have access to a computer.

Their anger that has poured onto soccer message boards and onto this site over the last 24 hrs since my interview on Real Radio is a manifestation of their frustration that a culture is changing and they don’t like it. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=philbhoy&search_type=&aq=f                  

It is always a good sign when racists are angry.

They are angry because they are impotent.

Contented racists are a sign that the oppressor has power over the oppressed.

That is no longer the case. That is why the hatred and abuse now pours into this site like so much toxic waste.

I will only allow those into public view if their missives are civil, polite and capable of basic sentence structure.

If you are reading this and you are a parent then you will instantly get what is about to appear a few lines down your screen. If you are not a parent then you will either dismiss the statement I am about to make or take my word for it, because you certainly wont “get it”. This is a parent thing. There is no way I can explain it to the childless. In fact I didn’t think it is possible for anyone to explain the following to the childless.

Ok here goes.

You will not tolerate a situation for your own kids that you endured as a child.

All the parents reading these words nod inwardly in quiet comprehension.

The rest of you will have to take it on faith.

That is how I felt when the “Famine Song” came to my notice in May of this year.

The UEFA cup final in Manchester had not passed without incident.

Manchester had seen the worst outbreak of civil disorder since the Miner’s strike of 1985.

The rioters were supporters of Rangers’ football club.

I wasn’t surprised by any of this. Anyone who knows the reputation of Rangers support knows that crowd trouble is a camp follower of their expeditions into European competition.

What WAS new was a song that was sung by a section of the crowd in the City of Manchester stadium.

It mocked the Irish famine and implored the target of this ditty “ to go home”.

That the opposition on the night was Zenit St. Petersberg from Russia mattered not a jot. This song was written for back home. It was intended to bait and taunt the supporters of their city rivals Celtic.

Most Celtic supporters in Glasgow can conjure up an Irish ancestor or two.

My own ancestry is a probably not uncommon for Glasgow born followers of Celtic.

One Irish born parent (my father from Mayo) and a settled family in Scotland who came to Scotland during the land war evictions. My mother’s grandparents were from Carlow and Donegal. All were rural poor Catholics. All of my great grandparents were children of the Famine generation. They had held on in places like Mayo and Donegal, just.

Not surprisingly between such a household in the East End of Glasgow and summer vacation on Mayo’s Atlantic coast I grew up with a keen sense of Irishness.

It was a proud rite of passage when the Irish embassy in London posted me my green passport with the golden harp embossed on the front.

Inside I savoured the words   “saoranach d’eirinn”. The literal English translation is “free person of Ireland” on the passport it was  “Irish citizen”.

I was indeed a citizen and not a subject of someone’s hereditary good fortune.

Citizen was good enough for me and it has been so ever since. One of the reasons I loved foreign travel as a young man was my affirmation at airports and borders of my Irish identity.

I have relatives with an identical genealogy in Philadelphia and in Ohio. There it isn’t a problem in the USA to have an Irish lineage. In fact it is something of a social advantage.

The Famine song would never be sung to Irish Americans. Never.

With the new football season in Scotland the famine song was again sung by the supporters of Glasgow Rangers.

This time it was what they really wanted. They were allowed to sing it inside the stadium of their archrivals as their team comprehensively beat Celtic 4-2.

In this hate fest the excellent performance of the Rangers’ players who fully deserved their victory was a mere sideshow for the Rangers support.

They had the serious business of pouring out racial hatred for those in Glasgow who remember that part of them will always, emotionally, be in Ireland.

A couple of weeks later the Irish Times published a letter by a Mr. Dan Duggan who had been at the game with his children. He was appalled at the anti-Irish racism given vent and fury in 2008 in a British soccer stadium. He was sickened by the “Famine song”.

Reading Dan Duggan’s (Rangers and racism, Irish Times 10/09/2008) reminded me that I made the correct decision to take my young family out of Glasgow in the mid 1990s.

The day that I read Duggan’s letter my son received his Junior cert results from his Gaeilscoil here in Donegal. Like his Mayo grandfather he is a fluent Irish speaker capable of a subtle and nuanced conversation in the first language of this republic.

In sean Dun Na nGall it is not a crime to be called Cathal. His sisters Roisin and Aislinn are in also in a culturally safe place.

The “famine Song” is only the most recent manifestation of Scotland’s oldest racism. It is also the racism that is tolerated by the leaders of Scottish society.

Although Rangers FC are currently subject of a probation order from UEFA for “discriminatory chanting” at UEFA controlled games the club will escape any sanction from the Scottish soccer authorities for their domestic outpourings of racism towards the Irish community in Scotland.

Moreover the Scottish media tend to turn a blind eye to the racism that is all around them.

The Famine is indeed over, although we Irish here in Ireland and in the global Irish Diaspora continue to deal with the demographic and psychological aftermath.

I did come home and it is sad that, in a very fundamental way, the city of my birth will never be home while these racists enjoy official tolerance.

A week or so after the derby match in Glasgow I was contacted by a source inside the foreign affairs department that the Irish embassy in London had received many complaints following on from the soccer match in Glasgow in August.

From my time with the Irish post in London I knew a few people I could call in the embassy.

I found out that the appropriate minister in the Scottish government didn’t know of the existence of the Famine song, never mind the import of this racist ditty.

The Irish consulate in Edinburgh did bring up the issue of the Famine song with the Scottish government.

I dipped into the Scottish soccer debate around the “Famine Song” by giving an interview to Ewen Cameron of Real Radio on the 16^th September 2008.

The very mild intervention of the Irish Consulate caused some embarrassment to a sporting establishment who had sought to deal with the Famine song “in house”.

This non-confrontational approach had seen the Rangers songbook not advance an inch towards the enlightenment in decades.

It took a Panorama programme in 2005 and UEFA sanctions in 2006 for  “discriminatory chanting” to make the singing of the original Rangers’ battle hymn “The Billy Boys” a banned substance inside Ibrox Park.

Although it is heard regularly wherever the rougher end of the Rangers support is found it is not heard inside Ibrox.

Result.

The Famine song was penned within the last twelve months.

It was a replacement for the “Billy Boys”.

Although marching “up to our knees in fenian blood” is no longer publicly acceptable (or legal) the need to bait and taunt those of Irish descent is still a deep-seated need probably best dealt with by a psychotherapist.

After this particular news cycle we know this much.

The Famine song-sung publicly in a soccer stadium in Scotland is likely to lead to the singers arrest for a “racial breach of the peace”.

Result.

Here in Donegal it isn’t a crime to be Irish anymore. My children are citizens of a republic and in times to come one of them may even be elected president.

That is why, when I hear the laughter of my children outside in the garden, I know that their mother and I acted in their best interests when they were too young to know that they were the objects of hatred of so many where they were born.

Their laughter is the best antidote to the hatred and bile that created the Famine song.