Shocked and saddened
by the personal animus
of a literary critic
The Cafe 2
Power prices
Why not gay marriage?
We have a tradition
of religious liberalism
Barbara Millar
Real doctors
The Cafe 3
May I ask two simple questions as the gay marriage saga continues:
1. Is there not a distinct possibility that we may now see the conventional religious celebration of marriage proscribed, on the ground of the biblical definition of marriage (as only between man and woman) being not acceptable to the government of the day and deemed by the said government to be discriminatory?
2. If the premises underlying gay marriage proposals be accepted, is there any reason for government to insist that individuals should be defined as male or female for any purposes whatsoever? Why insist that sex appear on birth certificates or any other official documents? Are we seeing the thin end of a very large wedge indeed?
John MacLeod
SR Extra
Andrew McFadyen on why Scottish Labour needs to turn to the Glasgow Girls
Today’s banner
Faces in the crowd, Remembrance Sunday, Glasgow 2009
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Kevin Rooney and his
nephew should wise up
about those chants
Edward Andrews
Now that PIRA has stood down, I wonder which version of the IRA Kevin Rooney’s nephew is supporting (2 November). Would that be the Real IRA which was responsible for the Omagh bombing or Continuity IRA or one of their splinter groups? He is fortunate that he is merely being accused of ‘religiously-aggravated breach of the peace’ and not under the anti-terrorism legislation.
Once again we have the lie told that the IRA in its various manifestations is not a sectarian organisation. Of course in theory that is true, and there were Protestants who were supporters of Irish independence and even during the civil war there were Protestants on the anti-treaty side. However, after partition, the position rapidly changed. Given that the northern partition state was effectively sectarian, a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’, it is not surprising that the anti-partition political and physical-force traditions were identified with the Roman Catholic community.
The identification of nationalism in its various forms with Roman Catholicism was encouraged by DeValera with his model of Ireland as a Catholic Gaelic-speaking community. These positions were codified in the 1937 constitution. Thus it was that the Protestant community in the statelet in the north-eastern corner was excluded from feeling part of the Irish people. This alienation was made all the deeper by being against a culture which sang about the lost green field, and other songs which could be seen as dressing up the descendants of the settler inhabitants in the north-east as foreigners who had defiled the national territory, who were holding it in occupation, and who should be forcibly ejected.
There are no moral excuses for the behaviour of the unionist establishment from partition until the suspension of Stormont, but there is the political excuse that this unlovely bastard child of the British empire had as one of its founding myths that its forefathers had been brutally attacked by the Roman Catholics in 1641 and felt that a substantial minority of the population were disloyal and sought not only the end of the state, but the destruction of the Protestant community.
Many Roman Catholics refused to get involved at any level in what we would now call the civil community. Few Roman Catholics, for example, sought work in the local civil service, and the behaviour of the nationalist politicians at Stormont was rather less than statesmanlike.
I am also distressed that there are those on the other side, mainly secular ‘Protestants’, whose position is obscene, and who require to feel the full
force of the law as much as the sectarian Celtic supporters.
By the 1960s there were slight signs of a change. No matter how inappropriately, Terence O’Neill began to reach out to the Roman Catholic population. The removal of DeValera to Áras an Uachtaráin meant that politicians like Seán Lemass, himself an old IRA man, could seek rapprochement between the two parts of Ireland. The false hope of the civil rights movement produced the reaction led by Paisley, and sectarian violence which eventually led effectively to the re-establishment of the IRA as protector of the Roman Catholic community, which had reason to feel under threat. It is not necessary to go in detail into the IRA campaign, except to say that it killed about 1,800 people and was based in the areas of Northern Ireland which were overwhelmingly inhabited by Roman Catholics.
The most worrying thing about attempts to end sectarianism in Scotland are not the Roman Catholic-hating bluenoses: at least they know they are bigoted and there is a chance to get them to change their attitudes. No, the people with whom I, a Protestant from the north of Ireland, proud to hold an Irish passport, glad to have lived in Scotland for over 30 years, have the most difficulties are people like Kevin Rooney who don’t even know that they are sectarian. I have lost track of the number of times that I have had to point out to Roman Catholic colleagues that their comments are sectarian. I am not a Jaffa, for example.
Kevin Rooney justifies the Celtic chants by saying that they happened for a long time, and refuses to accept that they are sectarian. Well, wise up – the politics of Ireland have changed. If sectarianism lies in the perception of those who are being attacked, I put on record that there is much of the whole Celtic model which I find sectarian. I am also distressed that there are those on the other side, mainly secular ‘Protestants’, whose position is obscene, and who require to feel the full force of the law as much as the sectarian Celtic supporters.
It may be tough that age-old chants and songs and those who voice them are criminalised. No wonder the football supporters and those who are part of the anti-discrimination industry, or who benefit from sectarianism, don’t like the proposed laws. It is only if these cultural remainders are simply not worth it that we might get rid of what is not only a hidden shame, but a widely unacknowledged one.
Edward Andrews is a retired Church of Scotland minister. Born in
Northern Ireland, he brought his family over to Scotland as he didn’t
want them brought up in the sectarianism of Ulster. He studied divinity
at New College, Edinburgh
