Scotland's Secret Shame....

Well, I watched Panorama last night (Sunday), and the overwhelming feeling I’m left with is utter embarrassment.

I’m a Rangers fan. I have been since I was about 6 years old. I don’t go to games because I live 350 miles away, and it’s too much bother. Call me an “interested observer” if you want.

It’s easy for me to come out with the standard “..but some of my best friends are Catholics/Celtic fans..”, but that’s because it’s true. I was brought up in an area that had virtually no Catholic kids. The first I heard of Catholicism was in Primary 7 when two or three kids were excused from Religious Education because they had to go to Catechism. “Lucky bastards, they’re getting out of R.E.” I used to think!

So I haven’t really got a true idea of the magnitude of the problem in hand. I did have a mate who was a “staunch” (what does that man, by the way? Does it mean what I think?) Rangers fan, and some of the stories I heard about him were truly horrifying. He’d come back from an Old Firm game and regale us with tales of spitting on a wee boy that was wearing a Celtic scarf, or about the kicking that some poor lad got for wandering into the “wrong” pub at the wrong time….but the thing is, he was a good friend, and a wonderfully proud father to his daughter. He wasn’t a bad person per se, except when he was wearing the Blue and someone else was wearing the Green.

For years I’ve heard the songs that come from the terraces, and now stands at Ibrox. I know now of the significance of “Hello, hello, we are the Billy Boys..” and of being “up to our knees in Fenian blood..” and I’ve always been embarrassed when I heard them.

(I even remember being down in England for the Donington festival and being in a local pub in Castle Donington. The (English) lads broke into a chorus of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” only to be rudely interrupted by a young Glaswegian woman singing at the top of her voice about being up to her knees in “Fenian blood” – we just stood and stared at her! WTF has that got to do with anything? Like many of the perpetrators of such things, she obviously didn’t understand what she was singing about or even why she was singing it.)

Even though “Billy Boys” is now sung at grounds across England, at least they seem to have missed the whole point of singing it (for a Rangers fan, anyway). I have no doubts that they don’t mention religion or being up to their knees in anything.

But the thing that annoys me is that because I’m a Rangers fan I am automatically pigeon-holed as a bigot. As someone anti-catholic, anti-Celtic and anti-Irish. Which I’d like to think isn’t true.

I don’t hold any hope for Jack McConnell’s new initiative to combat sectarianism in Scotland. We need to realise (and I’m sure he does) that these people are the most uneducated, imbecilic and stubborn groups of people in our wonderfully diverse country, and as such they will resist any form of change for the better.

Panorama has opened a festering sore that is undoubtedly present in the West of Scotland (and the rest of the country is affected in no small way either), and poked its grubby, sensationalist finger right into the wound. One can only hope that the resulting painful recoil can shock the mindless morons into stepping outside of themselves and having a good hard look at themselves.

But somehow, I doubt it….