A Special Breed

A Special Breed

Goalkeepers, said Irish football legend Harry Gregg, 'aren't crazy. They are a special breed who deserve respect.' Gregg played at a time when they received scant protection from referees and had to endure the violent attentions of aggressive forwards. He played at a time when Bert Trautmann, a former German prisoner of War and Manchester City keeper finished an FA cup final with a broken neck after what was called a 'robust' challenge. Trautmann dislocated 5 vertebrae in his neck one of which had wedged a broken one in place. Had this not occurred doctors were sure he would have died. Yey Trautmann played at a time the rules had changed to protect keepers more. There was a time when they were fair game for the most brutal treatment.

The Scottish cup final of 1937 saw Celtic play Aberdeen in front of an astonishing crowd of 147,365 at Hampden Park.  Goals from Johnny Crum and Willie Buchan gave Celtic a famous win and hope for the following season that they could once more topple Bill Struth’s Rangers and win the title. That same season saw Sunderland win the FA Cup by defeating the excellent Preston NE team of the period 3-1. It is a measure of how effective Scottish players were at that time that 12 of the 22 players who began the English FA cup final were Scots. Sunderland had won the league in 1936 and confirmed a golden period in their history by winning that FA cup final in 1937.

Football in the 1920s and 30s was far more physical than it is today and goalkeepers came in for particularly rough treatment. It was legal for forwards to literally kick the goalkeeper if he held possession of the ball in order to make him release it. Thus today we look at grainy footage from that era we see goalkeepers catching the ball and immediately launching it upfield before the forwards could challenge them. In Scotland there had already been two goalkeepers killed after onfield accidents.

In 1921, 24-year-old Joshua Wilkinson was playing in goal for Dumbarton against Rangers. As a result of a very physical challenge he received early in the game, he suffered a ruptured intestine which he unwittingly made worse by playing for the rest of the game. After the match, he complained of feeling unwell. Tragically, peritonitis had set in. Despite undergoing emergency medical surgery in Glasgow, he died on the Monday following the game. An investigation by the Scottish Football Association absolved any of the Rangers players of blame. Wilkinson’s father had a different view and claimed that his son had met his death as a result of “a blow received during the match”, but neither the football nor legal authorities were prepared to listen. Rangers to their credit did what they could for Wilkinson’s family and even paid for his headstone.

Celtic supporters will of course need no reminding that ten years after the death of Joshua Wilkinson tragedy would strike their own side. John Thomson was killed following an accidental collision with Rangers forward Sam English at Ibrox in 1931. Thomson, supremely brave, had already broken his jaw and fractured ribs in the rough world of Scottish football before that fateful clash with Sam English in September 1931. For both Dumbarton and Celtic the trauma of losing a player in such circumstances hit the club hard. Despite these two tragedies the footballing authorities did nothing to protect goalkeepers from some savage treatment.

On 1^st February 1936 Sunderland lined up to play Chelsea and even by the standards of the time it was a rough game. It wasn’t by any means a grudge match but is remembered for trouble in the stands, violence on the pitch and one particular moment of viciousness which would lead to tragedy. Sunderland’s talented young goalkeeper Jimmy Thorpe dived on a loose ball in his penalty box and as he held the ball to his body three Chelsea forwards arrived and immediately began savagely kicking him on the head, neck and upper body to try and force him to release the ball. This prolonged assault continued until a posse of Sunderland defenders arrived and pushed their opponents away. The referee did nothing as by the laws of the game the Chelsea players were within their rights. The crowd were incensed though as despite the rules few opponents endangered a goalkeeper in the manner the Chelsea players did that day.

Jimmy Thorpe played on in an obviously disoriented manner and lost two soft goals in a 3-3 draw. A Policeman nearby saw him lean on the post several times with a ‘ghastly white look on his face.’ The game finished with Chelsea being booed from the field and a still groggy Thorpe being jeered by some of his own fans for two late goalkeeping errors which earned Chelsea an undeserved draw. Few watching the players troop off the field realised those errors had been caused by his injuries. He went home to his wife and child and mentioned he had been kicked in the body and head. He took unwell at home and spent all the next day in bed. By Monday he was admitted to hospital and was diagnosed with broken ribs and head trauma. He lost consciousness and never woke up, dying on 5^th February. His injuries had led to a diabetic coma and this in turn caused heart failure. Like John Thomson, he was just 22 when he died. He remains the only English footballer to receive a league winners’ medal posthumously. The English League changed the rules after an uproar from fans over Thorpe’s death. Kicking the ball out of goalkeepers hands became illegal.

In October 1937 Celtic travelled south to play Sunderland in a match between the respective Cup holders. Both team captains paraded the trophies before the game and in those days before European football top clubs always enjoyed testing themselves against teams from other leagues. Celtic played well at Roker Park and goals from McGrory and Buchan sealed a comfortable win. One contemporary report stated that ‘Both sides played skilful attractive football but Celtic’s speed and splendid positioning made them the more dangerous in attack.’ The teams would meet again in the Empire Exhibition cup less than a year later and again Celtic came out on top winning 3-1 on their route to claiming the trophy.

Supporters of both clubs still remember the young goalkeepers who lost their lives playing the game they loved. Football has evolved to a huge extent since the rough days of the 1930’s and goalkeepers receive a huge degree of protection these days. It may annoy fans when referees whistle for even the slightest contact on goalkeepers in the modern era and perhaps they are over-protected but there can never be a return to the days when goalkeepers were routinely kicked, barged and shouldered into the net.

In 2011 Chelsea played Sunderland and marked the 75^th anniversary of the death of Jimmy Thorpe. Both goalkeepers (Craig Gordon & Peter Cech) wore black armbands as a mark of respect to the young goalkeeper so tragically lost. Goalkeeping was a dangerous profession in the early days of football and injuries were common. Some alas paid the ultimate price for guarding their goal and we rightly remember and honour them.

Joshua Wilkinson - Dumbarton FC (1921)

John Thomson - Celtic FC (1931)

Jimmy Thorpe - Sunderland FC (1936)

The Green Eyed Monster

The Green Eyed Monster

Celtic’s 9^th successive title win this season was unlike any other we have experienced. The Covid 19 pandemic meant that the common sense measure of halting the campaign on 30 games came into effect. Much as we wanted the season completed on the pitch and our day with the trophy, there was little chance of any football being played between now and the late summer and the SPFL took the right course of action. Celtic finished on 80 points from 30 games; that is to say they only dropped 10 points during the entire campaign. A few misguided or just plain mean-spirited folk harped on about the fact that Celtic could still be caught. Are we seriously being asked to consider that Celtic would drop a minimum of 14 points in 8 SPFL games when they have only dropped 10 in the previous 30? Their domestic form in 2020 is 13 wins and 1 draw with zero defeats. Their main rivals who were throwing away points like confetti at a wedding during the same period would have needed to win all their games. Get real.

With football in abeyance until the pandemic is under control, France and Belgium declared teams with runaway leads to be Champions. The final standings were based on average points gained per matches played. PSG had a 12 point lead at the time the league was called and Club Bruges was 10 points ahead in Belgium. Only in Holland where AZ Alkmaar and Ajax were on the same points 25 games in did they not declare a champion.

The printed media enjoy stirring up a fuss as it gets more clicks on their advert strewn websites and have wheeled out a former Rangers player every other day to warble on about asterisks and tainted titles. The breath-taking brass neck of some of these EBT recipients is quite something. Alex Rae (EBT £569,000) suggested there would always be an asterisk against this year’s title as did Alan Hutton (EBT £364,000) while Barry Ferguson (EBT £2.5m) said recently…

I still believe strongly that the season cannot be declared null and void but I also feel that titles have to be won fair and square on the pitch. I realise Celtic fans will be up in arms at the suggestion and they’ll say I’m just looking at this through blue-tinted specs.’

His comment about ‘titles being won fair and square’ on the pitch hardly holds up to scrutiny when most of his medals were won with teams packed with players being paid under the table. All monies earned for playing football should be declared to the SFA. The Supreme Court stated quite clearly that the tens of millions paid out to Rangers players in the EBT years were earning and therefore taxable. The hiding of side letters from the SFA was another element in this scandal. What grates is that the same Rangers fans who defend their players and club on this issue would argue the complete opposite had Celtic been caught cheating on this scale. Objectivity is seldom part of their make-up.

One Rangers fans site even held a poll about whether their club should take legal action against the SPFL for calling the league. 85% said they should despite the fact UEFA, who frown on such things, might well throw Scottish clubs out of Europe if they did. The site’s author rather gave the game away by stating in rather strangulated prose, ‘Rangers should go down the legal route even if it means implications for our own Europa League participation, as long as Celtic lose out  on the Champions League.’ These small minded folk are quite willing to inflict more chaos and cost onto Scottish football at a time some clubs are struggling to survive as long as it hurts Celtic.

Thus we see similar begrudgers trying everything in their power to tarnish Celtic’s title win with only a few Rangers fans having the integrity to say publically what most probably think; ‘you know what, we were never catching them in a million years.’

Celtic’s dominance of Scottish football is hard to take for some and the myth of the ‘journey’ back to their ‘rightful’ place at the top of Scottish football which was sold to them during their time in the lower leagues is proving very difficult to make reality. They arrived in the Premiership in 2016 with boasts of ‘going for 55’ and ‘coming for you’ and then proceeded to watch Celtic win every single trophy since then. Success isn’t guaranteed in football and the current Rangers are learning the hard truth of trying to live within your means.

This week’s league win marked Celtic’s eleventh successive piece of silverware and the club is still involved in the last 4 of the Scottish cup which will be completed sometime this year with luck. There has never been domination of Scottish football to this degree by one club. Struth’s Rangers of the 1920s and 30s racked up the trophies as did Stein’s Celtic in the 1960s and 70s but three successive trebles is new territory altogether. Indeed Celtic has potentially two more cup ties to make if four!

The multi layered nature of the rivalry of Glasgow’s two biggest clubs means there is seldom any magnanimity or generosity of spirit between them. Those with no love of Celtic would argue white was black rather than accept Celtic is the best team in the land. William Shakespeare understood this facet of human nature well and in his play ‘The Merchant of Venice’ Shylock, the money lending Jew is despised for his identity and mistreated by some of the other main characters states at one point…

‘He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated my enemies – and what's his reason? I am a Jew.’

There remain people today who laugh at Celtic’s loses, mock their gains and scorn the nation which bore this club. That may never change for some and Celtic supporters can expect few plaudits from them for any achievement, not that they look for them. Having endured the barren struggles of the 1990’s many Celtic supporters know too well the pain of being also-rans. They also remember the mocking, the goading and the triumphalism they endured in those years before Fergus McCann helped them lay the firm foundations of the club’s current success. There are those who dislike Peter Lawwell but any objective scrutiny of Celtic’s accounts will show the club has been well run under his tenure.

These are difficult times for Rangers and their supporters. There is no bottomless pit of money to bring in top players as there seemed to be in the 1990’s. How far they have fallen since David Murray’s hubris lead them to a vainglorious assault on the Champions League funded by his banker friends who let them run up unsustainable debts. A spineless board went along with a suicidal tax dodging scheme and a passive Scottish sporting media, with a few honourable exceptions, barely raised a warning.

Next season will prove seminal for both Glasgow clubs. For Celtic, the tantalising prospect of an unheralded tenth successive championship is the Holy Grail. For Rangers it is one last chance to stop Celtic’s dream and perhaps save their young manager’s Ibrox career. For their fans season 2020-21 will mark a renaissance or a nightmare they could never have envisaged in the Murray years. If Celtic does go on to make it ten in a row perhaps they’d best heed some other words of Shakespeare when he said…

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

Neither King nor Kaiser

Neither King nor Kaiser

A few hundred yards to the south of Edinburgh Castle lies the Cowgate district of Edinburgh. Today it is a mixed area of modern flats, older buildings, bars and a smattering of restaurants. 150 years ago the area was very different indeed. Doctor Stark, a medical Officer, visited the area in 1847 and described it in the following terms…

‘The inhabitants of the Cowgate consist of labourers, porters, carters, scavengers and paupers. The families were each housed in a single room and instances were not rare of two or more families occupying one apartment. The  low Irish formed a large proportion of this section of the community. Among this class the ordinary comforts of life were sadly lacking. A heap of straw served for a bed; there was but the barest minimum of furniture and domestic utensils and that of a primitive kind, consisting of bits of wood, pieces of tin and course pottery; water could be obtained only by the laborious method of drawing it from the public well; and the people lived in a pitiable state of filth and vermin.’

Around 14,000 Irish people lived in those conditions and struggled to get by. They also had to deal with the prejudice which some Scots held for them. It was into this community that a boy was born in the summer of 1868. John and Mary Connolly, natives of County Monaghan, named their son James and did their best to keep him fed and healthy in very trying circumstances. He was a supporter of the local football team Hibernian, itself a product of the Edinburgh Irish community and it is recorded that young James would carry their hamper on match days. James had little formal education after the age of ten when he left St Patrick’s Primary School to enter the workforce. By the age of 14 he had lied about his age and joined the army under the name of ‘James Reid’ to escape the grinding poverty of his surroundings.

His time in the Royal Scots Regiment coincided with the so called land wars’ in Ireland when the rural population struggled to free themselves from virtual serfdom at the hands of Landlords. Connolly was aghast at what he witnessed in Ireland; soldiers and Police in trying to halt the spread of rural agitation used very rough methods indeed. Evictions saw family homes demolished and people put onto the road with no shelter and little hope. Connolly viewed with distaste the idea of working class soldiers and policemen being used, as he saw it, to oppress their own people. His political beliefs were forming and he fed them by reading avidly and talking to others. In the end he deserted before his Regiment was posted to India and returned to Edinburgh where he married Lillie Reynolds. They had six children together and it would not have been easy as James spent much of his time involved in the business of the Socialist movement. His brother John spoke at a socialist meeting and argued for an 8 hour working day. His employers at Edinburgh Corporation got wind of this and fired him.

James travelled all over the UK, Ireland and the USA organising, agitating and supporting the right of workers to unionise and collectively fight for better conditions. The living conditions he found in the slums of Dublin were as bad as any he had seen in the Cowgate. One description of Dublin at the time Connolly returned to Ireland in 1910 stated…

'Irish workers lived in terrible conditions in tenements. An astonishing 835 people lived in 15 houses in Henrietta Street's Georgian tenements. At number 10 the Sisters of Charity ran a laundry inhabited by more than 50 single women. Infant mortality among the poor was 142 per 1000 births, high for a European city. The situation was made worse by the high rates of disease in the slums which was a result of a lack of health care and cramped living conditions.'

The great Dublin Lock out of 1913 when hundreds of employers, large and small, locked their gates to workers who were unionised saw Connolly active with Jim Larkin in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. Together, with Jack White they formed the Irish Citizens Army to help defend demonstrating workers from the more brutal elements of the Dublin Police. Connolly had learned from the Tonypandy riots in Wales in 1910 and the Liverpool Transport strike of 1911 when workers fighting for better pay and conditions had been suppressed by Home Secretary Winston Churchill’s brutal use of the Police and army. The Citizens Army would be organised and ready to protect the workers. Its volunteers were mostly young, working class men who were trained by more experienced men with military backgrounds. Its role in defending the workers was to grow into a political outlook which sought a complete change in not just the way Ireland was governed but by who actually governed it.

As World War One loomed, the Home Rule faction in Ireland was being opposed by Unionists who signed the famous covenant and formed the Ulster Volunteers to resist militarily if necessary. The Irish Volunteers led by John Redmond grew to be a force over 200,000 strong. Civil war was a possibility but as conflict with Germany led to open warfare in the summer of 1914 the country was for the most part distracted from domestic politics. For Connolly and the socialist movement, the war was another capitalist struggle which would be paid for by the blood of the workers of Europe. His slogan of ‘Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland’ was soon adorning the walls of the Transport Workers Building in Dublin where Connolly’s Citizens Army drilled. The British persuaded Redmond to commit the bulk of the Irish Volunteers to the fight against Germany. Most went on the understanding that Britain would honour its promise to allow home rule for Ireland at the war’s conclusion.

They died in their thousands in Britain’s battles from the Somme to Gallipoli. Many of them fought in the 10^th and 16^th Irish Divisions alongside the 36^th Ulster Division in that fateful summer of 1916. Their casualties were horrendous as Britain’s big push on the Somme sought to break the bloody stalemate of trench warfare. However a minority of the Irish volunteers refused to fight in the British Army and stayed in Ireland. Many were active in the Irish Republican Brotherhood who, like Connolly’s Citizen’s Army, were committed to using force to gain Irish independence.

On Good Friday 1916 Connolly and Thomas McDonagh helped Padraig Pearse write the Proclamation upon which modern Ireland was founded. His socialism can be discerned in passages alluding to equality for women and the   openness to all the people of Ireland. It states in part…

‘The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien Government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.’

Connolly had been in Belfast many times and saw the toxic results of sectarianism on working class communities. It divided people who lived in equally poor conditions and weakened the trade union movement which sought to help them. He had felt its insidious effects as a boy in Edinburgh and despised how it created false divisions among people who had far more in common than they liked to admit.

The society the seven signatories of the proclamation sought to create would no longer be based on the privilege of a minority or the divisions or ordinary people. Within a few weeks all of the signatories would be dead. The Easter Rising provoked a predictable brutal and vindictive response from the British who in their rage failed to comprehend that shooting the leaders of 1916 would rouse many of the Irish people to anger than had previously been the case. Connolly’s execution was particularly callous. He has wounded in the fighting, his ankle shattered by a bullet and tied to a chair to be shot. He accepted death as the price he would pay to strike for freedom as he saw it. His last meeting with his family was particularly poignant (see below) and he told them that it had been a good life.

James Connolly was shot in the stone breakers yard of Kilmainham Jail on a May morning in 1916. He had spent most of his life fighting the social injustices he saw around him every day. The land of his birth barely marks his passing and that is a tragedy. He should be remembered as part of that generation who fought for the common man. People like john MacLean, Mary Barbour and Willie Gallagher were part of the ‘Red Clydeside’ of the early twentieth century and are remembered still by ordinary Scots. There remains a blindness to the contribution Connolly made to working class advancement and this stems in part from his Irishness and his actions in 1916. His memory is kept alive by ordinary people who recognise that his life was spent trying to better the lot of the common people of these islands.

His final testimony given to his daughter before they took him to Kilmainham to be shot contains the words he would want to be remembered…

‘Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority, ready to die to affirm that truth, makes that Government for ever a usurpation and a crime against human progress. I personally thank God that I have lived to see the day when thousands of Irish men and boys, and hundreds of Irish women and girls, were ready to affirm that truth, and to attest it with their lives if need be.’

James Connolly (1868-1916)

Sowing the Wind

Sowing the Wind

Way back around about 1986 I attended a Celtic game at Clydebank’s quaint little Kilbowie Park. I don’t recall a huge amount about the match apart from Brian McClair scoring a second half hat-trick and Alan ‘Rambo’ McInally warming up as a sub enjoying the banter with the fans. ‘Rambo, get oan there and bang a few in!’ one fan shouted as the muscular forward warmed up within touching distance. Another added, ‘Naw, stay aff, you’re shite.’ The big forward took it all in his stride and did in fact enter the fray that day and scored a good goal. As he celebrated he ran to the fans he had enjoyed the banter with earlier and high fived one or two. He stopped at his erstwhile detractor who stood hand raised, and smiled, ‘no you, you said I was shite!’

Walking back through the town to the train station an older chap pointed out the bomb damage still prevalent on one or two of the buildings. The old bath house was pock marked with deep shrapnel gouges from the German air raids of March 1941. I was never taught that part of history at school and made a point of learning more about what Clydebank endured all those years before. We are often reminded that London bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s fury during the Blitz but places such as Coventry, Liverpool, Manchester, Belfast and the Greater Glasgow area took a pounding too. In all over 60,000 civilians died in air raids on the UK during World War Two. Perhaps in relation to size and population few places in the UK suffered as Clydebank did.

Germany’s invasion of Norway in 1940 gained them access to air bases from which they could launch air raids on Scotland. There had been raids on the east coast of Scotland with towns like Peterhead being bombed more than 20 times but nothing on the scale of what was to occur in the spring of 1941. On Thursday 13^th March, 240 German bombers droned over the North Sea and headed for industrial Clydeside. They flew over Loch Lomond and must have made a fearsome noise as they passed over built up areas. When they arrived over the town of Clydebank they knew exactly what their targets were to be. Clydebank and its environs was a hub of industrial activity with the Singers Factory, John Brown Shipyards, Oil storage tanks and a Torpedo making facility all in or near the town.

Sitting in the River Clyde was the Polish warship ORP Piorun (The Thunderbolt) which was undergoing repairs in John Brown’s shipyard. The Poles manned their guns and fired everything they had at the German bombers who were pounding Clydebank. As the bombs rained down it was obvious that this was a raid on a scale not seen in Scotland up to this point of the war. Of 8000 houses in Clydebank, barely 10 escaped undamaged. Many hundreds of civilians were killed and injured with thousands more made homeless. Clydebank was ablaze and as the German bomber fleet headed back to Norway, it was said you could see the fires in Clydebank from Dundee. It was a human tragedy on a huge scale.

The following night the Luftwaffe returned to a still burning town and pounded it again. It could be argued that the Germans were attacking legitimate targets and that the civilians caught up in the raids were collateral damage. Head of  RAF Bomber Command, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris had already committed his bomber force to the strategic bombing of German cities and scores of them were reduced to rubble. The raids on Hamburg in July 1943 killed 43,000 people and caused a firestorm which utterly destroyed whole sectors of the city. Berlin, Cologne, Kiel, Rostock and Dresden were among scores of German cities bombed repeatedly. The ‘butcher’s bill’ was in excess of 400,000 German civilians. There are those who quote Harris’ famous words, ‘The Germans have sowed the wind and now they will reap the whirlwind,’ feeling that anything was justified to win the war with fascism. It was a time of total war when any distinction between military and civilian targets was often ignored.

Watching the crass and often tasteless celebrations of VE night this week made me wonder if we had learned anything at all. Jingoism and flag waving were to the fore in parts of England and we had the remarkable sight of two grown men dressed as Spitfires doing a ‘fly past’ down a suburban street as people applauded. Celebrating the end of a brutal war is appropriate but as 75 years have now passed we should perhaps be more focused on sombre remembrance of the victims of war and not in jingoism or goading former antagonists.

Wars are awful things and must always be the last resort. World War Two unleashed a savagery on the world the likes of which had never been seen before. Civilians made up the majority of casualties with some 40 million perishing. Clydebank was but a drop in the ocean of suffering we humans inflicted on each other in those years. Yet every victim was a son, a daughter, a mother, father or friend with their own hopes for the future, their own stories to tell.

Today the German President gave a moving speech in Berlin about Germany’s crimes in the Hitler years and spoke of peace and reconciliation. Germany has confronted its past and recognises its sins with genuine contrition. That sort of tone is appropriate and best honours those who die in war. There are memorials to the victims of war in every land. Perhaps the greatest memorial of all would be to ensure that it never happens again. 

We live in hope.

The laughter of our children

The laughter of our children

This week saw the anniversary of the death of Irish Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands. Those of us who lived through those times remember with clarity the ratcheting up of tension as each successive day passed and the unbending British Prime Minister Thatcher refused to compromise. When Sands died there was an outpouring of anger not just in the north of Ireland but around the world. There were also those who said that he chose the path of violence and could expect only prison or death as a release from it.

The decision taken by the British Government in the 1970s to ‘Ulsterise, normalise and criminalise’ the conflict in Ireland was taken in the cynical belief that the deaths of locally recruited soldiers and policemen didn’t hit home with the British public as powerfully as the deaths of Scottish, English or Welsh soldiers. The ‘criminalisation’ of the conflict sought to deny any political motivation to those involved and treated them as criminal gangs. Thus the British government could try to label the conflict a fight against crime rather than what it actually was; a colonial struggle fought out amid the last spasms of a dying empire. Ireland, Britain’s first colony, was likely to be its last.

Whether a man is a freedom fighter or a terrorist will always depend on your perspective. To the Nazis the French Resistance were terrorists to the British they were freedom fighters. To say that men like Sands joined the IRA for criminal gain is hard to sustain. He knew at the outset that death or a prison cell were the likely outcomes of his choices. Men like him weren’t involved in the armed struggle for personal glory or financial advantage and the British knew this but to pursue their policy of criminalisation, they needed to portray their adversaries in a certain way. Criminalisation led to the withdrawal of political status of prisoners held for offences related to the conflict. Some refused to wear prison uniforms as it was an admission of sorts that the struggle was a criminal enterprise rather than a political one. Thus the ‘blanket men’ arrived. The lyric of a song of the time summed up their defiance…

‘I’ll wear no convict’s uniform nor meekly serve my time

That Britain might brand Ireland’s fight 800 years of crime.’

Any student of Irish history knows that the various rebellions and risings which occurred were not motivated by criminal intent but were in the main a response to invasion, occupation, dispossession and the deeply unfair nature of the society Britain had imposed on Ireland.

Operation Banner, the deployment of British Troops into the province in 1969 was portrayed in the British media as the good guys arriving to keep the warring tribes of Paddies from killing each other. The RUC and B Specials had lost control of the situation and were viewed as partisan by the Catholic minority in the north. The army was there to reassert control and prop up what was essentially a failed state.  Their initial welcome in beleaguered Catholic areas soon changed after incidents like the Falls Curfew, Ballymurphy Massacre, Operation Demetrius and Bloody Sunday. The army killed 306 people in the conflict, 160 of them were unarmed civilians; among this group were 61 children.

The use of sensory deprivation techniques on Republican prisoners by the British Army led to a conviction in 1971 of torture before the European Court in the Hague. This technique consisted of men being hooded and dressed in thick boiler suits and being made to stand against a wall on tip-toe and being subject to "white noise". The British military had used torture in various colonial wars - Fort Morbut in Yemen or Hola Camp in Kenya where the Army attempted to force 88 Kenyan detainees to work. They refused and were viciously clubbed. 11 men died and the other 77 suffered permanent injuries.   Caroline Elkins' details the British Army’s behaviour in Kenya in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, ‘Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.’ It does not make pleasant reading. One of the victims had pins jammed under his fingernails and into his body. His testicles were crushed between two metal rods. His name was Hussien Onyango Obama and his grandson was to become President of the United States.

Elkins’ book is a horrifying catalogue or murder, castration, rape and torture and yet very few people in the UK today could tell you a thing about what their army did in Kenya. They are not taught in school about the dark side of Britain’s colonial past and are instead fed stirring tales of empire building heroes. Nor are they held to account by the press which for the most part tows the party line. It was only in 2013 that the British Government finally expressed ‘deep regret’ about their actions and gave £20m in compensation to surviving victims tortured by the army.

Some of the methods used in places like Kenya were used in Ireland. The myth that they were there to act as referee in a what was essentially a local conflict is palpable nonsense. Internment for instance was used almost exclusively against one community.  As author Fintan O’Toole said, ‘Ideologically and militarily, the army was a player not a referee.’

Ordinary people were caught up in all of this and had hard choices to make. Some, on both sides, took up arms to protect their people or their political position as they saw it. Others kept their heads down and hoped the spiral of violence wouldn’t affect them or those they loved. All the combatants involved committed acts of savagery which could rightly be called atrocities. None of them emerged with a military or indeed a moral victory.

Looking back through the lens of almost forty years there are those who look for heroes or use hindsight to try to justify some of the dreadful acts which occurred. I could write a long list of atrocities committed by all sides in the conflict and none of them could be justified. Violence begets yet more violence and as with all conflicts it is the innocent who bear the brunt of the suffering. It is those innocent victims who are most deserving of our thoughts and compassion.

Bobby Sands has been described by people with very different perceptions of him this week as both a hero and a terrorist. He himself would probably dismiss either title. He was a undoubtedly a courageous young man caught up in some extremely difficult times and like many others chose to try and change society by force. Those of us lucky enough not to be faced with such choices in our lives can count our blessings.   

He is quoted as saying, ‘our revenge will be the laughter of our children.’ I hope that laughter echoes around Ireland from all its children, north and south, from all faiths and none.

We’ve seen enough tears to last a lifetime.

The Banter Years

The Banter Years

Napoleon is often credit with saying, ‘Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the process of making a mistake.’ It’s tempting to think Peter Lawwell has this phrase in mind as he quietly watches Rangers make a fool of themselves over their claims to have a dossier containing damning evidence against senior SPFL figures. Few of us doubt the SPFL made a mess of the vote on restructuring the leagues to meet the reality of the Covid 19 pandemic but weeks after the Ibrox club claimed to have such evidence we await it being produced. Their latest pronouncement has downgraded their damning evidence to ‘a lack of fair play.’ They look increasingly like a poker player who has a weak hand and tried to bluff his way through the game. Now people are demanding that the cards be laid on the table and they are still prevaricating.

Scottish football is famous for its factionalism, suspicion and conspiracy theories and you have to wonder why Rangers would make such claims at a time our game is facing an existential threat. More cynical voices have suggested it’s all part of that old psychological plan to foster a siege mentality. The outcome of this is that supporters feel their club is somehow being treated unfairly and will back the club financially via season tickets without questioning why their marquee signing manager has failed miserably despite spending millions on new players or what the club is doing to stop haemorrhaging money as it tries to stop Celtic’s relentless trophy collecting juggernaut.

The more sceptical among us often think of that old Roman phrase at such times, ‘cui bono?’ (who benefits from this?)  

What are Rangers causing such a fuss about and in what way will they gain from it? Are we really expected to believe they are now moral guardians of Scottish football fighting for the little guy? This from a club that in a former life cheated on an industrial scale by paying players millions via a tax avoiding, EBT scheme without informing the SFA as the rules demand? A club whose owner, Sir David Murray,  called in a debt for under £50,000 from Airdrie FC which forced a founder member of the Scottish League to go into liquidation and make their players redundant? A club which has yet to express any regret about operating a virtual apartheid system for over 70 years of its history? The moral voice of Scottish football- really? You could easily be forgiven for thinking that such an outfit in whatever guise they appear in looks out for number one first and foremost.

The reality that Celtic will complete their second ‘nine in a row’ series of title wins must weigh heavily on their minds. The Parkhead club are in decent financial condition despite taking an obvious hit from the ongoing Covid 19 lockdown and its consequences for sport. They will undoubtedly miss the revenue from 4 or 5 home games should the season be called and were also in the cup semi-final but generally the club is well run and in robust health. The team began 2020 in sparkling form and of 13 domestic matches played since January, won 12 and drew 1. Compare that form to a Rangers side which had something of a collapse in early 2020 where they also played 13 games but won just 7, drew 2 and lost 4. During that sequence they lost twice to bottom club Hearts and also at home to Hamilton. Most people who know football recognises that on that form far from turning around a 13 point deficit in the remaining SPFL games, Rangers were more likely to see the Hoops stretch their lead.

So is all this fuss about trying to somehow discredit Celtic’s inevitable title win? They know that when football resumes Celtic will be favourites to make it ten in a row and thus create a new Scottish record. That is too much for some to stomach and we have already heard much bleating about some of Celtic’s title wins being somehow ‘tainted’ as Rangers were not in the league when they were won. This palpable nonsense is the sort of desperate chain of thought  you’d expect from a jealous child in the playground. All of Celtic’s titles were won fair and square against the teams who deserved to be in the top flight and if Rangers followers want to talk about ‘tainted titles’ they need look no further than the EBT years. It is ironic that since they joined the top flight in 2016 boasting they were ‘coming for you’ and ‘going for 55’ Celtic has won every single trophy competed for and were on track to win another treble this season. They have also handed out some royal spanking to the Govan club along the way.

If Rangers produce their dossier next week and it turns out to be a damp squib then they will look very foolish indeed. You don’t shout about corruption and then refuse to hand over your evidence. The so called ‘banter years’ will continue as supporters of other Scottish clubs continue that great Scottish tradition of laughing at and winding up the opposition at every opportunity. Rangers have given opposition fans much ammunition over the past 7 or 8 years both on and off the field. Not only the calamity of administration and liquidation in 2012 which reverberates in Scottish football to this very day and in many ways poisoned the game here. There was also being turfed out of Europe by a team from Luxembourg to losing at places like Annan and Stirling. From the ball stuck in a hedge, to the ‘winter of discount tent’, Pedro in the bushes and cheering a cup draw against Celtic before being battered 4-0 in the actual match. The latest farce involved a poorly made fake invoice showing Dundee FC receiving funds from a former Celtic director. This led to some hysterical reactions online while others sat back and laughed. Then there are the endless, tedious statements. One wag commented if there was a statement league they’d be forty points ahead.

There is of course a serious side to all of this. The SPFL board need to be more careful and more professional in their handling of important issues. Scottish football is in a perilous state at the moment with income streams drying up and uncertainty over TV deals and Sponsorship. Sponsors want to be seen to be involved with positive organisations not squabbling factions pulling in different directions. Our prominent clubs need to set an example and demonstrate some leadership not act like spoilt children.

Celtic have played a blinder in all of this. Had they got involved in a war of words with Rangers it would have played into the hands of the more unhinged conspiracy theorists among the Ibrox club’s support. By staying silent they have followed Napoleon’s maxim of never interrupting your opponent when he is making a mistake. The week ahead is an important one if Rangers don’t produce a ‘smoking gun’ next week then they are going to look very foolish indeed but then that’s nothing new in these strange times.