When writing about the murder of Constable Carrol in Craigavon and British soldiers Mark Quinsey and Patrick Azimkar at Mazareene barracks in Antrim one of my reasons for totally condemning these murders was that Northern Ireland was in a new era.
I was quite clear what I thought about those who had taken the lives of these three men.
I wrote that these delusional “guerrillas”, confusing means with ends, were trapped in a previous historical period.
Any of the ,highly debatable, justifications for the use of arms in Northern Ireland circa 1970 were all totally and utterly gone in 2009.
One of the key components of that new dispensation was that the old RUC was a thing of the past and that the new policing service ably led by Hugh Orde was a model of modern enlightened policing.
Subsequently today when Northern nationalists claim that they do not enjoy the protection of the police, although that claim may have had some validity in the past, it is  a piece of self-pitying victim hood.
The days of the police attacking innocent people like Mr. Devanney in a sectarian attack or idly looking on as a nationalist was battered to death a la Robert Hammil was entirely a thing of the past.
The PSNI has no ex-“B” Specials in their ranks and their 24-hour a day job is the protecting of everyone in Northern Ireland regardless of their background.
That was my firm view of policing in Northern Ireland until this week.
Now I’m not so sure.
Up until the Murder of Kevin McDaid I was rooting for the PSNI 100%.
At any opportunity when discussing such matters with people in the Six Counties who didn’t like the new policing arrangements I would say:
“Are you saying that they are just then the old bigoted RUC with a new uniform? I’m not buying that one! You’re living in the past because that is a comfortable place for you. The past is full of old certainties. The world has changed, this place has changed  for the better and the police service here is part of that change.”
Now, in a similar conversation, I would be quieter, more reflective. I don’t know if the strident pro PSNI me was wrong, I just don’t know. I have to be, however,  susceptible to evidence.
The evidence of Mr.McDaid’s murder suggests that the nice new PSNI and the bad old RUC might not be that different.
There seems, at the very least, a case to answer that the PSNI officers on the scene  did very little as Kevin McDaid was being battered to death by the mob of Rangers supporters.
Kevin Myers, always abrasive, always readable described those who murdered Mr.McDaid’s as:
“Worthless sub-fascist idiots of lumpen-proletariat Protestant Ulster..”
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/there-is-no-substitute-for-lethal-force-in-certain-policing-situations-1754740.html
Regarding the less than heroic behaviour of the two PSNI officers who, allegedly, witnessed the mob of Rangers supporters attacking Mr.McDaid Kevin stated:

“the two peelers scarpered when the loyalist scum arrived, leaving the latter to kill Kevin McDaid at their leisure. (Imagine the outcry if some poor Protestant thugs had been shot dead, while about their traditional tribal hobby of Fenian-hunting?)”

“Better that an innocent civilian be butchered, than a policeman kill a psycho-simian or two.”
Kevin advocated that the PSNI officers should have drawn their legal weapons and interrupted these Rangers fans in full flow by shooting a couple of them dead.
This, of course, did not happen, that much is certain.
In his Independent column Kevin analysed why police officers faced with a mob armed with cudgels battering a man to death chose to in the words of Assistant Chief Constable Finlay “ withdraw”.
Kevin’s main thesis for PSNI inaction on the day in Coleraine is that the Patten reforms had so neutered the police force in Northern Ireland that faced with a Rangers mob murdering Mr. McDaid they withdrew to get their paperwork in order rather than draw their weapons on, as Kevin calls them, a “psycho-simian or two.”
Of course members of the RUC looked on while Robert Hammil was kicked to death by a loyalist mob in Portadown.
After this horrible murder members of Mr. Hammil’s family had to endure taunts from loyalists in Portadown  town centre anytime they ventured there.
When these thugs would see a member of Robert’s family they would shout: “Robert Hammil ha ha!” and jump up and down on the spot emulating what had been done to Robert.
A dance then emerged in loyalist drinking clubs across  Northern Ireland called “ the bouncy”.
The “bouncy” is often performed at Ibrox.
Many Rangers fans will not know the genesis of this piece of fascist performance art, but many of them from Northern Ireland will be in no doubt  as to the origins of “the bouncy”.
Kevin’s argument about the gun shy PSNI falls to pieces when one looks at the behaviour of the force in recent years.
In 2007 the PSNI fired shots attempting to apprehend two men in the nationalist Ardoyne area of Belfast.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/6452227.stm
The PSNI have discharged their firearms  to take life in the course of their duty as evidence here in the death of Neil McConville in 2003.
http://www.policeombudsman.org/modules/press/press.cfm/action/detail/Press_ID/168/Archive/2007/year/200
Some have said that the two officers witnessing a rage filled mob of Rangers fans intent on murder should have drawn their weapons and fired warning shots to scare off, as Kevin Myers would style them, these “psycho-simians.”
Once more there is evidence that this has happened in the past with PSNI officers firing warning shots to good effect:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4223570.stm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfqo04RHiBE

Here is the  treatment of the murder of Kevin McDaid by the  conistently excellent Channel 4 news team.

I would be grateful if any of you could  post up here how this story was treated in Scotland by the print media or on TV.

It clear from this youtube clip that the C4 team focussed on the football element to the murder.

I watched the news footage of Ally McCoist dancing on his toes on the Tannadice turf waving a union flag.
I thought at the time “ I wonder how this plays in the North?”
For some Rangers supporters in Coleraine the day was almost perfect as the final whistle sounded at Tannadice and their team were SPL champions.
They had waited since 2005 to be able to say that their team was the best in Scotland.
In any footballing culture across the planet it would have been a signal for a party.
It doesn’t matter if it is Barca or Burnley.
You’re team has emerged at the top of the pile after a tough season.
You’re champions and there isn’t a feeling like it for any football fan.
Rangers, of course, have a great following in the North of Ireland.
These supporters are loyal; unfortunately some of them are also Loyalist.
As most Rangers supporters across the planet were happy to party into the night.
The Loyalists in Coleraine needed something else to celebrate their team’s triumph-a dead taig.
Any Taig would do.
They’re not that fussy.
Kevin McDaid’s crime was that he was a Catholic.
Mr. McDaid was 49; a family man and a plasterer by trade Kevin spent a lot of his free time doing voluntary community work. He had just returned from a fishing trip he had arranged for young lads from both traditions.
Before his murder Kevin was arranging another cross-community trip to take young people out of the area on the 12th of July.
Kevin’s widow, Evelyn, is a protestant. She was also badly beaten by the mob as she tried to save her husband.
His bruised wife Evelyn told of the man she had lost and how that her Kevin would have wanted no revenge.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/mob-murder-widow–kevin-was-my-life-14314028.html
As I write another victim on Sunday’s SPL celebrations in Coleraine, Damian Fleming is unconscious in hospital. He is critical and is unlikely to survive.

Had these murders happened in Mississippi in the 1950s and the attacking crowd had used a rope and a tree then we would have described the death of Kevin McDaid as a “lynching.”
A feature of the lynching in the Deep South was the official tolerance of the local police.
As Robert Hammil had his head repeatedly jumped on by a loyalist mob members of the RUC looked on impassively from a Landover a few yards away.
That the RUC behaved in this fashion has been forensically established and is not contested.
What is now being alleged by Mr.McDaid’s 22-year-old son Ryan is that the PSNI did something similar as their father was being murdered.
Ryan alleged that there was a police car only 100 yards from the scene of the murder.
Mrs McDaid said that the attackers claimed they were members of the UDA.
The PSNI were quick to wheel out Assistant Chief Constable Alistair Finlay to rebut these allegations
Finlay stated that there was  “no evidence this was anything other than a maverick group of yobs”.
Local people said the group could have been as large as forty strong. ACC Finlay, who defended the police’s handling of the incident, also denied a claim by Mr McDaid’s family that officers stood by while he was being attacked.
“This is not something that we’re aware of, but if anybody has any information on that we would ask them to contact us and share that information with us,” ACC Finlay said that:
“Police arrived very quickly after the initial phone calls, and there were up to 60 people engaged in hand-to-hand fighting. Two neighbourhood police officers moved to make an initial arrest of one of the main aggressors, but such was the hostility of the crowd that they had to withdraw and move to rendering first aid.”
These officers have weapons and legal authority for their use.
A man was being murdered yet they withdrew?
It is hardly surprising, perhaps, that many in the nationalist community in the Six Counties think that the PSNI isn’t that different from the RUC.
The widely held belief in some nationalist areas is that the PSNI will observe a Catholic being beaten to death a la Robert Hammil and its no big deal.
Mrs McDaid claimed that the men who murdered her husband had claimed that they were members of the UDA.
Moreover she claimed that they had said that they were  “going to clean up this Fenian hole.”
This, of course, is the rationale of the ethnic cleansers in Bosnia.
There is, in the loyalist subculture of Northern Ireland, a wet dream that sees the creation of something akin to an Ulster Volkstaat, a land free of fenians.

The PSNI have now warned Ryan McDaid, Kevin’s son, that there is now a credible threat against his life from loyalists.
This warning came the day after I had watched Frankie Gallagher of the UDA’s political wing the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG) state that the UDA had no hand act or part in Kevin McDaid’s murder or the attack in the Heights area on Sunday.
I realise that there might be a certain comedic value in writing “UDA” and “political” and “research” in the same sentence.
However there isn’t any of this that is in anyway amusing.
I know I’ve been to Coleraine and came to close quarters with these fine fellows.
I was last in Coleraine over ten years ago.
I was lecturing at the school of social work at the University of Ulster, Magee College in Derry City.
The University’s main campus is in Coleraine and I also had a student on placement in Coleraine. Subsequently I spent a fair amount of time in the town over the period of an academic year.
One day in particular I visited my student at her placement and had travelled there by car.
When I came out of the health centre my Donegal registered car was surrounded by youths, many of them in Rangers shirts.
About half of them were carrying some type of weapon. I saw at least two baseball bats.
They were deep in discussion about what they were going to do with the owner of the car parked in their area.
I walked up behind the lad who seemed to be the leader. He was holding a golf club, but I rather thought he wasn’t that into the ancient game.
“Get off my car! ”
They spun round and were startled by two factors.
One, my Scottish accent.
Two, my appearance. I was out of central casting in my tweed jacket, polo neck, clutching a University of Ulster folder in front of me like a shield.
“Which is the correct road to Londonderry?”
It was more of an order than a polite request. I knew the road back to Doire very well indeed, but any doubters in this underclass lynch mob melted.
This was a British gentleman giving them orders!
The psychological climate immediately changed.
The ambience changed from menace to deference.
They were being talked down to by a university lecturer and one from the mother country!
Their rapid transformation from a menacing feral pack of teenage thugs to a ragtag honour guard was pathetic and unnerving in equal measure.
One of them actually attempted a salute to the grandson of a member of the West Mayo flying column as I drove out of that red, white and blue twilight zone.
All warfare is based on deception.
My view of the defenders of Coleraine has not changed.
They are the trailer trash of a dead empire.
A few weeks after that incident I bumped into the sadly departed Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam.
Our paths had first crossed many years earlier when I had been an undergrad reading politics at York and she was a newly elected MP.
She had an amazing talent for remembering faces, because she remembered mine!
I told her of the positive impression she had on me when she had visited.
She had given a lecture on being an MP, being a woman in a gentleman’s club etc.
Mo winked at me and said:
“I was shaggable then!”
I blushed. Her disarming vulgarity revealed a real warm heart and great courage. What I didn’t know was that she was battling with a serious illness and was wearing a wig her hair gone due to chemotherapy.
We swapped vignettes over a cup of coffee before the power points began about her sojourn in the Sick Counties.
It was clear that this left wing Englishwoman detested the tattooed loyalists.
Looking back it must have taken a lot for her to go into the Maze prison to speak with Loyalist prisoners.
She did it for peace, but she didn’t like doing it.
She asked me did I know a place called Rathcoole?
I certainly did I told her I had a student there on placement.
She said that one of her staff was organising a trip for her there earlier in the year.
He had went out to the place she was visiting-as I recall it was some kind of family centre.
The usual gable end murals were a bit worse for wear and clearly needed touching up.
People in the fiercely loyalist estate knew that the Queen’s minister was about to visit their little loyal sink estate.
They did get the paintbrushes out for the murals of Derry’s Walls and   King William at the Boyne.
That much I expected.
What I heard next amazed me.
The painters-young loyalists under the direction of senior paramilitary figures who ran Rathcoole as their fiefdom told the lad to paint out the murals. The gable ends were painted grey!
Mo Mowlam was swished past grey gable ends.
The day after her ministerial visit the mural painters were out again and brand new murals of the King Billy on the Boyne were created.
Most of my teaching time at Magee was filling in for a colleague on sabbatical. He taught the mental health component of the social work degree so I was covering his classes.
This Rathcoole community fiercely loyal, but perhaps embarrassed to show that loyalty to the Queen’s minister…
Yeah I thought there is a PhD in this lot!
There is a belief among some northern nationalist that the behaviour of these loyalist lynch mobs has the tacit approval of some unionist politicians.
DUP Councillor Adrian McQuillan on BBC’s “Newsline” was classic:
“Tit for tat all the time. What reason can you see for there being tricolours up yesterday afternoon, a Sunday afternoon? None other than for to get a reaction from the loyalist community, and they certainly got a reaction this time, which is very sad.”

“tit for tat”?

Robert Hammil, Michael McIlveen and Kevin McDaid were all Catholics killed in similar circumstances. All battered to death by a loyalist mobs.
“Tit for tat” implies some degree of reciprocity. There is none.
I watched McQuillan’s statement about “a reaction” and I was dismayed.
It sounded like a plea in mitigation.
I hope I’m wrong about that, if I’m correct then Northern Ireland remains the Sick Counties when I thought that the new dispensation was a way through to community health.
A reasonable person might well ask: “what kind of men would do such things?”
Within a crowd of forty-even self-selecting from the Coleraine Rangers gene pool-there might be one, perhaps two genuine sociopaths.
The men who murdered Kevin McDaid weren’t sociopaths, nor, I am sure, had they recently been released from secure psychiatric facilities.
Like the respectable men who strung up black men from trees in the  “good ol days” in Alabama they were psychologically normal.
What was aberrant was the belief system that socialised them.
Like the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 so brilliantly analysed by Christopher R Browning in his book “Ordinary Men.”
These particular ordinary men in Coleraine are, like Hitler’s killers on the eastern front, the products of a deeply sick culture.
The Loyalists who murdered Mr. McDaid are, of course, responsible for their own actions and, hopefully, they will be prosecuted to the limit of the law.
Dealing with the individuals doesn’t explain, however, why it is always a Loyalist mob and the victim, ipso facto, is always a “taig”.
The murder of Kevin McDaid was an act of cultural complicity. Twenty, thirty or forty men may have beaten him, but an entire sub-culture affirmed their hatred and their violence.
If a group sings a song that has lyrics like:
“We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood surrender or you’ll die!”
then don’t be too surprised that if they in fact end up splashing in the blood of fenians.
I’m sure Kevin McDaid, if given the chance, would have surrendered to save his live so that he could continue to be a husband to Evelyn and a father to his children.
He couldn’t be afforded that because some people’s idea of a perfect day for Rangers FC means that a Taig has to die.
Kevin McDaid was not as fortunate as PC Mike Regan who escaped with his life as a pack of Rangers supporters kicked him to the ground last May in Manchester as the Queen’s underclass wrecked the city.
No they aren’t ordinary football supporters, but they do feel affirmed at Ibrox and that is something the club has to, one-day address.
After the match on Sunday Ally McCoist enthused about Kyle Lafferty as his “big Ulster gazelle”.
Everyone knows that it is highly unlikely that a Rangers manager would be enthusing about a player from Cork or Dublin because Rangers seem unable over the past 25 years to find a suitable player from the Republic of Ireland.
That hard truth is a key component of the emotional contract between Rangers FC and the men who murdered Kevin McDaid in Coleraine last Sunday.

Today’s release of the report by Justice Sean Ryan into abuse of children in “care homes” run by the Catholic Church in Ireland doesn’t reveal anything new.
However it is a story that refuses to go away for the simple reason is that the thousands of victims have yet to receive any justice and ipso facto any closure.
The Catholic Church in |Ireland in the early decades of the Irish state was, effectively, above the law.
Over the years as a social worker and a journalist in Ireland I have met many former ex-prisoners of the Catholic Church.
Only recently I was being taken home from the bus station to my home by a very personable taxi-driver. He was in his mid-sixties. He confessed-and it was a confession-that he had been an inmate of Artane boys school in Dublin.
He had told me this when he had learned-in the process of a conversation-that I had been a Team Leader in the north Dublin for the Health Board.
As soon as this man said “I was in Artane for years.” I knew immediately what that meant for him.
He had been sent there as a twelve year old for playing truant from school.
Power is only accountable when power is on the wane.
The Catholic Church was the unelected power in the Free State. It provided an educated free army of teachers, nurses and social care workers to as bankrupt state just emerging from a civil war.
It was an offer that the Free Stat’s new rulers couldn’t and dare not have refused.
Today the past is, indeed, another country.
The power of the Catholic Church has been so diminished that it is difficult to communicate this to anyone who has no experience of the country.
This is especially true of people who think they know, who think they are in touch with the modern Irish zeitgeist.
It has been fascinating to observe the decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland over the last 15 years at close range.
I can recall the Catholic Church triumphant from my childhood summers spent in Mayo when the local clergy were feted like royalty in respectable households.
My cousins in Mayo-the boys at any rate- “benefited” from an expensive boarding school education at the hands of priests in County Galway.
My matriarchal grandmother wanted the boarding school experience for me, but my mother would have none of it.
I have that, and much more, to thank her for.
Instead I went to a boring comprehensive school that let me home after four and I sat in class with girls and boys together.
The educational experience that my Mayo cousins endured was so appallingly dysfunctional as to be criminal.
Of course my grandmother would have probably collapsed in shock had she known what was going on behind those high walls in County Galway.
People in government clearly did know enough to take action, but they didn’t.
Justice Ryan’s report today paints a picture of a submissive and deferential civil service who let the Catholic Church act with impunity.
Most great crimes in history are acts of mass complicity.
In Ireland in the days of the Free State Mass itself was a key component of people being compliant.
The alpha male of Catholic nationalism Eamonn De Valera himself bent the knee to John Charles McQuaid.
This, truly, was Rome rule.
The government of this republic still has to totally face down the Catholic hierarchy in this state.
Like with so much today the people are miles ahead of the political class.
The Irish government has previously agreed to pick up the tab for any litigation against the Catholic Church for abuse that they are surely liable for.
The leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland Archbishop Sean Brady today apologised.
Not good enough.
As I watch him on the RTE news he doesn’t look contrite he just looks creepy.
The Catholic Church is not, in Ire3land, financially liable for generations of abuse.
If the Catholic Church were in any way truly contrite then they would shut up shop on this island.
Of course they wont because they dete3ct a need for their unique brand of snake oil that they purvey to old, the   frightened and the dying.

Today’s report will not result in any prosecutions nor will any of the abusers be named.
 Consider this scenario.
A commercial provider of childcare, say, with twenty nurseries employed known paedophiles and then moved those child abusers to other crèches and day care centres within the company if a parent complained and the abuser was free –within the organisation –to abuse again.
Had that happened then the CEO of that day-care provider would be in prison.
The Catholic Church, in Ireland and across the planet, ran a gulag of child abuse facilities.
The CEO wears a funny hat he is called the “Pope” and he was once in the Hitlerjugend.
It would appear if one wants to practice child abuse with impunity then you need volume and god in the boardroom.
Today is a small step forward for the victims of Ireland Catholic gulag, but their final day of justice remains a distant objective.
Meanwhile our legislators, clearly equipped with a full irony by-pass, can bring in a blasphemy law to protect those poor souls who have an imaginary friends called Jesus yet they deny justice to those who were violated and destroyed by priests and nuns.
We are still a long way from cherishing all the children of this republic equally.

Ten years ago Scottish composer and conductor James MacMillan gave a lecture at the Edinburgh festival entitled “Scotland’s Shame – Anti-Catholicism as a barrier to genuine pluralism.”

The reponse from the Scottish media was  immediate , hostile and, on one occasion, somewhat underhand.

In an interview with the guardian in 2006 he related a telephone inetrview with the Sunday herald.

MacMillan was sure that the call was being recorded or monitored in some way-perhaps set up as a conference call.

Perhaps the people on the other end of the line wanted him to trip himself up or say something damning.

He did hear someone in the background saying to his  interviewer “ ask him if he is Opus Dei!”

The classical musician couldn’t help but let out a guffaw.

MacMillan had clearly  touched a raw  nerve.

The time and place of his lecture would have added to the collective pain that Scotland establishment must have felt.

The entire artistic world spends a month in Edinburgh every summer.

MacMillan has been described as Scotland most successful musical  export.

In the age of celebrity this internationally feted composer and conductor was telling it to the world how it was to be a Catholic boy  growing up in Kilwinning.

Moreover he was saying that things were still difficult for Scotland’s Catholic minority.

Ten years on from his speech I was grateful that James MacMillan  took time out from a busy schedule  afforded me the time to answer my questions so fully and frankly.

Q: Where were you born?

JM: In Kilwinning, Ayrshire.

Q: You are from a Catholic background-were you aware of any social exclusion that your community endured during your childhood?

JM: I was aware of tensions, which manifested themselves in unpleasant ways. Prejudice was rife – seemingly part of the majoritarian attitude to Catholics in the area. And outright discrimination was very much in the living memory of relatives, who remembered jobs being advertised in the 30s and 40s with the proviso that ‘no Catholics need apply’. Elements within the Church of Scotland had campaigned for the repatriation of the Catholic Irish right up to the 1930s. The Kirk apologised for this a few years ago. Much of the debate here now revolves round whether actual discrimination is still current or not. Research by Williams and Walls of the MRS Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at Glasgow University have argued that there is indeed still a lingering problem, relating to social deprivation among the Catholic Irish descendents. This is vehemently challenged though by other academics like Steve Bruce and Michael Rosie. They and others like Graham Walker are also campaigners for a specific understanding of Scottish working class protestant culture. Not for nothing are they known as the Orange Order’s favourite sociologists. Others like Prof David McCrone is suspiciously keen to argue that there is no such thing as an Irish community in Scotland. There are good reasons to enquire as to what motivates these non-objective, self-proclaimed experts in this matter. (Joe Bradley would be worth speaking to about this).

Q: It has been said that anti-catholic sentiment in modern Scotland is merely a misunderstanding of another phenomena-that of anti-Irish racism. Would you agree with that?

JM: These two prejudices are complicatedly intertwined. I have a great deal of sympathy with those who want to stress the ethnic dimension, because they are clearly correct. However, it would be mistake to dismiss the purely religious aspect of this issue. Scotland has been historically vehement in its anti-popery since the Reformation, centuries before Irish immigration. The Scottish cultural protestant mind-set is programmed to be aggressive about Catholicism. Secular commentators might want to play this down nowadays, but this is the dark theological hinterland to the current debate. 

Q: since you “went public” on your views of Scotland’s anti catholic underbelly what has been the response to you personally?

JM: Catholics are generally well disposed towards me, as I articulated an argument many would make in private but shy away from expressing it in the Public Square, for obvious reasons. Anyone who does this is attacked. Many in the media etc tried to assassinate my character and motivations at the time of my speech in 1999. This has made me very wary and ‘choosy’ about dealing with the Scottish media and other aspects of public life here. I have just swung my wider focus on to the outside world where I can be a composer, pure and simple. I have created a little cocoon for myself in Glasgow, which is populated by family and friends.  

In retrospect, though, it seems that most have come round to my analysis, in that there has been a grudging acceptance that there is a problem here that needs to be addressed. That suits me just fine, as that was the intention of the speech in the first place. The embarrassment and surprise factors were crucial at the time! This was a good lesson to learn, and will well serve the new campaign to confront anti-Irish racism in Scottish football.

Q: What is your view of “The Famine Song?”

JM: It is utterly disgraceful – nakedly sectarian and racist – it has no redeeming factors whatsoever

Q: What has been your assessment of the official response to this controversy?

JM: I am not surprised that the condemnation of the fans that sing this has been less than robust. Scottish life is full of the nudge-and-wink acceptance of anti-Irish/Catholic bigotry. Sports journalists are the worst with a few honourable exceptions. However, Kieron Brady is on to winner with this campaign. There is no way official Scotland can wriggle out of this. I am looking forward to see it all develop….. 

Q: What needs to be done in the future if “the Famine song” continues to be heard in Scottish football stadia? 

JM: The response needs to be ultra-strict – expulsions, life-long bans etc. It is easy to pinpoint the perpetrators. Police cameras are trained on the crowds at every game. There is no excuse…

 Q: James we’re the same age-and I recall in the 1970s that my family in the West of Scotland were worried about the prospect of Scottish self government as an Edinburgh parliament could bring in the policies of old Stormont-further socially excluding the Catholic minority of Scotland. Can you recall a similar fear in your Ayrshire childhood?

 JM: Yes I remember this very well. Although the anxiety lingers a little bit in some quarters, it is clear that things have changed. Catholics just need to be politically astute in the new situation. For example, we all know that New Labour is riddled with ideological atheists who want to smash Catholic education. The SNP have been trying to make inroads into the west-of Scotland Catholic vote for years. They know one way to do that is to be seen publicly defending faith schools. Politically astute Catholics know this is just an opportunist ploy, but we can use that to our advantage. It is important that, instead of throwing our lot in with one party against the other, as was the case in the past, we learn to play one off against the other…

It makes life more interesting, if nothing else!

Q: It is ten years since you gave a lecture entitled: ‘Scotland’s shame: Anti-Catholicism as a barrier to genuine pluralism’. Do you still stand by that view-or has your view changed?

JM: I think my earlier answer might have covered this. Basically the disgraceful, nation-wide scenes around McGeady and McCarthy point to unfinished business. The shame clearly lingers on. I’m just amazed that ‘official Scotland’ isn’t willing to see it. Heads in the sand again….

Q: you mention the treatment of McCarthy & McGeady had they been, say, Scottish born of Italian heritage and had opted to play for Italy do you think that they would have endured the abuse they have as Republic of Ireland players?

JM: No. The Scottish nativist bigot has a special hatred for Irish Catholics, because of the political dimension, which colours the relationship that Scotland has had with Ireland from the 17th century to recent times.